That isn’t a typo. Many know the changes that are afoot, but for those who don’t, here’s the story.
In late April, I had discussions with two separate entities that set some things in motion that couldn’t be stopped. The first discussion involved a sit down with my old employer, ERGON ; (http://www.ergon.com/ ) they offered me an employment opportunity that was simply too good to ignore, especially at my age, with my limited capabilities and in this economy. It’s not in the beautiful Rocky Mountains on the banks of the Colorado River – it’s in Jackson, MS. (Note to those in Colorado: Jackson, MS doesn’t suck. Not even close.) How could I consider this, you ask? I mentioned that there were two discussions. Shortly after the Ergon discussion, an individual sat me down, looked me straight in the eye and told me “I want to buy The Riverside.” “Wow”, I thought, “the stars are in alignment, the gods have spoken and the Three Princes of Serendip have just booked rooms at The Riverside!”
When we bought the hotel, there were always discussions about how long we wanted to operate it, provided we were financially able to keep it afloat and the banks and our creditors didn’t make the decision for us. Five years for sure, and maybe as long as ten years; unless someone came along and wanted it more than we did, at which point, we would consider the offer. Well here was this someone, and his unexpected overture just happened to coincide with an out-of- the-blue, over-the-top, once-in-a-lifetime, multi-hyphenated job opportunity.
I accepted the job, and began to work with the buyer on the due-diligence details. The potential buyer did all sorts of things that made me think he was serious – he loudly, openly and publicly told people he was buying it. Without consulting or getting approval from me, he invested in capital equipment for the kitchen and hotel. He continually brought in friends and associates and showed them what he was going to fix, change, improve, add, subtract, divide and multiply.
I thought this guy was serious!! So much so, that I basically checked out of the business, let him take control of it, and began making plans for the next chapter in our life journey. I gave him our offer sheet, and it went unacknowledged for three weeks. I started to wonder what the hell was happening – no counter offer, no discussion, no “are you crazy, I wouldn’t give you half of what you’re asking for this dump!” Nothing. Upon finally being pressed for a response, he simply said “I’m not interested, and I've decided to concentrate on other issues.” Huh?? What about the crowd of friends you had in here two nights ago speaking as if you were the soon-to-be owner?
Here are a few links that might help describe me and my ability to trust and judge other humans, especially regarding this particular human interaction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmuck
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dupe
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sucker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_(person)
http://www.oxfordenglishdictionary.org/stupididiotwho
We bury our dead, we dry our tears and we move on. We also hopefully learn from our mistakes – trust needs to be earned, not passed out like candy on Halloween night to any neighborhood spook that shows up at our door.
So the second part of the serendipitous equation went away like a foul smell, but part one remained a reality. The position of VP of Sales for Ergon Armor http://www.ergonarmor.com/ awaits me in Jackson, MS. The Riverside is for sale, and we have five interested parties. I say to those interested parties, know that it is an acquired taste and not for everyone. Know that we are selling more than a house and a building that generates revenue – we are selling a historic Grand County icon, a building that comes with a luscious past that transcends any who would own it and all who now visit. Know that if you are lucky enough to be able to own this place, your life will be sometimes cursed, but mostly blessed. Know that your daily life will be filled with the very best of what humanity has to offer, 98% of the time. But be very wary of strangers bearing gifts. Welcome them with open hearts and open arms, as we did.........but be wary.
To be continued….
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
The Town Meeting, Part II
In Part I, we talked about the town's plan to raise needed revenue for infrastructural repairs to the town's water system, resting heavily on the backs of the businesses, and to a lesser degree, the residential customers. The monthly water bill for the Riverside was arbitrarily raised from $150/month to $750/month. I say arbitrarily because it is obvious that those on the town council or whoever refigured this new rate have no concept of cash flow as it relates to running a business. That $600/month increase translates to an additional 103 room rentals per year – and that’s just to maintain our current levels of income vs. expenses. Multiply that by the 5, which is the total number of hotels in town who will also have similar rate increases, and that requires an additional 515 room nights spent in Hot Sulphur; this increase needing to occur in a depressed economy, where average bookings were down this year by 20%. So we know this isn’t possible; memo to town council – wishing and hoping don’t make it so! One of the town council members actually said “if the business owners aren’t smart enough to figure out how to come up with the extra revenue, they shouldn’t be business owners.” Smacks a little of Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” attitude, doesn’t it? I say to you, town council person, “if you’re smart enough to be on the town council, you’ll be smart enough to figure out where to come up with all of the lost tax revenue you’ll need to recover from the stupid business owners who’ve gone belly-up!”
So the first round of elevated water bills hit our mail boxes in mid-July, and the much discussed “what-ifs” became reality for all of the business owners, complete with an August 15th due date. (One of the other problems with the increase is that the water bills are quarterly, so you need to come up with three months worth of $750 all at once. That's a big check for water that the town pulls out of the adjacent Colorado River.) This spurred several of the business owners to band together for a meeting – not a town hall meeting, but a meeting of business owners-only to discuss what could be done to stop this municipal cash grab from all of those Hot Sulphur business’s million dollar war chests – yeah, right. I was informed that we were to meet on Wednesday night at 7:00PM at the Barking Dog Pub. Unlike the last town meeting I attended, where the participants had to stoke up on hooch at home before spending the next few hours at the HSS Town Hall, the meeting planners decided to skip that formality and just have the damn meeting in the town bar. Anybody yet see a potential problem with that? Let’s get a bunch of people together who are already fuming mad, then let’em pound down brews before and during the meeting, and then have a heated argument. That should make for a productive evening.
When we enter the Barking Dog for the meeting, there were only a few of the business owners present, and only two that I had previously met. There was one man whom I didn’t recognize holding court down at the end of the bar. He was a tall, slim fellow, made all the taller by his outlandishly conspicuous white cowboy hat – not a 10-gallon hat, but maybe a 7.5 gallon hat. He wore a grey tank top, the armpit areas of which were truncated with dark sweat stains. He was loudly waving his arms about as if he were below deck in a rolling sea swatting at…..…..…wait a minute, it was Ron, the drunken plumber who tried unsuccessfully to unclog our pipes on New Year’s night. What in the hell was he doing here?? What the hell kind of a business does he own?? I didn’t know being the official Hot Sulphur Springs “Town Drunk” qualified someone as a business owner. Can “Town Drunk” be some sort of a new franchise opportunity I’m not aware of? (And let me tell you something; earning the moniker of ‘Town Drunk of HSS’ is no easy feat, as the competition is ferocious!) Ron was at the meeting not because he was a business owner; he was at the meeting because he lives at the bar, and the meeting was at the bar. WHY IN THE HELL DID WE HAVE THE MEETING AT THE BAR?? (Maybe that town council member was right to question the intelligence of the local business owners after all.)
At about 7:30, when all of the owners arrived, we ordered one more round for the discussion and moved from the bar to a large table to begin the meeting. Including Cowboy Hiccup, there were 11 participants at the table, representing three of the five hotels, owners of most of the towns’ apartment units and the owner of the Barking Dog. The meeting started badly, as Ron the plumber was dominating the conversation with inane drunken babble about how he personally ran the water treatment plant for 20 years and how he was the town’s master plumber and everything is this town is screwed up and blah blah blah blah blah. After about five minutes of this, the meeting organizer asked that we limit our responses to two minutes, and then suggested that we appoint a ‘Sergeant at Arms’ in the event that participants got out of order. How many informal meetings have you attended where the first order of business was to appoint a ‘Sergeant at Arms’?
