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What is dirt candy? Vegetables, of course. When you eat a vegetable you’re eating little more than dirt that’s been transformed by plenty of sunshine and rain into something that’s full of flavor: Dirt Candy. It’s also the name of my restaurant, which opened in October, 2008.

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There’s nothing worse than when a walk-in table wants to eat here and I have to tell them we don’t have any tables, even when they can see some empty ones. Or when we only have two tables seated and one of them wants to move and I can’t let them. It’s always a bummer, but it’s the drawback of having a small restaurant: the invisible tyranny of the seating chart.

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Take a look at this thing. It’s our seating chart by the time we get done with it at the end of the evening. I never knew so much of my time would be spent figuring out who’s sitting where. It occupies my brain all day long. It eats at me and wakes me up in the middle of the night. Because it is my cruel lord and master. And it is the answer to the constant question: why do you sit where you sit at Dirt Candy?

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The true riddle of the sphinx: why am

I sitting here instead of over there?

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Lots of people seem to enjoy posting reviews on Yelp! And so I just posted one about the low quality graffiti that appeared on the front of Dirt Candy recently. Seriously, I’m very disappointed in the level of this artist’s work.

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Here’s a link to my Yelp! review of this hackwork.

Something that I never expected when I opened Dirt Candy was just how much of my life would be spent managing reservations. With only 18 seats, and an average of about 40 people coming through the door most nights, figuring out who’s sitting where is like a massive game of Tetris. Kristen, our server, and I spend about two or three hours each day on the reservations – calling to confirm, trying to make the seatings work – and while we start out with a nice clean sheet that’s all blocked out and orderly like an A++ student’s homework, what we end up with at the end of the night is usually something that looks like this:

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It looks like a ransom note from someone who wears a tin foil hat. It’s why I hate no shows so much. They  mess up my Crazy Chart!

If you were drinking milk this morning you might have seen my face on the back of the carton and wondered: “I didn’t know Amanda was missing? Isn’t she one of the 100 most powerful jews in the country? What a loss.” Don’t despair, I haven’t been abducted or lured into a maze with no exit and a minotaur in the middle. I’ve just been getting my butt kicked by restaurant life.

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All of us at Dirt Candy have been working like maniacs to get a bunch of things changed in time for the October 29th birthday celebration so I’ve had people in putting a new exhaust fan in the bathroom, trying to get the heat working right, fixing the dining room lights so we can lower the intensity a bit and really boring things like that. You’d think that if you built a restaurant from scratch you wouldn’t still be fixing things a year later, but that’s just not the case.

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“Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!”

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On top of that, one of my refrigerators downstairs keeled over and died on a Saturday night, and we didn’t notice until Monday morning. Say hello to a $350 repair bill and goodbye to over $200 worth of food. Then the repair guy told me the fridge next to it was screwed as well, so there’s another $450 in repairs. On top of that, we have to renew our health certificate which means that we have to get proof of our current policy from the provider (not as easy as it sounds) and send a $280 check to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. By now, I need mental hygiene myself. And, on top of all of this, we’re desperately trying to get two new dishes on the menu.

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But rest assured, we’re trying to make these changes and fix these little things and not blow our brains out. Dirt Candy: always working for you!

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(Updated with extra, gross story of quasi-sexual humiliation)

Dear Turbo Air,

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You’re the worst. No, really. The worst. When I called to let you know that my eight-month-old freezer wasn’t working properly you first accused me of lying, saying that my machine was 100% fine even though you hadn’t looked at it. Then you flat-out refused to send a technician to look at it even though I said that I would pay for the service call if necessary.

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My ice cream looks like soup, and although you told me that this freezer isn’t meant to freeze ice cream (something no one mentioned to me when I bought it) it’s been freezing my ice cream into a rock hard block of frozen ice cream for the past eight months. Suddenly, it’s not. Sounds like a problem to me.

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However, my favorite part of the conversation was when you told me that, according to the technician, the unit was working just fine. The technician who never came out to look at the freezer? Yes, that technician. Apparently, he turned invisible and came to my restaurant and somehow checked out the freezer without any of us knowing about it. Amazing!

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So thanks, Turbo Air. For your lousy freezer and your horrible customer service and your invisible repair technicians, you have earned the title of “The Worst Company I Deal With.”

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- Amanda

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Update: so a tech from Turbo Air showed up the day after this post went up. He did some things to the freezer for a while, but wouldn’t talk to me and then he left. That night, as service started, I checked the freezer and everything was soup. It was now ten degrees ABOVE zero. I called the company and was told that the technician had found nothing wrong, again. I told them he spent a long time working on the unit for nothing to be wrong, and was told to calm down.

