We Need Your Vote!

Jill and I are trying to pick a color for the exterior of the building. (We were originally planning to sandblast the building to get down to the brick, but luckily Chris knocked out an exterior brick by accident and it turns out the building is made of white brick...which is incredibly ugly. So on to Plan B!) We have gotten several paint samples and tested them on the side of the building:



We don't like any of them. Don't worry, that's not what the vote is about. The vote is to settle a disagreement about what color the sample on the left is. Believe it or not, we are having a debate about this, and at times like these we must resort to democracy. Here's a close-up so you can see it by itself:


So go ahead and place your vote as a comment--just click on the word "comment" below. You can vote anonymously if you're not confident about your color vision. Just tell us what color you would say this is, and if you want you can choose another color that this might lean towards (for example, red with some orange in it, or green with a mustard undertone). Come on, don't be shy. Family, friends, bankers, jump right in!

Finishing Behind the Walls and Ceiling

There's a lot of stuff inside walls. Now that I've seen how many pipes and wires are in there, it seems like a miracle that I've never hit anything when I've hung stuff up in my house, since I basically drill/hammer at random. All of the things behind the walls had to be inspected before the walls could be closed, which began on Friday. You can now really see the individual rooms. For example, here are the bathrooms (currently storing some ducting):



The drywall guys are finishing this weekend so that we can have the all-important Screw Inspection on Monday. Unfortunately that inspection is not designed to tell us who has some screws loose, rather it serves the much less useful function of allowing the City of Denver to certify that we have enough screws in the walls. I would say that if the wall is staying up, it has enough screws, but what do I know. What, exactly, is the danger of having too few screws, anyway? I mean, obviously if your electrical system is incorrectly wired you could be in imminent danger, but if you don't have enough screws in the walls, what terrible fate could befall you? One day your wall is abruptly going to fall off and kill you?

Lots of stuff is going on above the ceiling as well. Jill christened Thursday as Ladder Day, because there were guys everywhere on ladders and stilts (!), hanging framing for the ceiling and putting up our lights. I'm sad that I didn't get a picture of the guys on stilts, but here's one view of Ladder Day:


Jill and I spent about six ineffectual hours trying to explain how we wanted the lights to be installed, which was made difficult by the twin facts that we have no idea what we're talking about, and the electrician is tuned to a different frequency altogether. So we talked at each other at lot, made several calls the harass the guy who sold the lights to us in an attempt to understand how far apart these lights are supposed to be placed (don't you feel like that should be on the package or something?), and then the electrician did something different from what we wanted, but I'm sure it will be fine.

After much worry over the condition of the brick in our interior wall and the cost to have it sanded and sealed, we have finally committed to having it done. The guys came to start grinding the brick, and I took a picture as they were getting started. Then I had to leave because this process generated so much dust that it there was a red cloud coming out the door, even though they had a vacuum hooked up to their grinders to suck off some of the dust. Amusingly, the guys hadn't shown up with dust masks or eye protection, so Aaron gave them dust masks and one of them had to wear my $4 goggles from Home Depot, which certainly make a fashion statement.



At the end of the day on Friday, Aaron and I were discussing whether to replace some of the windows at the front of the building, and we were wondering what was between these two windows (clearly something had been covered up here--you can see the difference on the outside of the building). In typical problem-solving fashion, Aaron grabbed a broomstick that was nearby and made a hole in the wall:


He peeled off several layers of stuff (plaster, drywall, foamcore) and found that there's another window behind there! So now we have three windows! This building is so weird. Why would you cover up a window on the front of your store?

The Food Show!

The Sysco food show was funny! It was in a huge hall with hundreds of booths with representatives of every kind of food company you can think of, all of whom had samples. We started in the cheese area and ate way too much cheese, so we had to ration our sampling for the rest of the time. We went to every booth, which took several hours, and at one point our Sysco rep Carlo caught up with us and said that he'd been observing our progress and we were doing a very good job. You can do a bad job at a food show? There were some really interesting displays, such as this extremely patriotic crown roast of lamb at one of the meat booths:



We asked the rep at the lamb booth to take this picture of us, and he seemed confused about whether we were joking or not. Especially when we pulled out two little flags to wave. Here we are in America! In front of a lot of meat!