We went around the table, with everyone getting their two minutes to state their issues, offer solutions, ask questions, etc.; except everyone’s two minute allotment turned into five minutes as the Popped Plumber kept interrupting with his nonsensical blather, which would then bring the Sergeant at Arms around the table to shake a finger in his face and threaten to throw him out – several times he actually grabbed Ron in a bear hug and tried to pull him out of his chair. Again I ask, ever seen this sort of thing in one of your neighborhood meetings? But then I don’t suppose you have your meetings in a bar.
One of the apartment owners, a lovable old curmudgeon named Lou, barked so loudly at Ron to shut up that he was actually able to get him to shut up and make the two most sharply perceptive points of the evening; point one being that they should no longer officially refer to the town of HSS as the ‘county seat of Grand County’, rather, it should henceforth be known as the ‘toilet seat of Grand County’. His second point, the highlight of the evening, involved the importance of water conservation in this water starved area, and suggested a citizens awareness campaign with a slogan of “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down!”
It was at this point, after picking ourselves up off the floor, that Julie and I excused ourselves from the proceedings and headed back to The Riverside. The end result of the group meeting was a decision to show a united front as business owners and write a formal letter to the town, demanding to know specifics on forthcoming stimulus money, educating the council as to the catastrophic end this town will come to – on their watch - if they run all of the businesses off, and finally, a strong suggestion that all future town hall meetings be held at the Barking Dog and Ron the Plumber be installed on the town council as it’s voice of reason. He couldn’t do any worse.
So the first round of elevated water bills hit our mail boxes in mid-July, and the much discussed “what-ifs” became reality for all of the business owners, complete with an August 15th due date. (One of the other problems with the increase is that the water bills are quarterly, so you need to come up with three months worth of $750 all at once. That's a big check for water that the town pulls out of the adjacent Colorado River.) This spurred several of the business owners to band together for a meeting – not a town hall meeting, but a meeting of business owners-only to discuss what could be done to stop this municipal cash grab from all of those Hot Sulphur business’s million dollar war chests – yeah, right. I was informed that we were to meet on Wednesday night at 7:00PM at the Barking Dog Pub. Unlike the last town meeting I attended, where the participants had to stoke up on hooch at home before spending the next few hours at the HSS Town Hall, the meeting planners decided to skip that formality and just have the damn meeting in the town bar. Anybody yet see a potential problem with that? Let’s get a bunch of people together who are already fuming mad, then let’em pound down brews before and during the meeting, and then have a heated argument. That should make for a productive evening.
When we enter the Barking Dog for the meeting, there were only a few of the business owners present, and only two that I had previously met. There was one man whom I didn’t recognize holding court down at the end of the bar. He was a tall, slim fellow, made all the taller by his outlandishly conspicuous white cowboy hat – not a 10-gallon hat, but maybe a 7.5 gallon hat. He wore a grey tank top, the armpit areas of which were truncated with dark sweat stains. He was loudly waving his arms about as if he were below deck in a rolling sea swatting at…..…..…wait a minute, it was Ron, the drunken plumber who tried unsuccessfully to unclog our pipes on New Year’s night. What in the hell was he doing here?? What the hell kind of a business does he own?? I didn’t know being the official Hot Sulphur Springs “Town Drunk” qualified someone as a business owner. Can “Town Drunk” be some sort of a new franchise opportunity I’m not aware of? (And let me tell you something; earning the moniker of ‘Town Drunk of HSS’ is no easy feat, as the competition is ferocious!) Ron was at the meeting not because he was a business owner; he was at the meeting because he lives at the bar, and the meeting was at the bar. WHY IN THE HELL DID WE HAVE THE MEETING AT THE BAR?? (Maybe that town council member was right to question the intelligence of the local business owners after all.)
At about 7:30, when all of the owners arrived, we ordered one more round for the discussion and moved from the bar to a large table to begin the meeting. Including Cowboy Hiccup, there were 11 participants at the table, representing three of the five hotels, owners of most of the towns’ apartment units and the owner of the Barking Dog. The meeting started badly, as Ron the plumber was dominating the conversation with inane drunken babble about how he personally ran the water treatment plant for 20 years and how he was the town’s master plumber and everything is this town is screwed up and blah blah blah blah blah. After about five minutes of this, the meeting organizer asked that we limit our responses to two minutes, and then suggested that we appoint a ‘Sergeant at Arms’ in the event that participants got out of order. How many informal meetings have you attended where the first order of business was to appoint a ‘Sergeant at Arms’?
We went around the table, with everyone getting their two minutes to state their issues, offer solutions, ask questions, etc.; except everyone’s two minute allotment turned into five minutes as the Popped Plumber kept interrupting with his nonsensical blather, which would then bring the Sergeant at Arms around the table to shake a finger in his face and threaten to throw him out – several times he actually grabbed Ron in a bear hug and tried to pull him out of his chair. Again I ask, ever seen this sort of thing in one of your neighborhood meetings? But then I don’t suppose you have your meetings in a bar.
One of the apartment owners, a lovable old curmudgeon named Lou, barked so loudly at Ron to shut up that he was actually able to get him to shut up and make the two most sharply perceptive points of the evening; point one being that they should no longer officially refer to the town of HSS as the ‘county seat of Grand County’, rather, it should henceforth be known as the ‘toilet seat of Grand County’. His second point, the highlight of the evening, involved the importance of water conservation in this water starved area, and suggested a citizens awareness campaign with a slogan of “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down!”
It was at this point, after picking ourselves up off the floor, that Julie and I excused ourselves from the proceedings and headed back to The Riverside. The end result of the group meeting was a decision to show a united front as business owners and write a formal letter to the town, demanding to know specifics on forthcoming stimulus money, educating the council as to the catastrophic end this town will come to – on their watch - if they run all of the businesses off, and finally, a strong suggestion that all future town hall meetings be held at the Barking Dog and Ron the Plumber be installed on the town council as it’s voice of reason. He couldn’t do any worse.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
The Other 98%....
My last few blog entries have been a bit on the negative side, detailing the some-times ugly attributes of people who enter into our life because of the ‘OPEN’ sign we have on our front door. For this I apologize, as the original intent of this blog wasn’t to make it into a wordier version of Facebook – (“I’m really bored right now. Think I’ll take a quiz to see what 1960’s cartoon character I’d most likely smell like after a run in the woods...”) The intent of the blog was to chronicle the unique aspects of our lives as they played out doing an unusual job in a small town while living in a historic building on a magnificent river. Instead, I’ve fallen prey to bitching about the 2% of life’s bastards who have turned this dream into a sometimes nightmare. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.
As recompense for my recent caustic digressions, I’d like to take this opportunity to laud the other 98% of the human race, who are our reason for giving up safety and security so that we may experience, share and enjoy the glory of their being. We did this because we love people and we derive great satisfaction in interacting with them and making them happy. In fact, Julie has given her life to making children with special needs productive, whole and happy, and some gutless, anonymous son of a bitch referred to her as “two-faced” in another vicious on-line review. Whoops! Sorry, said I wasn’t going to go there anymore; last time.