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I told them we were going into service and I really needed someone to come out that night or first thing in the morning. They hung up on me. I called back and asked why they hung up on me. They hung up on me again. I called back and the guy I was talking to said, “Do you see who the boss is? Do you see? I have all the power, you have none.” I asked for a repair technician. He said he would maybe send one but I had to call him “The Big Boss.” I called him The Big Boss. Then he asked me to beg him or he said he wouldn’t put in the order.

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This was extremely humiliating and extremely weird, but what could I do? This is the guy who is running the service for Turbo Air. And so I took a deep breath and said, “Please, Big Boss, send a repair tech tomorrow.” He said he would. This is the grossest thing I’ve run into in a  long time, but when you need your freezer right away what choice do you have? Last night we couldn’t sell desserts except for the popcorn pudding thanks to Turbo Air and so we lost a couple of hundred dollars.

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Update to the Update: after a few more visits by the Turbo Air service people they still couldn’t fix my freezer. The solution? I paid $250 to another company who came in, identified that the problem was that the defrost cycle was incorrectly set, bought a tool to set it correctly, and fixed the issue in less than an hour. Thanks for nothing, Turbo Air!

Glamour! Romance! Excitement! These are the feelings that come with running a restaurant and I offer up this thrilling tale of what happened last Friday night in the hopes that it won’t happen again this Friday night. Usually we get our bread delivery around 2pm and our produce delivery arrives around 10AM every day. Last Friday at 10AM there was no produce. 10:30AM: nothing. 11AM: the same. We called our produce people who implied that we were crazy, but said that they’d look into it in order to soothe our fraying nerves. Then…nothing.

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Time passes. We call our produce people again. They say that they’ve just dropped our delivery off at WD-50 but they’re sending the truck back for it right this minute. Now it’s 2pm and we notice that our bread isn’t here either. I call our bread people. “It’s on its way,” they say. “It’ll be there any minute.” I hang up the phone and look around and see that the produce still hasn’t materialized. More phone calls. Yes, our produce people say, it’s on its way right now. Please, stop bothering us. I hang up and decide to try the bread people again. Our bread people tell us they’re backed up but they’re getting to us. Now it’s 4pm. That’s 90 minutes before service begins, and we have no produce and no bread. More phone calls are made. We are stalled. Nothing happens. 5pm. We are now half an hour away from service and we have no produce and no bread.

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Just when you think you know your business, something like this happens. I thought February and March were really busy months where we did a ton of business. April had a really slow week in the middle with Passover and tax time and while it picked up again,  May felt like the slowest month ever. Just pure torture with some really dead nights. This is the reason you keep records, so someone who’s not in the kitchen and dining room keeps accurate score, because I just put my sales taxes together to pay the bill for April and May and it’s $2,000 higher than February or March, so I guess I was wrong and April/May were great for Dirt Candy.

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An illustration of the dangers of trying to estimate sales with your feelings as opposed to Quickbooks.

Some people may have noticed that when you book a table at Dirt Candy on Open Table you’ll see a note stating that if your party has not arrived within ten minutes of your reservation we may not honor it. Nothing makes me feel like a crabby old person, standing on my front porch and yelling at those darn kids to get off my darn lawn, than making a rule about reservations but, unfortunately, with only nine tables we’re so small that if a table doesn’t show or if they show up forty-five minutes late (it happens) it screws up the dining room for the rest of the night.

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Something that’s come up a few times at the restaurant is people bringing in outside food, usually dessert. I totally understand that if it’s a birthday or a special occasion someone might want to bring in cupcakes or some such….but tell us! Whenever there’s a reservation, I usually confirm it by phone beforehand so that’s a perfect time to talk about the totally amazing six-foot-tall, twelve-tier cake you want to have served to you at the end of your meal. When you make a reservation via Open Table there’s a space for notes, and you can enter it in there. Or you can call me and tell me before you show up. But we have to know.

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“Hi, it’s my friend’s birthday and

we brought in a little something…”

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For some people it’s Monday, but for me it’s Tuesday. The day when I go back to work (although, to be fair, Monday’s when I do all the paperwork and accounting). Tuesdays are when we arrive in the morning and the fridges are bare, when the big deliveries come in and when the major prep for the week happens. We spend all day knee-deep in produce with trays of grapefruit segments getting candied, spinach soup being made, dumplings getting folded, onions being pickled, pasta dough being mixed, jalapenos getting chopped, beets getting roasted and on and on. It looks a little like this:

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Roasted beets for the pasta.

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Grapefruit segments before

being candied.

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Micro herbs.

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Forest of micro herbs.

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Produce delivery. Can’t seem to

make them quit the plastic bags.

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