All posts tagged Restaurant Design

Do you know that song. Liza does a great version of it.

I’d love to get you on a slow boat to china,
All to myself all alone.

It’s a beautiful song, but I think it has been ruined for me, because it makes me think of how our chairs and bar stools are on a slow boatfrom China, and won’t be here until a week after we open. That is correct. A week after we open.

What to do.

Do you delay opening…again and incur further costs? Do you hire chairs at more than the cost of purchasing them outright?

Or do you send out an SOS email to family and friends asking them if they have a chair or two they’d be happy to lend a little restaurant in Enmore.

The response was incredible, everybody has a chair or two they’d be willing to do without for a week it seems. And you’d be amazed at just what types of chairs they are…

Like this wicker toilet. Doesn’t every house have one of them. Unfortunately this little gem is also in Western Australia, which is almost as far as China, so not our first choice.

The chess set chairs. A Knight perhaps, or maybe a Castle. Possibly a little too grand for our dining room and not as comfortable as it looks.

Love a retro chair. Lime green no less. And these live in a little house just around the corner from us, so my friend can wander up with a chair under each arm.

Bentwood Thonet Chair. How many kids born in the late 70′s grew up eating their weetbix on chairs such as these. Whoever came up with that design would have their own private super yacht, no slow boat to china for them.

Slightly oversize for a dining room, and my friend would no doubt miss her favourite sunning spot, but in the current vogue colour apparently – lime green.

Another Australian classic. Seen in most grandparent’s houses usually close by a teacosy and a couple of choice lace doilies.

Might not look like much to you, but I remember this chair in the house of one of my dearest childhood friends. Retro classic these days I’m sure, but for me it’s full of beautiful memories of our young years in the country.

Slightly impractical for an urban homestead inner city restaurant though, so i’ll let her keep it, in all its ripped-cushioned glory.

Yes, I am aware it is slightly unorthodox to invite people to your soft opening and ask them to bring their own chair, but with so many factors to consider, believe it or not, this solution was actually the path of least resistance. So, if you’re joining us in those first few days and wonder why you’re sitting on a moth-eaten spongy, high-backed uncomfortable chair, now you know.

I’d best be off, it’s time I finished climbing the great Mount Washmore. Ash lands from NYC tomorrow morning, and the patch of floor space designated to her bed is currently covered in a delightful combination of our daughter’s toys and Gregory’s mismatched socks.

At least we didn’t ask her to bring her own mattress.

Reservations now being taken at hel...@hartsyard.com.au or 02 8068 1473.

The Management crew started today – THANK HEAVENS – and HY was a veritable hive of activity today.

There’s Cassie, our FOH manager, buried behind sundry bar items we dumped on the bar. It was such a relief to have her start work, and I was so excited I spent most of Sunday night compiling a ‘to-do’ list full of all the jobs I hadn’t made it to yet.

Boring things like OH&S, inventory of cleaning supplies, counting forks and calling people’s super funds. There’s a job that will kill you slowly.

That’s Andrew and Song hard at work scrubbing the kitchen. Although, I’m going to out Andy here and tell you that he only picked up the mop for the photo. Prior to that he was debating with me about aprons. He is worried they’re not going to match his sneakers.

Gregory was not, is not, nor ever will be a member of the United States Marine Core. I don’t think he’s quite their type. His buddy is though, and he gave him that shirt when we did our road trip across the country before moving to Australia.

A road trip that involved a lot of gin and duck fat, I think lard replaced the blood in my veins. Three months later, when we finally got to Gregory’s parents holiday house in Florida, Gregory was so inflated, his mother put him on an apple diet and he lost 14 kilos in 10 days. Horrendous.

At first I thought those pieces of string seemed utterly ridiculous, but Gregory used them to hold on the silicon while it dried. It’s the same principal as meat glue in a kitchen I suppose. Ulrik, who we bought the space from, used this block to serve his roasts on. Gregory evened it out and it’s going to serve as our pass in the gap between the kitchen and the dining room.

There’s still much to do, but tomorrow I’ll be sure to waste some time by asking a company why I can express ship 15 aprons here from the US for $100 less than it would cost me to pick them up from their store…in Erskineville.

One would think I have bigger fish to fry – and I do – but for some reason I can’t let this go. It doesn’t make any sense.

But I tell you what does make sense now…the emailing system.

That’s right, I finally worked out (oh alright, with a little help from our very patient friend who is building the website) how to get the emails up and running.

So feel free to pepper us with questions, comments or RESERVATIONS!!

Hartsyard will be open for business SATURDAY 26 MAY, 5.30 pm till late.

We’ll start off with dinners only, Wednesday – Sunday, from 5.30 onwards and will introduce weekend brunch in a couple of weeks.