It was June 29th, 2008, and we had lived full-time at The Riverside for only two days. It was late in the afternoon, and the hotel was almost booked full. We were making last minute preparations for the evening dinner crowd, when I noticed two young men trying to get a very large, full-body wheelchair into our west hotel/restaurant entrance. As the hotel was built a few years before the ADA, it unfortunately isn’t up to code regarding accessibility. I went to see what could be done about helping them get the wheelchair into the building; it was at this point that I took the time to notice the inhabitant of the chair. He was an elderly gentleman, I’d say he was in his early 80’s, and he looked very much like my father looked shortly before my father died. He was unable to communicate verbally, barely nodding ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to queries from his grandsons. He also appeared to be paralyzed from the neck down – no sign of movement from his torso or limbs. I immediately gained respect for these young men, who upon first glance I’d judged as hoodlums from their tattoos, piercings and the goofy, oversized clown-like baseball caps sitting askance on their skulls; (bear with me; I’m an old fart.) They were in fact the epitome of love, tenderness and human kindness in the way that they cared for their grandfather – and care it took, as getting the chair from one cranny through the next would have tried to patience of most. In followed the boy's grandmother, who told me that she and her husband spent their wedding night at The Riverside in 1952, and that her husband “didn’t have too much time left, and they wanted to see the place one more time”. She took me upstairs – the husband stayed downstairs as ascending the narrow stairways were impossible, even with the help of the resolute grandsons – and showed me the room, ‘Elizabeth’, where they spent their first night as newlyweds. She paused and bowed at the door for a minute, reverentially, and without speaking, went back down the stairs to be with her husband. She gently took his hand and told him that she'd found the room, and it was much as she'd remembered; there was the faintest attempt at a smile from the old lion. I was dumbfounded, speechless, and choked up to the point of not even being able to communicate with this family. In fact, I can’t retell this story to people without tears welling in my eyes and my throat constricting, as I have burned in my memory the eager, helpless, dying face of the man who was trying in that instant, through strained eyes, to suck in and relive one of his life’s greatest memories.
I thought we bought a hotel and restaurant. It was at this point that I finally realized that we bought much more than a business; we are the stewards of this magnificent building and the memories of thousands of unknown people and their stories. How many weddings, receptions and honeymoon nights, how many births and deaths, how many Christmas mornings and Thanksgiving turkeys, how much heartache and how much joy? What an awesome responsibility it is to be caretaker to such a magnificent old girl as The Riverside. My thanks to this beautiful couple, whose names I didn’t even have the where-with-all to learn. I followed them out the door, watching as the grandsons delivered their charge into the van with the delicate skill and loving care of surgeons; goofy hats still askance on their skulls.
It didn’t take but two days of living at The Riverside for me to understand why we did this; not for the bastards, but for the other 98% of the human race.
To be continued………
As recompense for my recent caustic digressions, I’d like to take this opportunity to laud the other 98% of the human race, who are our reason for giving up safety and security so that we may experience, share and enjoy the glory of their being. We did this because we love people and we derive great satisfaction in interacting with them and making them happy. In fact, Julie has given her life to making children with special needs productive, whole and happy, and some gutless, anonymous son of a bitch referred to her as “two-faced” in another vicious on-line review. Whoops! Sorry, said I wasn’t going to go there anymore; last time.
It was June 29th, 2008, and we had lived full-time at The Riverside for only two days. It was late in the afternoon, and the hotel was almost booked full. We were making last minute preparations for the evening dinner crowd, when I noticed two young men trying to get a very large, full-body wheelchair into our west hotel/restaurant entrance. As the hotel was built a few years before the ADA, it unfortunately isn’t up to code regarding accessibility. I went to see what could be done about helping them get the wheelchair into the building; it was at this point that I took the time to notice the inhabitant of the chair. He was an elderly gentleman, I’d say he was in his early 80’s, and he looked very much like my father looked shortly before my father died. He was unable to communicate verbally, barely nodding ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to queries from his grandsons. He also appeared to be paralyzed from the neck down – no sign of movement from his torso or limbs. I immediately gained respect for these young men, who upon first glance I’d judged as hoodlums from their tattoos, piercings and the goofy, oversized clown-like baseball caps sitting askance on their skulls; (bear with me; I’m an old fart.) They were in fact the epitome of love, tenderness and human kindness in the way that they cared for their grandfather – and care it took, as getting the chair from one cranny through the next would have tried to patience of most. In followed the boy's grandmother, who told me that she and her husband spent their wedding night at The Riverside in 1952, and that her husband “didn’t have too much time left, and they wanted to see the place one more time”. She took me upstairs – the husband stayed downstairs as ascending the narrow stairways were impossible, even with the help of the resolute grandsons – and showed me the room, ‘Elizabeth’, where they spent their first night as newlyweds. She paused and bowed at the door for a minute, reverentially, and without speaking, went back down the stairs to be with her husband. She gently took his hand and told him that she'd found the room, and it was much as she'd remembered; there was the faintest attempt at a smile from the old lion. I was dumbfounded, speechless, and choked up to the point of not even being able to communicate with this family. In fact, I can’t retell this story to people without tears welling in my eyes and my throat constricting, as I have burned in my memory the eager, helpless, dying face of the man who was trying in that instant, through strained eyes, to suck in and relive one of his life’s greatest memories.
I thought we bought a hotel and restaurant. It was at this point that I finally realized that we bought much more than a business; we are the stewards of this magnificent building and the memories of thousands of unknown people and their stories. How many weddings, receptions and honeymoon nights, how many births and deaths, how many Christmas mornings and Thanksgiving turkeys, how much heartache and how much joy? What an awesome responsibility it is to be caretaker to such a magnificent old girl as The Riverside. My thanks to this beautiful couple, whose names I didn’t even have the where-with-all to learn. I followed them out the door, watching as the grandsons delivered their charge into the van with the delicate skill and loving care of surgeons; goofy hats still askance on their skulls.
It didn’t take but two days of living at The Riverside for me to understand why we did this; not for the bastards, but for the other 98% of the human race.
To be continued………
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
"Yuck! Clean it up!"
The words harpooned me, taking not only my breath away, but every semblance of dignity and self worth in our self-perceived successful undertaking of running The Riverside.
“Yuck! Clean it up!”
As we have a limited – and often times non-existent – advertising budget, our life-blood for procurement of new customers to the hotel and restaurant is largely based upon good ‘word of mouth’. We rely on the residual effect of our hard work and exceptional efforts in providing a positive experience for bringing in new customers from the recommendations and kind words of current and regular customers. We’re not unique in this matter – all businesses, especially ‘moms & pops’, thrive on good word of mouth, or die with the opposite. And now with the internet - I was skeptical at first, but I’ll now boldly predict that it is here to stay – good or bad word of mouth is out there for millions to see at the click of one of those linkey things.
“Yuck! Clean it up!”
As of this writing, guests to The Riverside have posted 30 reviews on various sites – Google, Yahoo, CitySearch, Tripadvisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com/Search?q=Riverside+Hotel%2C+Hot+Sulphur+Springs%2C+CO&sub-search.x=7&sub-search.y=12) and B&B.com, and I’m overwhelmed at the kind, encouraging and generous words, many from strangers and guests that I’m sorry to say I can’t remember. Of the 30 reviews, 23 have given us the highest five star rating and 6 have given a four star rating; quick math tells you that one rating and review remains.
“Yuck! Clean it up!”
Reviews #1 through #29 have titles such as “Incredible Find!” “Our best stay to date in Hot Sulphur” “A wonderful lifetime memory” “A rare gem”; and then there’s review #30 - “Yuck! Clean it up!”