Another exciting feature was the "Splenda Challenge" at the Splenda (sweetener) booth. There were two unlabeled containers of iced tea, one sweetened with sugar and one with Splenda, and you were supposed to guess which was which. Jill and I felt confident about our ability to identify the fake sugar, so we each tasted the two teas, and immediately agreed which one was the Splenda iced tea. We were right! The Splenda rep seemed mildly impressed (why not embarrassed?), but we didn't win any prizes or anything, which we had been hoping for.

One sad thing was that at least half the booths were serving seriously pre-made foods, like canned enchilada filling, macaroni and cheese that you squeeze out of a bag, fully decorated cakes, and worse. The samples at these places consisted of chafing dishes that held unidentifiable glop with skin on top. Like a cafeteria, except this is where cafeterias get that stuff. Even more depressing is the fact that a lot of restaurants get their complete menus frozen/canned/heat-in-the-bag. Next time you order a dessert at a restaurant, and it seems kind of dry and not really anything like it looked in the picture on the menu, you can be pretty sure they bought that cake completely decorated and just defrosted it to serve you, with maybe some Hershey's syrup squeezed on it. Or you can come by Generous Servings and have a pastry that's made from real ingredients, which sounds a lot more appetizing to me.

Pumpkins

There haven't been a lot of dramatic changes in the way the building looks over the past few days. The electrical and plumbing rough-ins are done, they were inspected today, and that means we can start to close up the walls. Having walls in there is going to be a bit of a shock, since we've gotten used to the space being open. Having a ceiling is going to require even more of an adjustment. We'd love to leave it open, but there's no insulation at all up there, so we have to put in insulation and a ceiling.

Jill and I are working on the outside of the building: we're picking paint colors to repaint it, having the gutters repaired (which became an emergency issue when the snow melted and we had a waterfall coming off the roof), and thinking about how to set up the patio. Meanwhile, we've temporarily decorated the building in true Brinig tradition: we had a pumpkin-carving party yesterday, and Jill's and my creations now adorn the front doorstep:



Tomorrow Jill and I are attending the annual Sysco food show (Sysco is a big food distributor), which we hope will include endless free samples. We went to Sysco a couple of weeks ago to meet with one of their staff chefs to brainstorm about breakfast foods we might want to serve in the café. We were really impressed with the chef--he had tons of good, practical ideas, and the food he demonstrated for us came out really tasty. Plus they gave us several big boxes of sample products to take home, which I've been living off of since then. We've been experimenting with one of the chef's ideas and we think it's a real winner--perhaps soon to be the Generous Servings breakfast specialty. Our recipe development is still in the confidential stage, but check back in a few weeks to see our menu unfold. Better yet, plan to stop by and sample for yourself--we'll be open in less than a month!

Our New Coffee Counter and a Eulogy for Summer Vegetables

Last week Jill and I walked through the site and made lots of final decisions about where things should be placed (electrical outlets, switches, etc.), and decided on the final design for the coffee bar. It was kind of stressful: the framers were standing there with their nail guns while Jill and I tried to imagine how deep and high to make the counters, where all the equipment was going to go, and what the flow of customers would be like. We tried to ease the tension by doing some square dancing to the country music the guys had on, but no one seemed really amused. So we made our best guess and let the guys go to it, and a few hours later, Jill could get a sense of the space that will be her home away from home:


(Jill always serves coffee with her eyes closed; it's one of her special talents.) Luckily, the counter as it was framed in seems big enough to us.