Really looking forward to serving you folks, have a great week!

e: hel...@hartsyard.com.au

Standards are dropping pretty low on the home front around here. Mount Washmore continues to defy geological odds by actually increasing in height, as washing gets cleaned, dried but not folded, we are on a steady diet of warm weetbix and bacon, and this morning Gregory and I both awoke with hangovers on account of a date night last night (our first in 6 months. We used a gift voucher for a restaurant, but it still cost us $150 because Gregory orders like a chef. ie everything on the menu) then got dressed for the day only to discover we have run out of deodorant.

As my aunt pointed out, that’s why the french invented perfume, so I am now liberally doused in a perfume Gregory bought me when we actually had an income, and am glad the bureau of meteorology got it wrong – again – and it is not the 29 degrees that was predicted.

I hope all this lack of action around the home is inversely proportional to the action going on at the restaurant. The builder returned today, which is helpful as the building isn’t actually finished.

The greenhouse is still far from green, in fact it’s far from being a greenhouse at all really, as we had run out of flanges to attach the piping to the walls and Gregory, the plumber and the builder all swore there were none left in all of Sydney.

Of course, this store is 30 minutes from home, but only a stone’s throw from my parents place, from whence I have just returned, having dropped our daughter there, who is now sleeping so I can’t even make my mum go and get them for me.

It appears Mount Washmore is set to grow again, and I won’t get to any of the invoices that are staring me in the face. Sorry people, I’ll pay you Monday.

It also appears that we won’t have chairs for the opening, but we refuse to let that stop us, and are throwing the doors open to the public on Saturday 26 May 2012.

There.

I said it.

On the internet.

We can’t back out now.

We will be taking reservations, just not yet, as I haven’t worked out how to set up the email account, and while the phone line is installed, I haven’t yet bought phones.

Just like in the theatre, we’ll be doing several dress rehearsals beforehand, serving friends and family sympathetic to the cause, and who won’t mind kneeling on account of no chairs.

No, seriously, I do have a plan to best the great chair disaster of 2012, but will reveal it only when I’ve worked out all the logistical links. (I’m not sure I can carry 34 chairs from the local Masonic Lodge all by myself).

But for now, it’s off to the plumbing supply store, to buy the flanges to get to the restaurant, to give to the builder, to build the greenhouse, to grow the food, to serve in the restaurant that Gregory and Naomi built.

Remember that nursery rhyme? This is the house that Jack built. 

Let’s hope this one has a happy ending.

Caption: Flanges are the circular bits attached to the wall. Don’t be embarrassed if you didn’t know. I thought they were a dessert.

You are looking at 5 decanters sitting on the bench top in the house of one of my dearest friends. (Doesn’t it look like a shot from a Martha Stewart mag?)

The five decanters they got for their wedding.

Four more than they require, it seems, so they’re donating the rest to Hartsyard. Which is why I won’t disclose my friend’s name. I’d hate for her mother’s next door neighbour to discover they’d given her gift away.

I suppose that’s why people do shopping lists for their weddings, so disasters like this don’t occur.

I didn’t give them a decanter. I don’t think I gave them a gift at all if I recall correctly.

In my defence, I’d flown back from NYC just for the event, so my decanter fee had been incorporated into my flight costs. But I did give the guests a bit of a gift by rounding the corner as bridesmaid number two and flashing everyone when my dress blew open in the wind.

You can’t put a price on presents like that.

I met one of their guests the other day, in a small world situation that reminds you not to gossip and always to be nice to everyone.

It turns out that Josh, one of the Managers of IMPOS (the POS system we’re using) is this very friend’s cousin.

For the record, he doesn’t remember me flashing him at the wedding, which is nice and made things less awkward.

I did a bit of a shop around for POS systems as they’re vital and complicated and more expensive than a decanter, but I was quickly sold on IMPOS because of the efficiency of their system and particularly because of their customer service. (And this was before I realised I knew his cousin and could exploit the name-dropping advantage).

Josh and Mark are swift with a return call and email, thorough in their product knowledge and provide free coffee and muffins at the training. Which is key for a woman who is trying to open a restaurant, who is also a mother and who is averaging 5 hours a night sleep.

They devote a whole day to training, but kindly suggested i’d only need the morning.

Five and a bit hours later I was done and they felt so sorry for me, Rodrigo the lovely trainer, drove me home.

I’d mentioned previously in a blog that most all of the people involved in the making of HY, are friends, or friends of friends which has made the whole experience a lovely, organic, exploit everyone you know journey.

It also means Josh and IMPOS fit right in.

And yes, I did check. He and his wife gave them kitchen utensils, not a decanter.

That would have been more awkward than flashing 100 guests at a wedding.