Here’s what our friendly reviewer had to say about our hotel:
“What might have been a nice hotel in a convenient spot was ruined by two things: absolutely filthy and smelly 50+ year-old carpeting throughout and grimy, outdated and frankly frightening bathrooms. The folks running the place seem nice enough but, sorry folks, good intentions don't cut it when paying guests expect a clean environment. However much it might have cost to clean up and update this old building, it should have been done before opening up the hotel for business. Whatever the other hardships there may be in converting a ramshackle old clap-trap building into a hotel, there is absolutely NO excuse for not cleaning the bathrooms, miserable though they may be. Beware of this place if you value cleanliness and charm - you won't find either here and this frightful relic just may turn your stomach.”
Oh my God! Who said this about our hotel? The name on the review was ‘Pdoo’, from Chicago. IL, and they stayed in the hotel in May. I didn’t remember anyone saying that the bathrooms were frightening or filthy – most normal people who would be put off enough by dirty bathrooms or carpet to take the time to write such a devastatingly horrible review – no, make such a personal attack - wouldn’t hesitate to make mention of it during their stay. I’ll take this one step further – anyone who would be such a heartless, malicious asshole as to write something so mean spirited, would generally have the balls (read "have the balls" as also having a general lack of social skills) to personally confront you right there on the spot. “Hey buddy, your bathroom is filthy – Yuck! Clean it up!”
I immediately start going through guest registers, looking for someone from Chicago who stayed at the hotel in May. Wait a minute. We were closed in May, opening for two family reunions on May 25th – one family from Denver, the other from New York. Lovely people all of them – totally satisfied with their experience, with nothing even resembling a complaint from any of them. Further investigation into the other four rooms we rented the last week in May have no one from anywhere other than the Front Range – no one from Chicago or even any point east of Denver. So I’m thinking, “Could this person have us confused with another hotel?” “Could this be a competitor, or perhaps a disgruntled ex-employee?”
“Yuck! Clean it up!”
The other part of me wanted to dismiss this as I try to dismiss the previously mentioned bastards in our restaurant; someone whose standards for acceptance aren’t founded in the real world, and are therefore never met by anyone in this world. But I couldn’t put it away, as the more I thought about it, the more I came to the realization that this wasn’t a legitimate review by a Riverside customer, rather, this was written by someone close to us. But for what purpose; to get me to clean the downstairs men’s room more than once a month? Or was the review meant to personally injure us, demean our efforts and “good intentions” and ultimately hurt and devalue the hotel?
Fortunately, the good folks at TripAdvisor take this sort of thing seriously; the legitimacy of their site isn’t worth a hoot if anyone can say anything, anytime without basis or foundation. They also tell me that it can even be classified as libel in a court of law, when proved to be a false and malicious published statement intended to damage someone’s reputation – we won’t have any trouble proving the published part. So they’re going to get to the bottom of it for us, and I’m both anxious and a little scared to find out who the bastard might be.
“Yuck! Clean it up!”
To be continued……..
“Yuck! Clean it up!”
As we have a limited – and often times non-existent – advertising budget, our life-blood for procurement of new customers to the hotel and restaurant is largely based upon good ‘word of mouth’. We rely on the residual effect of our hard work and exceptional efforts in providing a positive experience for bringing in new customers from the recommendations and kind words of current and regular customers. We’re not unique in this matter – all businesses, especially ‘moms & pops’, thrive on good word of mouth, or die with the opposite. And now with the internet - I was skeptical at first, but I’ll now boldly predict that it is here to stay – good or bad word of mouth is out there for millions to see at the click of one of those linkey things.
“Yuck! Clean it up!”
As of this writing, guests to The Riverside have posted 30 reviews on various sites – Google, Yahoo, CitySearch, Tripadvisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com/Search?q=Riverside+Hotel%2C+Hot+Sulphur+Springs%2C+CO&sub-search.x=7&sub-search.y=12) and B&B.com, and I’m overwhelmed at the kind, encouraging and generous words, many from strangers and guests that I’m sorry to say I can’t remember. Of the 30 reviews, 23 have given us the highest five star rating and 6 have given a four star rating; quick math tells you that one rating and review remains.
“Yuck! Clean it up!”
Reviews #1 through #29 have titles such as “Incredible Find!” “Our best stay to date in Hot Sulphur” “A wonderful lifetime memory” “A rare gem”; and then there’s review #30 - “Yuck! Clean it up!”
Here’s what our friendly reviewer had to say about our hotel:
“What might have been a nice hotel in a convenient spot was ruined by two things: absolutely filthy and smelly 50+ year-old carpeting throughout and grimy, outdated and frankly frightening bathrooms. The folks running the place seem nice enough but, sorry folks, good intentions don't cut it when paying guests expect a clean environment. However much it might have cost to clean up and update this old building, it should have been done before opening up the hotel for business. Whatever the other hardships there may be in converting a ramshackle old clap-trap building into a hotel, there is absolutely NO excuse for not cleaning the bathrooms, miserable though they may be. Beware of this place if you value cleanliness and charm - you won't find either here and this frightful relic just may turn your stomach.”
Oh my God! Who said this about our hotel? The name on the review was ‘Pdoo’, from Chicago. IL, and they stayed in the hotel in May. I didn’t remember anyone saying that the bathrooms were frightening or filthy – most normal people who would be put off enough by dirty bathrooms or carpet to take the time to write such a devastatingly horrible review – no, make such a personal attack - wouldn’t hesitate to make mention of it during their stay. I’ll take this one step further – anyone who would be such a heartless, malicious asshole as to write something so mean spirited, would generally have the balls (read "have the balls" as also having a general lack of social skills) to personally confront you right there on the spot. “Hey buddy, your bathroom is filthy – Yuck! Clean it up!”
I immediately start going through guest registers, looking for someone from Chicago who stayed at the hotel in May. Wait a minute. We were closed in May, opening for two family reunions on May 25th – one family from Denver, the other from New York. Lovely people all of them – totally satisfied with their experience, with nothing even resembling a complaint from any of them. Further investigation into the other four rooms we rented the last week in May have no one from anywhere other than the Front Range – no one from Chicago or even any point east of Denver. So I’m thinking, “Could this person have us confused with another hotel?” “Could this be a competitor, or perhaps a disgruntled ex-employee?”
“Yuck! Clean it up!”
The other part of me wanted to dismiss this as I try to dismiss the previously mentioned bastards in our restaurant; someone whose standards for acceptance aren’t founded in the real world, and are therefore never met by anyone in this world. But I couldn’t put it away, as the more I thought about it, the more I came to the realization that this wasn’t a legitimate review by a Riverside customer, rather, this was written by someone close to us. But for what purpose; to get me to clean the downstairs men’s room more than once a month? Or was the review meant to personally injure us, demean our efforts and “good intentions” and ultimately hurt and devalue the hotel?
Fortunately, the good folks at TripAdvisor take this sort of thing seriously; the legitimacy of their site isn’t worth a hoot if anyone can say anything, anytime without basis or foundation. They also tell me that it can even be classified as libel in a court of law, when proved to be a false and malicious published statement intended to damage someone’s reputation – we won’t have any trouble proving the published part. So they’re going to get to the bottom of it for us, and I’m both anxious and a little scared to find out who the bastard might be.
“Yuck! Clean it up!”
To be continued……..
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
The Four Seasons of Grand County
I’m assuming that anyone who reads this Blog lives in a typical, human-friendly environment that has four seasons. You live by those seasons, as they control and define your temperaments, your wardrobes, your activities, and certainly your ESPN schedule – they are the clock that controls your life. Atypical environments – Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, Siberia, The Moon, and Columbia, Mo – don’t have four seasons; they might have two, maybe three, and that makes them uninhabitable by mortals who demand the normalcy of an acceptable human existence. (OK, I’m kidding about Columbia, MO having less than four seasons.)