We just got our new phone lines installed, so feel free to call us at (303) 455-9730 (of course, you'll have to leave a message, but we'll call back!). Everyone advised me not to pay the phone company its outrageous price for running the phone lines inside the building to our jacks, so I didn't, but then it was unclear who was going to do that work. It turns out, that person is me. I climbed around in the rafters nailing the lines up, which took me about eight times as long as it would have taken anyone who knew what he was doing, but it was quite satisfying (it also makes it easy to know who to blame if the phone doesn't work). Luckily there are about twelve ladders in the building, so getting up to the ceiling wasn't a problem, and although I almost dropped a hammer on my head (hard to imagine, but possible), I emerged unscathed from the mission.

Today it snowed here--a lot. After I bundled up in eight layers of outerwear, I rushed outside to see if I could save any of my garden. I picked all the remaining tomatoes off my plants, harvested my chard, cut my basil plants at the ground, and bid a tearful goodbye to my tarragon. I felt like those Italian winemakers who set fires in their vineyards to try to keep the frost from getting to their grapes. I am going to make pesto tonight and pretend that it's still summer for one more day. I don't know what to do with my tiny green cherry tomatoes. For now they are decorating my table:


Aww, how festive. Too bad the green tomatoes remind me of the slaughter of the innocents. As I was digging tomatoes out of the snow today, I was thinking that I need to come to terms with the fact that I do not like the weather here as much as I liked northern California, but no one can afford to live in the Bay Area unless they invented Google, so I just have to get used to it. Then I went to meet a woman who was selling some cooking equipment, and it turns out she and her husband both went to Stanford twenty years ago. We were making desultory chit-chat about Stanford, and the husband said, "The one thing I really miss about Stanford is the weather--it doesn't get better than that." So apparently two decades of Colorado living haven't erased the memories. I'm sure there will be something to like about this winter...drinking hot cocoa, for one. That will make at least one or two hours of cold weather seem cozy. And how about gingerbread houses? Can't do that in the summer. Of course, you can make gingerbread houses in California, as I did last year (check out my Cathedral of Siena).

No really, there are lots of great things to cook in the fall and winter. Sign up for a class, or contact us about a holiday event for your family, friends, or company. Tonight I'm eating pesto, but then it's on to soups, root vegetables, and holiday foods.

Whoa!

This morning I met a painter at the building and was talking to him as I walked inside. I stopped in mid-sentence when I saw what the place looks like--it's completely different from yesterday. Here's an example: the first picture is what the "bathrooms" looked like yesterday, and the second picture is from today.





Whoa, those framing guys are fast. Here's what the window between the café and kitchen is going to look like:



How cool is that? Given how quickly things are getting nailed into place, Aaron told us that we had five minutes to decide on the final location and layout of the café counter and the bar where we're going to have seating for people using laptops. Yes, this is the kind of thing one would usually decide before drawing plans, but we didn't have time then, because we were contending for the record of fastest permitting process known to the city of Denver (which we accomplished). Luckily Aaron got some calls on his Blackberry (see above), so Jill and I had little longer to design the counters. I'm not sure exactly what we told Aaron to do, but it's going to be fantastic.

The other really exciting news is that I baked some chocolate chip cookies, and they're good. You might not think that's a big deal unless you knew that it was my sixteenth attempt to make decent cookies since moving to Denver, and the previous fifteen batches have been total flops because of the altitude. This has been greatly affecting my self-esteem: my secret chocolate chip cookie recipe (well, not so secret, since I've taught it to about a hundred people) has been a source of pride since I got it almost ten years ago, but since moving here, all I'd been able to make were thin, tough, bumpy-looking things that spread weirdly and had uneven coloration. I've been growing increasingly desperate as I've changed one variable at a time to try to adjust the recipe, because each successive failure cast more doubt on both my cooking and science skills. The process was disturbingly similar to my Ph.D. research, although significantly shorter and less expensive. Sixteen variations on chocolate chip cookie recipes later, I have produced cookies that I would say are very good. I should have taken pictures of the failures so that you could appreciate the improvement, but it was too depressing at the time. Jill and I have also conducted extensive hot cocoa, chai, and biscotti testing. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.

