I Hear She's a Real Bitch by Jen Agg

I Hear She's a Real Bitch by Jen Agg

Author:Jen Agg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2017-05-16T04:00:00+00:00


• family management

• taking orders

• making drinks

• trying to course out tables

• working with a new team for the very first time

It was terrifying and chaotic, and just north of disastrous, but at the same time so exciting to finally have the doors open and to be able to serve people food, and we got through it.

That first night was filled with exalted and exhausting highs, but the next six weeks, which felt more like six months, were slow and scary—like nobody-came-in-some-nights scary. Occasional Sundays and Mondays, Grant, Patrice, and I would sit at table 1 in the front window trying to look like a lot of people having a really good time (acting), but for who? At that time Dundas West wasn’t the hipster promenade it is now. Sometimes an hour would pass and no one would even walk by save for a few hobos and pros. Fuck, I miss them, especially the prostitutes, they were a constant reminder that gentrification was still in the early-adopter stages, years away from white thirty-somethings actually adopting. What an ironic twist, my slight resentment of a thing I unwittingly ushered in.

During these early days, Grant was very kind and friendly—I think the humiliation of a mostly quiet restaurant kept him more puppy dog than pitbull. The tumbleweeds and crickets were worrying. We’d get some industry people through our door, and they always seemed to enjoy it, drinking and praising enough for ten tables, and Fridays and Saturdays were starting to have at least one solid seating, but we weren’t even breaking even—something I knew for certain, as I had the insane notion that I was the best person to do the books because we couldn’t even afford to pay anyone. (By “do the books” I mean recording sales and sales tax by hand in an old-timey ledger, and hand-writing and sending out the weekly cheques. Crazy. Hiring a restaurant-specific bookkeeper ten months in was the smartest decision I made that year.)

THE POWER OF A POSITIVE REVIEW, especially in that time, cannot be overstated. These were the halcyon days before Yelp, TripAdvisor, and bloggers had all but drowned out the voice of critics, which I’m of two very distinct minds about, depending on the review the critic gives my restaurants. When it’s a great review, I’m all, “Critics are such an important voice and help synthesize what the masses are saying, but in lovely purple prose.” Terrible review? “Fuck critics, we’re in a post-criticism society.”

After those first six weeks, sometime in late November 2008 we finally got our first major review, and it could not have been more exciting. It was a four-star, absolutely glowing review from Corey Mintz at The Toronto Star. Corey happened to be filling in for the regular critic while she popped out a baby—and I’m forever grateful to her husband, as I’m quite certain (although there’s no way to definitively PROVE it) she never would have given us four stars. The Hoof was right up Corey’s alley, and he just got it, all of it.



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