I’ve never lived in Columbia, Mo, and I no longer live in Shawnee, Ks – I now reside in Hot Sulphur Springs, a town so small that unless you had to pee really badly or were in desperate need of a bag of chips and a tank of gas, you wouldn’t remember that you drove through it on your way from here to anywhere. But this is Grand County, Co, and we still have four seasons! They are as follows:
- Pre Winter
- Kick your ass, freeze your butt, bury you with snow, make the power company rich, kick your ass again, Oh God I’m cold!, How many more years before summer?, I can’t even begin to feel my ass anymore Winter
- Post Winter
- Spr-ummer-fall
We’ll start with Pre-winter, which generally begins sometime in late July or early August. I know you’re thinking that in most parts of the US, late July or early August are generally the beginning of the ‘dog days’ of summer. In northeastern Kansas, the dog days meant a continual stream of 90+ degree days with little or no precipitation; the green and lush bluegrass lawn that you worked so hard to attain in the spring has turned into a dormant, dusty brown plot with a few strands of nut grass popping up here and there. You sit on the back deck in the evening in a dry heat, listening to the cicadas do there thing amongst the drying leaves of the moisture-starved hardwoods. It drags on to the point where you’re not only ready for a cold snap, you’re praying for it. Not so in Grand County – Pre-Winter is that little reality check that dumps two feet of snow on August 9th in the higher elevations, shutting down Trail Ridge Road (the pass that joins the western part of Rocky Mountain National Park to the east and Estes Park), if only for a day. Pre-Winter is the season that this July 29th dumped a couple of inches of slushy snow/hail on the tourists in Grand Lake, who the day before were sunbathing on the beach. Pre-Winter is Grand County’s reminder that no matter how nice it is today, a climactic Armageddon is always – and with utmost certainty - right around the corner. Pre-Winter can last as long as two months, sometimes even stretching into October, offering some of the most beautiful weather to be had anywhere in the world. You’ll have days with highs in the upper- 60’s to low 70’s, with the golden aspens set against a sky so brilliantly blue that it leaves you challenged for adjectives. Just don’t ever plan an outdoor wedding during Pre-winter, as that 70-degree, azure day can turn into Santa Land in a matter of hours.
The next and most dominant of the Grand County seasons is real winter, not to be remotely mistaken with anything that the rest of the country refers to as winter. As I mentioned earlier, this is ‘Kick your ass, freeze your butt, blah, blah, blah winter’. Your typical winter in Grand County generally lasts anywhere from 9 to 14 months. Daytime highs of -10F are common for most of December & January. February is usually a lot colder. There was a night when I went outside to smoke a cigar and the nighttime air being sucked through the business end of the cigar froze up the moisture from my breath in the discharge end of the cigar. I wasn’t out too long that evening. It is literally too cold to snow, as the flakes are so frozen and the air so dry that the snow falls like the finest ash you’ve ever encountered; you can effortlessly sweep a 3-4 inch snowfall from your front walk with a kitchen broom. However, it does accumulate, and by the end of February, you’ll typically have anywhere from 4-8 feet of it piled high on your northern exposure areas, i.e., the back of the house and roof-areas that don’t see the low-slung southern-sky sun for a few months. In fairness, it’s not always below zero in February – occasionally you’ll get a little tropical warm-up, say into the low 20’s, which then brings some moisture that translates into a damp-snow blizzard that limits visibility in a car to the inside front of your windshield. Getting caught in one of these – I have several times – is what made St. Christopher get out of the transportation business.
There are a few plus sides to real winter in Grand County. You have some of the best skiing to be had anywhere in the world. You can also ski in the winter, with some terrific powder and wonderful slopes. And then there’s the skiing! Moguls, side-slipping, stemming, traversing, cliff-hucking – woo baby, I can’t get enough of it. Not really. I tried to ski once, and took my skis off halfway down the bunny slope, never again to attempt a double-reverse traversing cliff-huck. So while the winter in Grand County offers some pretty good skiing, if you don’t ski, you’re pretty much you-know-what for something else to do. I guess one final plus of a Grand County winter for me is that the brutally cold climate is not conducive to the growth of the large, poisonous tarantulas typically found in tropical climates. I thank God every day for that fact, as I’m scared to death of big tarantulas. I’m always thinking to myself, “If I lived in an Amazonian rain forest, I’d be all the time dealing with big, hairy spiders. Here in Grand County, with 9 months of snow and sub-freezing temperatures, that isn’t an issue.”
Real winter is followed by post-winter, also known locally as ‘mud season’. Ahhh, Mud Season; how idyllic is that? Here’s a free slogan for the local Chamber – “Come Celebrate Mud Season in Beautiful Hot Sulphur!” Mud season is always welcomed by the locals, as it is the harbinger of better times ahead. The days are slowly getting longer and steadily getting warmer, the temperatures now starting to crack that 32-degree freeze-line with regularity – at least in the late afternoon, on sunny days. Those dry powdery snowfalls of real winter are replaced by heavy, wet, blinding snowstorms – but they melt quickly, especially when the daytime highs are in the low 40s and the torrential rains help to knock the winter snow accumulations into the swollen streams and rivers. And the end result of this glacial cleansing is, well, mud; on the roads, in the yards, the parks, the trails, the parking lots, the carpets and floors, and especially on Lucy’s’ underbelly and paws. Many of the locals, especially those involved in the seasonal hospitality and food and beverage industries, pack up and head out of town to warmer, sunnier, cleaner climes – that would be anywhere other than Grand County, CO.
The final season, though the shortest of the four, is the reason why 19,000 people put up with the other three seasons to reside in this county. Spr-ummer-fall essentially takes the best aspects of spring, summer and fall and rolls them into one languid, lush and beautiful 6-8 week season. At the onset of Spr-ummer-fall, the river thaws and gushes forth, the mountain meadows become lush with grass, sage and wildflowers, and the days end in a bask of alpenglow. This one-two week season is followed by a mountain summer – warm, dry days and cool starlit nights – where the sky is bluer and the stars are brighter than any you’ve ever seen or could imagine. The afternoon heat is often punctuated by a brief blast from Mother Nature, bringing oft needed moisture and relief to the arid valley. Only occasionally do the storms last into the evening, and even less do they bring summer snow. The final weeks of Spr-ummer-fall bring the golden aspens – a sight that makes the orange and red of Midwestern oaks, maples and hickories pale in comparison. If the color gold can ever look ablaze, it is in these aspens as they rest against the backdrop of the foot hills and peaks of the Rockies. One of the most spectacular sights one can ever behold is seen from the top of Ute Pass, a 20+ mile drive from the Riverside, where the spectacle of the Gore Range and the Blue River Valley is laid out before you in a panorama that has to be witnessed – it can’t be described. It is mountains that look like they were drawn by children, with sheer faces and exaggerated jagged peaks; throw in the golden explosion of the aspens, and you’ll find it hard to get back in your car and leave the view behind.
The four seasons of Grand County are truly a dichotomy – nature at its cruelest and most malevolent at one turn, and glorious and magnanimous at the other. It is as exhilarating to witness the brutality of the winter as it is to revel in the gentleness of summer. But forgive me my abruptness in ending this chapter of life in the mountains; I must now put aside my musings, as it is starting to rain tarantulas.