Set in Stone

A very exciting thing happened on Friday: we got a floor! Jill and I dropped by to see the concrete guys in action, skating around on the wet concrete to smooth it out. One of the most dramatic things about the way the building looked was that all the shoring, ladders, and other construction clutter had been removed, so we have one giant room (plus our tenant's space).


Seeing the new concrete made us have an attack of nerves: it's so permanent. The pipes that you can see sticking up in the picture above are the drains for our sinks, so the decisions we made about where to put those are now set in stone. No more drawing arrows on the blueprints to show how we want things moved around. I hope we didn't mess up.

Jill and I have spent lots of time thinking about how to finish the concrete. Everywhere we've been for the past three weeks, we've noticed the floors. I have to admit, concrete floors are not my dream, so I've had a hard time coming to terms with how the finished product is going to look. We've decided to stain the concrete, but we haven't picked the color yet. As we were standing around looking at the new concrete on Friday, we made the snap decision to etch lines in the coffee shop area to make "tiles". I went back on Saturday night to see how they came out. Here's a picture of the partially-cured concrete:



By Monday the floor will be cured enough for the guys to get back to work. They will put in the new wall that divides the cafe from the kitchen, and suddenly the space will start to look like we've been imagining it for months.

We're thinking about our grand opening (now vaguely scheduled for the third week in November). The date that the construction is going to be done is unfortunately close to Thanksgiving, which has thrown our plans off. I know that in a year it's not going to matter whether we opened on the day before Thanksgiving or the week after it, but it seems like a big deal right now. Then again, everything seems like a big deal right now: what style aprons to buy, how big to make the font on our menu board, whether to sell bags of coffee beans, what wattage lights to install, where to buy our furniture, how many inches we need to leave between the stools at our bar, whether there are enough people who buy coffee between 6:00 am and 7:00 am to justify opening that early, what speed internet connection we need, whether solar-powered holiday lights really work, how to enter gift certificate sales into our accounting program, what to do about the fact that our walk-in cooler is being delivered two weeks before we have the concrete pad poured to place it on. Starting a business is insane--the breadth of decisions that have to be made is impossible to get your brain around. How can anyone know about all these things? I can't wait for the day when I only have to make choices about maintaining the business.

I'd Rather Be Hammerdrilling

Oh dear. Today was not good. I got yelled at by four people at the bank--assembled in a conference room just for this call--for being a troublemaker, when at the heart of it all I was just trying to tell them the great news that I saved $9000 on the water tap work. I wanted to pay the guy right away for getting the job done quickly and cheaply, and the bank does not like to pay people right away (or ever, if possible). I pushed too far, and they now apparently suspect me of taking the loan money and using it to finance my prescription drug habit or my concubine in the Bahamas or something. Do I look like an Enron executive? It didn't help that I was fiercely defensive about our contractors, whom the bank people suggested might be incompetent, dishonest, or probably both. Now the bank thinks we're all in cahoots.

All of this is laughable because we're making great progress on the building. The bank sends out an inspector every two weeks to verify that the work is being done, and even he was impressed with how much things have progressed. The majority of his report consists of pictures he takes. For example, to prove that we have paid laborers to do various jobs, he took a picture of a guy digging a hole. To show that we have a Port-a-Potty, he took a picture of that (Chris volunteered to model its usage, if that would help the bank see why we needed to spend money on it). He also photographed piles of lumber and steel that were lying around, and to top it off he took a picture of an invoice for a piece of equipment. He does not appear amused by any of this. We pay this construction monitoring company several hundred dollars per report for their expertise.

We did some more hammerdrilling--I spent several hours out there with the guys today, which was fun. Jill prefers an over-the-head hammerdrilling method, which is not sanctioned by the National Hammerdrilling Association, whereas I have perfected a "make fault lines and let gravity help" approach. Follow those hints to figure out which of us is which in the pictures below--it's a bit hard to tell when we're tricked out in our safety gear (another hint would be Jill's personalized shirt).