I’ve never lived in Columbia, Mo, and I no longer live in Shawnee, Ks – I now reside in Hot Sulphur Springs, a town so small that unless you had to pee really badly or were in desperate need of a bag of chips and a tank of gas, you wouldn’t remember that you drove through it on your way from here to anywhere. But this is Grand County, Co, and we still have four seasons! They are as follows:
- Pre Winter
- Kick your ass, freeze your butt, bury you with snow, make the power company rich, kick your ass again, Oh God I’m cold!, How many more years before summer?, I can’t even begin to feel my ass anymore Winter
- Post Winter
- Spr-ummer-fall
We’ll start with Pre-winter, which generally begins sometime in late July or early August. I know you’re thinking that in most parts of the US, late July or early August are generally the beginning of the ‘dog days’ of summer. In northeastern Kansas, the dog days meant a continual stream of 90+ degree days with little or no precipitation; the green and lush bluegrass lawn that you worked so hard to attain in the spring has turned into a dormant, dusty brown plot with a few strands of nut grass popping up here and there. You sit on the back deck in the evening in a dry heat, listening to the cicadas do there thing amongst the drying leaves of the moisture-starved hardwoods. It drags on to the point where you’re not only ready for a cold snap, you’re praying for it. Not so in Grand County – Pre-Winter is that little reality check that dumps two feet of snow on August 9th in the higher elevations, shutting down Trail Ridge Road (the pass that joins the western part of Rocky Mountain National Park to the east and Estes Park), if only for a day. Pre-Winter is the season that this July 29th dumped a couple of inches of slushy snow/hail on the tourists in Grand Lake, who the day before were sunbathing on the beach. Pre-Winter is Grand County’s reminder that no matter how nice it is today, a climactic Armageddon is always – and with utmost certainty - right around the corner. Pre-Winter can last as long as two months, sometimes even stretching into October, offering some of the most beautiful weather to be had anywhere in the world. You’ll have days with highs in the upper- 60’s to low 70’s, with the golden aspens set against a sky so brilliantly blue that it leaves you challenged for adjectives. Just don’t ever plan an outdoor wedding during Pre-winter, as that 70-degree, azure day can turn into Santa Land in a matter of hours.
The next and most dominant of the Grand County seasons is real winter, not to be remotely mistaken with anything that the rest of the country refers to as winter. As I mentioned earlier, this is ‘Kick your ass, freeze your butt, blah, blah, blah winter’. Your typical winter in Grand County generally lasts anywhere from 9 to 14 months. Daytime highs of -10F are common for most of December & January. February is usually a lot colder. There was a night when I went outside to smoke a cigar and the nighttime air being sucked through the business end of the cigar froze up the moisture from my breath in the discharge end of the cigar. I wasn’t out too long that evening. It is literally too cold to snow, as the flakes are so frozen and the air so dry that the snow falls like the finest ash you’ve ever encountered; you can effortlessly sweep a 3-4 inch snowfall from your front walk with a kitchen broom. However, it does accumulate, and by the end of February, you’ll typically have anywhere from 4-8 feet of it piled high on your northern exposure areas, i.e., the back of the house and roof-areas that don’t see the low-slung southern-sky sun for a few months. In fairness, it’s not always below zero in February – occasionally you’ll get a little tropical warm-up, say into the low 20’s, which then brings some moisture that translates into a damp-snow blizzard that limits visibility in a car to the inside front of your windshield. Getting caught in one of these – I have several times – is what made St. Christopher get out of the transportation business.
There are a few plus sides to real winter in Grand County. You have some of the best skiing to be had anywhere in the world. You can also ski in the winter, with some terrific powder and wonderful slopes. And then there’s the skiing! Moguls, side-slipping, stemming, traversing, cliff-hucking – woo baby, I can’t get enough of it. Not really. I tried to ski once, and took my skis off halfway down the bunny slope, never again to attempt a double-reverse traversing cliff-huck. So while the winter in Grand County offers some pretty good skiing, if you don’t ski, you’re pretty much you-know-what for something else to do. I guess one final plus of a Grand County winter for me is that the brutally cold climate is not conducive to the growth of the large, poisonous tarantulas typically found in tropical climates. I thank God every day for that fact, as I’m scared to death of big tarantulas. I’m always thinking to myself, “If I lived in an Amazonian rain forest, I’d be all the time dealing with big, hairy spiders. Here in Grand County, with 9 months of snow and sub-freezing temperatures, that isn’t an issue.”
Real winter is followed by post-winter, also known locally as ‘mud season’. Ahhh, Mud Season; how idyllic is that? Here’s a free slogan for the local Chamber – “Come Celebrate Mud Season in Beautiful Hot Sulphur!” Mud season is always welcomed by the locals, as it is the harbinger of better times ahead. The days are slowly getting longer and steadily getting warmer, the temperatures now starting to crack that 32-degree freeze-line with regularity – at least in the late afternoon, on sunny days. Those dry powdery snowfalls of real winter are replaced by heavy, wet, blinding snowstorms – but they melt quickly, especially when the daytime highs are in the low 40s and the torrential rains help to knock the winter snow accumulations into the swollen streams and rivers. And the end result of this glacial cleansing is, well, mud; on the roads, in the yards, the parks, the trails, the parking lots, the carpets and floors, and especially on Lucy’s’ underbelly and paws. Many of the locals, especially those involved in the seasonal hospitality and food and beverage industries, pack up and head out of town to warmer, sunnier, cleaner climes – that would be anywhere other than Grand County, CO.
The final season, though the shortest of the four, is the reason why 19,000 people put up with the other three seasons to reside in this county. Spr-ummer-fall essentially takes the best aspects of spring, summer and fall and rolls them into one languid, lush and beautiful 6-8 week season. At the onset of Spr-ummer-fall, the river thaws and gushes forth, the mountain meadows become lush with grass, sage and wildflowers, and the days end in a bask of alpenglow. This one-two week season is followed by a mountain summer – warm, dry days and cool starlit nights – where the sky is bluer and the stars are brighter than any you’ve ever seen or could imagine. The afternoon heat is often punctuated by a brief blast from Mother Nature, bringing oft needed moisture and relief to the arid valley. Only occasionally do the storms last into the evening, and even less do they bring summer snow. The final weeks of Spr-ummer-fall bring the golden aspens – a sight that makes the orange and red of Midwestern oaks, maples and hickories pale in comparison. If the color gold can ever look ablaze, it is in these aspens as they rest against the backdrop of the foot hills and peaks of the Rockies. One of the most spectacular sights one can ever behold is seen from the top of Ute Pass, a 20+ mile drive from the Riverside, where the spectacle of the Gore Range and the Blue River Valley is laid out before you in a panorama that has to be witnessed – it can’t be described. It is mountains that look like they were drawn by children, with sheer faces and exaggerated jagged peaks; throw in the golden explosion of the aspens, and you’ll find it hard to get back in your car and leave the view behind.
The four seasons of Grand County are truly a dichotomy – nature at its cruelest and most malevolent at one turn, and glorious and magnanimous at the other. It is as exhilarating to witness the brutality of the winter as it is to revel in the gentleness of summer. But forgive me my abruptness in ending this chapter of life in the mountains; I must now put aside my musings, as it is starting to rain tarantulas.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Stoned Soup
I came from an industry – manufacturing – that required all job applicants to pass a drug screening before being hired, and then be subject to random drug testing, (although we never did a random test without susceptible cause, as the omnipresent specter of a whiz-quiz combined with the need for a steady paycheck were generally enough to keep them from the ganja), or mandatory testing in the event of an injury or accident. One of my favorite pre-employment drug test stories (we all have them, don’t we?) involved a young man who called late on a Friday evening just as I was locking up for the weekend, wanting to know if we’d gotten the results from his drug screening, and had he passed the test. I asked him “what do you think?” and he answered, “I’m not sure, that’s why I’m calling to find out."
While I’m generally an advocate of respecting people’s privacy and personal liberties, all it took were a few incidences of valves being inadvertently left open causing nasty, very hard to clean up black stuff to spew out on the floor, forklifts crashing into the bright fluorescent yellow roof support poles located smack-dab in the middle of the fork lift aisle, or the wrong pump pumping the wrong stuff out of the wrong tank into the wrong mixer before I decided to shelve my “what you do on your time is your business” philosophy and start drug testing. Amazing how quickly the expensive, hard to clean and potentially dangerous drug-induced brain-farts virtually disappeared.
I’m not in heavy manufacturing any longer – no big mixing tanks, no pumps, no 150-hp motors or 4” ball valves making 2000-gallon batches of noxious goo. I’m now in light manufacturing – pots, pans, little Kitchen-Aide mixers and a consumer-grade food processor, manufacturing stocks, soups, salads, entrees and crème brule. No need for drug testing here.
Wait just a minute! How ironic that an industry where overstressed people are running around cramped quarters on slippery floors at a breakneck pace with BIG SHARP KNIVES IN THEIR HANDS doesn’t require their employees to be drug and alcohol free. Why is this?? How can this be?? Simple – if you drug tested cooks before you hired them, and then actually expected them to stay sober during business hours, you’d have a pretty limited labor pool to draw from, especially in Grand County, CO. (Having said that, we are blessed at The Riverside to not only have a drug-free, sober-during-business-hours chef, but one that out-cooks all of the other four-star hash hawkers on the mountain.) Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with our previous chef, and it was he who opened my eyes to the proclivity of chefs to indulge in, no, to mostly outright abuse drugs and alcohol. When I told our food supplier that I thought our chef was pretty much stoned all of the time, he said “welcome to the restaurant business.” This explained a lot. Let’s be honest; you probably can’t come up with something like Sautéed Soy-infused Lichens served over a bed of Squid-Ink Pappardelle without a little creative help.
Often times the creative aspect can be skewed a bit when one asks the ganja gods for too much help. For example, our straight chef prepared a beautiful apple custard tart for dessert – light flaky crust, apples artfully arranged on a bed of silken vanilla custard. It was a sight to behold, almost too beautiful to slice and serve. Enter Chef Hookah who, of his own accord and without consulting straight chef, decided the tart needed that little extra something to really make the dish special. That something was beet juice. We had just gotten some beets from our local vegetable purveyor, and Bong Boy felt that the logical thing to do with fresh beets was to dice them, put them in a pot with a little water, and slowly cook them down into a brilliant red, syrupy reduction. This fire engine red reduction was then Jackson Pollock-ed onto a white desert plate, upon which the soft yellow tart would rest – indeed, a feast for the eyes, but not for the palate. The beet juice tasted like – and I mean this literally – dirt. Dirt is not a good taste, and it certainly doesn’t enhance the flavor of apple custard tart. The only dish the flavor of dirt might work well with would be an earthworm flan, which I thought of but didn’t suggest to our Weeded Wonder, for fear that it would end up as one of the evening specials.
We sold all of the tart that evening, and to a diner, they described the taste of the beet reduction as ‘interesting’. Know that when someone uses the term ‘interesting’ to describe something in a restaurant, that’s never, ever meant as an acknowledgement of successful taste bud manipulation.
While many may argue this point, I’ll assert that being stoned to the gills can generally have a negative affect on motor skills, cognitive ability and overall job performance – unless maybe you’re Jerry Garcia. Or you were Jerry Garcia. I should get less of an argument on this point when you consider that the individual has thrown down 10 of my Budweisers along with 6-8 shots of Johnny Walker Red or Hornitos Reposada Tequila during the evening rush, on top of his usual afternoon of reefer madness. Do the terms “thick tongued”, “pie-eyed” or “cow-faced” conjure up any notion of a person you’d want active on your payroll? I ask, would you willingly pay work-comp insurance premiums for this individual while he was hacking up a chicken with a razor sharp Santoku, eyes lolling to the back of his head, drool pooling at the corners of his mouth? I think not – not even would Jerry Garcia write that check.
So Chef Doobie-Doer has moved on, and fortunately, he’s taken his passion for Maui Wowie, tequila shots and Budweiser into someone else’s restaurant. As long as I’m in this business, I know that I’ll have to employ and deal with those whose skills and creativities are fueled by a ‘higher’ calling, and just be thankful that we don’t use forklifts in our kitchen.
While I’m generally an advocate of respecting people’s privacy and personal liberties, all it took were a few incidences of valves being inadvertently left open causing nasty, very hard to clean up black stuff to spew out on the floor, forklifts crashing into the bright fluorescent yellow roof support poles located smack-dab in the middle of the fork lift aisle, or the wrong pump pumping the wrong stuff out of the wrong tank into the wrong mixer before I decided to shelve my “what you do on your time is your business” philosophy and start drug testing. Amazing how quickly the expensive, hard to clean and potentially dangerous drug-induced brain-farts virtually disappeared.
I’m not in heavy manufacturing any longer – no big mixing tanks, no pumps, no 150-hp motors or 4” ball valves making 2000-gallon batches of noxious goo. I’m now in light manufacturing – pots, pans, little Kitchen-Aide mixers and a consumer-grade food processor, manufacturing stocks, soups, salads, entrees and crème brule. No need for drug testing here.
Wait just a minute! How ironic that an industry where overstressed people are running around cramped quarters on slippery floors at a breakneck pace with BIG SHARP KNIVES IN THEIR HANDS doesn’t require their employees to be drug and alcohol free. Why is this?? How can this be?? Simple – if you drug tested cooks before you hired them, and then actually expected them to stay sober during business hours, you’d have a pretty limited labor pool to draw from, especially in Grand County, CO. (Having said that, we are blessed at The Riverside to not only have a drug-free, sober-during-business-hours chef, but one that out-cooks all of the other four-star hash hawkers on the mountain.) Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with our previous chef, and it was he who opened my eyes to the proclivity of chefs to indulge in, no, to mostly outright abuse drugs and alcohol. When I told our food supplier that I thought our chef was pretty much stoned all of the time, he said “welcome to the restaurant business.” This explained a lot. Let’s be honest; you probably can’t come up with something like Sautéed Soy-infused Lichens served over a bed of Squid-Ink Pappardelle without a little creative help.
Often times the creative aspect can be skewed a bit when one asks the ganja gods for too much help. For example, our straight chef prepared a beautiful apple custard tart for dessert – light flaky crust, apples artfully arranged on a bed of silken vanilla custard. It was a sight to behold, almost too beautiful to slice and serve. Enter Chef Hookah who, of his own accord and without consulting straight chef, decided the tart needed that little extra something to really make the dish special. That something was beet juice. We had just gotten some beets from our local vegetable purveyor, and Bong Boy felt that the logical thing to do with fresh beets was to dice them, put them in a pot with a little water, and slowly cook them down into a brilliant red, syrupy reduction. This fire engine red reduction was then Jackson Pollock-ed onto a white desert plate, upon which the soft yellow tart would rest – indeed, a feast for the eyes, but not for the palate. The beet juice tasted like – and I mean this literally – dirt. Dirt is not a good taste, and it certainly doesn’t enhance the flavor of apple custard tart. The only dish the flavor of dirt might work well with would be an earthworm flan, which I thought of but didn’t suggest to our Weeded Wonder, for fear that it would end up as one of the evening specials.