Today our band of workers included Bob, the carpenter, who was fixing the holes in the roof (actually, his assistant was fixing them, and Bob was standing on the ground critiquing...I'm sure this reflects some essential apprenticeship process). I forgot my camera, so I don't have a picture of Bob yet, but believe me, it will be worth the wait when you see him. Bob went down the street to get us pizza for lunch, and he got me the biggest soda I've ever drunk, which was good, because I was really thirsty after inhaling all the plaster dust. It was the first real Coke I've had in a while, and it tasted...kind of gross. Not that diet Coke tastes any better.

I would have finished removing all the plaster if it weren't for the three hours I spent on the phone with the bank. Now one of the laborers is going to have to finish the job tomorrow (we better take a picture of him), which makes me sad, because it was my own personal project. But it has to get done before they pour the concrete floor tomorrow afternoon! That's going to make a huge difference in how the place looks, and starting next week, we will be in sprint to the finish line. It's still more than a month away, but the place is going to start looking better each day, and it's time for Jill and me to enter desperation mode. Too bad I am so worn out from my battles with the bank that the only thing I could manage after I got home this evening was to test out a chocolate chip cookie recipe and eat about ten cookies' worth of dough.

We've Been Discovered!

In the past week, an interesting phenomenon has occurred: Generous Servings has been discovered by miscellaneous salespeople who want to offer us coffee, cups, food, Yellow Pages ads, phone service, memberships in associations we've never heard of, and more. In fact, we're being stalked. Every time we stand outside the building, someone who just happened to be in the neighborhood pulls up and jumps out to meet us. It's kind of weird. But I remember that when I was in cooking school, I asked one of the chefs how to find food distributors, and he said, "Don't worry, they find you." I didn't believe him, and I've been proactive and made my own contacts, but now I can see that if I'd waited a few more weeks, I could have saved myself some phone calls.

Our construction has progressed more this week. Rick managed to get the 1000-pound steel beam into the building by himself on Sunday afternoon. Here's Chris looking at it, thinking, "How the heck is Rick going to get this thing up to the ceiling?"



Somehow Rick did it, and now our ceiling is held up by wood and steel, so the center wall can come out. Here's the view from the door (apparently there is a large number of loose bricks in the parapet, which Chris and Aaron are going to do something about--I don't think there's a clear plan yet--so the area is fenced off to keep Jill and me out of it):


The steel beam is the thing running right over the ladder. The guys will now start to remove all the shoring, and by next week they'll be pouring the new concrete floor, and the place will finally start to look like it's part of the developed world again.

Also, in an ironic twist, my frustrating trip to the Denver Water Board of Commissioners has returned dividends: about $27,000, in fact. It's a long story, but as a result of talking with one of the guys at that meeting, I found out that we don't need as big a water tap as we thought, which saves us $18,000 in fees, and then a different guy at Denver Water referred me to a plumbing subcontractor who can do the work to replace the tap (hire flagmen to reroute traffic, dig down to the water main in the middle of the street, replace the pipes, fill in the concrete and asphalt, etc.) for about $9000 less than the company we were going to use for the job. It's taken several weeks to figure this out, and we had to call a lot of inspectors to make sure we wouldn't get in trouble farther down the line, but now we've gotten the necessary approvals. It's unbelievable that a few phone calls can make a $27,000 difference. I am totally in favor of rewarding persistence (it is one of my strongest qualities, much to the chagrin of people whose evil tactics involve wearing you down), but this is bordering on being completely arbitrary.

Yesterday afternoon and this morning have been spent fighting with the bank to get them to release funds from our SBA loan. I know we should be endlessly grateful to them for entrusting us with so much money, but their oversight is so heavy-handed as to be insulting. In fact, although they've promised to entrust us with the money, every time we want some of it, we have to prove to about fifteen people that we need it for a REALLY good reason. This is a slow way to get anything done, and a waste of my mental energy, which you would think the bank would want me to put towards finding ways to make sure they get paid every month.