We sold all of the tart that evening, and to a diner, they described the taste of the beet reduction as ‘interesting’. Know that when someone uses the term ‘interesting’ to describe something in a restaurant, that’s never, ever meant as an acknowledgement of successful taste bud manipulation.
While many may argue this point, I’ll assert that being stoned to the gills can generally have a negative affect on motor skills, cognitive ability and overall job performance – unless maybe you’re Jerry Garcia. Or you were Jerry Garcia. I should get less of an argument on this point when you consider that the individual has thrown down 10 of my Budweisers along with 6-8 shots of Johnny Walker Red or Hornitos Reposada Tequila during the evening rush, on top of his usual afternoon of reefer madness. Do the terms “thick tongued”, “pie-eyed” or “cow-faced” conjure up any notion of a person you’d want active on your payroll? I ask, would you willingly pay work-comp insurance premiums for this individual while he was hacking up a chicken with a razor sharp Santoku, eyes lolling to the back of his head, drool pooling at the corners of his mouth? I think not – not even would Jerry Garcia write that check.
So Chef Doobie-Doer has moved on, and fortunately, he’s taken his passion for Maui Wowie, tequila shots and Budweiser into someone else’s restaurant. As long as I’m in this business, I know that I’ll have to employ and deal with those whose skills and creativities are fueled by a ‘higher’ calling, and just be thankful that we don’t use forklifts in our kitchen.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Riverside Garlic Salad
This is our signature salad, developed from a recipe handed down to me and my siblings from my father, Alfred J. Paradise. Dad loved to cook, and he passed that passion for good food and entertaining on to all of his children. I also place partial blame on both of my parents for helping to get me into this mess, as they both new how to cook and entertain, and ended up instilling this ‘flaw’ in all of their children. It was rare that a week went by without some sort of get together in the Paradise house involving food and drink with either our large extended family or agglomerations of friends, neighbors or business associates. I grew up around food and fun, and have tried to turn those wonderful childhood memories and experiences into a respectable career here at The Riverside.
Dad was an empirical cook, and rarely did he consult a cookbook or magazine for a recipe. He flew by the seat of his pants, often recreating food from only the gustatory memories of dishes he’d had in restaurants. He took great delight in 'jacking' with people who’d ask for recipes of his original creations. “Oh, there’s no recipe” he’d say, “It’s just a few tablespoons of this or a cup or two of that.” Or he would go to the other extreme, saying things like “boil the potatoes for 17 minutes, then immediately douse them in 52-degree water for six minutes, making sure the water maintains the 52-degree temperature.” He would delight inwardly as his unsuspecting dupes would diligently write down his culinary canard, always to come back at some later point and complain that although they followed the instructions to the letter, they were unable to recreate his recipe.
This is no canard; this recipe should make enough dressing for four large servings of garlic salad. You’ll need a large round-bottom wooden salad bowl, ( http://www.bowlmill.com/cgi-bin/bowlmill/1015U1.html?id=okCdE7oK ) the rougher the texture of the wood, the better, and a hefty wooden spoon.
6 cloves of garlic
1 tablespoon coarse kosher salt
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1/2 lemon
½ cup of olive oil
½ cup ice cubes
Press the garlic, or mince extremely fine, and place in the bottom of the salad bowl with the kosher salt and Dijon mustard. With the back of the spoon, make a smooth paste – grind that salt into the garlic. Add the juice of ½ lemon to the paste, and slowly add the olive oil, stirring to a smooth consistency. Add the ice cubes, and stir well, until the ice has started to melt. You don’t have to totally melt the ice at this point – you can pour the mixture into a cup, and use within the hour. The ice does three things – it emulsifies the mixture to help prevent it from separating, helps cut the potency, and obviously cools the dressing. This salad should be served very cold, with cold crisp lettuce, mozzarella and croutons - no store bought croutons; here is our standard Riverside crouton recipe.
5 slices Farm to Market Sourdough Bread http://www.farmtomarketbread.com/
¼ cup olive oil
3 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons garlic salt
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
In a large sauté pan, heat the olive oil and butter to near smoking. Add the garlic salt and cayenne pepper, and then add the bread, (which you’ve cut into ½” cubes). Keep tossing the croutons until they’re coated with the oil/butter/salt mixture and toasted to a crunch.
Toss the lettuce with the croutons and the shredded mozzarella (use whatever type of lettuce you like - we use a mixture of romaine, fresh spinach when available, and mixed spring greens. This salad is also excellent with good old hand-shredded iceberg lettuce - that's all we had growing up as poor white children in Johnson County, KS).
Add the dressing a little at a time, and keep tossing until all of the mixture is coated. SERVE COLD on chilled plates, and top with fresh cracked pepper.
Dad was an empirical cook, and rarely did he consult a cookbook or magazine for a recipe. He flew by the seat of his pants, often recreating food from only the gustatory memories of dishes he’d had in restaurants. He took great delight in 'jacking' with people who’d ask for recipes of his original creations. “Oh, there’s no recipe” he’d say, “It’s just a few tablespoons of this or a cup or two of that.” Or he would go to the other extreme, saying things like “boil the potatoes for 17 minutes, then immediately douse them in 52-degree water for six minutes, making sure the water maintains the 52-degree temperature.” He would delight inwardly as his unsuspecting dupes would diligently write down his culinary canard, always to come back at some later point and complain that although they followed the instructions to the letter, they were unable to recreate his recipe.
This is no canard; this recipe should make enough dressing for four large servings of garlic salad. You’ll need a large round-bottom wooden salad bowl, ( http://www.bowlmill.com/cgi-bin/bowlmill/1015U1.html?id=okCdE7oK ) the rougher the texture of the wood, the better, and a hefty wooden spoon.
6 cloves of garlic
1 tablespoon coarse kosher salt
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1/2 lemon
½ cup of olive oil
½ cup ice cubes
Press the garlic, or mince extremely fine, and place in the bottom of the salad bowl with the kosher salt and Dijon mustard. With the back of the spoon, make a smooth paste – grind that salt into the garlic. Add the juice of ½ lemon to the paste, and slowly add the olive oil, stirring to a smooth consistency. Add the ice cubes, and stir well, until the ice has started to melt. You don’t have to totally melt the ice at this point – you can pour the mixture into a cup, and use within the hour. The ice does three things – it emulsifies the mixture to help prevent it from separating, helps cut the potency, and obviously cools the dressing. This salad should be served very cold, with cold crisp lettuce, mozzarella and croutons - no store bought croutons; here is our standard Riverside crouton recipe.
5 slices Farm to Market Sourdough Bread http://www.farmtomarketbread.com/
¼ cup olive oil
3 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons garlic salt
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
In a large sauté pan, heat the olive oil and butter to near smoking. Add the garlic salt and cayenne pepper, and then add the bread, (which you’ve cut into ½” cubes). Keep tossing the croutons until they’re coated with the oil/butter/salt mixture and toasted to a crunch.
Toss the lettuce with the croutons and the shredded mozzarella (use whatever type of lettuce you like - we use a mixture of romaine, fresh spinach when available, and mixed spring greens. This salad is also excellent with good old hand-shredded iceberg lettuce - that's all we had growing up as poor white children in Johnson County, KS).
Add the dressing a little at a time, and keep tossing until all of the mixture is coated. SERVE COLD on chilled plates, and top with fresh cracked pepper.
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