Real Adventures In Cooking: Off the Grid and Into the Frying Pan

08/17/2013

Power outage at your favorite brunch spot.  

Pretend you're the customer.
What would you like the owner to do about it? What CAN he do about it? Put up a CLOSED sign on the door and let everyone go back to bed? Would you blame him if he did?

Well, that's not going to happen if we're talking about Dave Bailey and Rooster. You're not going home hungry just because Ameren UE decided to pull off an unannounced seven-hour repair that darkened the whole block.
Call it a lesson in dedication to hospitality.  Call it ballsy. Call it theatre of the absurd.
This is the story of what happened a couple weeks ago in Downtown St. Louis.

It was two hours before go-time at one of the busiest brunch restaurants in the city when the lights went out. 

Ameren techs made vague promises of a reconnect sometime within a 4 to 8 hour window. Dave Bailey and Exec. Chef Peter Clark, standing in the only available light by the windows at Rooster, strategized ways to receive and feed the impending 600-700 people who usually dine on a busy Saturday.

Scrap the menu, scrap the format.

Breakfast Buffet, ten dollars a head.

They called the staff together and deployed them in teams.  Some set to work in the dim inner rooms of the building prepping ad-hoc stations for service, some moved out to the sister restaurants whose kitchens were standing mostly idle at that early hour.

One team brewed coffee into 20 airpots over at Bridge, one team of line cooks started knocking out  French Toast by the hundred on Range's spacious flat-top. By about 9 a.m, carts laden with hot food came wheeling back in the doors at Rooster and the impromptu breakfast buffet took shape.

Chef Peter staged and stocked it attentively while Dave Bailey schooled the staff on how to run service in Power Off Mode.  Dave himself with his cell-phone and a Square credit card reader would (and did!) personally ring in every credit transaction over the course of the day.  Waiters would wave and point him toward tables ready to settle up, and he would dodge like a pinball around the dining room collecting money. Dishes would be washed and sanitized by hand and stacked on the useless electric dish machine to air dry, bar service would just have to happen without fridges. Then they opened the doors.

By 11 a.m. the game grew hectic as tables turned at a record pace for a place that usually allows for leisurely dining.  Some customers I gather left at once when they found out that Rooster's full menu wasn't available, but most plunged into the new situation and filled their bellies on local bacon and sustainably raised pork sausage, French toast and biscuits and gravy.

A block away, the Commissary kitchen at Range re-prioritized every project serving the needs of Dave's 5 restaurants and set teams of cooks laying out and roasting off bacon 20 sheet pans at a time to keep up with the appetites at Rooster. The house-made (from the whole hog!) pork sausage which had been stocked to last Rooster thru Monday was gone by 10 a.m. Cooks were grinding and mixing, pattying and cooking off that sausage all day long.

Meanwhile, I split off from the fray and pulled together a catering affair for 170 college students and got it out the door in time for an 11 a.m. set up off-site. That required scrapping the staffing plan entirely and making use of a few Rooster and Range staff who didn't have their hands full otherwise, plus my Range chef squeezing in 200 burger patties in whatever space he could clear off between rounds of French Toast.

The Bakery, on the same grid as Rooster, spent the first hours of the day saving all 400 gallons of ice cream plus innumerable frozen ingredients from their rapidly warming freezer, moving van-loads to the freezers in other Bailey's basements.  When the lights finally came on past noon, they switched into War Emergency Power to catch up on the bread and biscuits Rooster had devoured, cutting and shaping orderly forms by hand from 100-pound masses of dough. One of my bakers was working three stations at a time, hammering out more ice cream, pressing tortillas, and shuttling racks of buns into ovens in a tight choreography that any line cook would admire.

Savory Chef Christian Ethridge and Head Baker Justin Haltmar kept the whole thing on the rails with me as we powered through into the relative calm of 3 p.m. when the calls for "MORE" finally quit coming from Rooster. By 5 p.m. the Commissary's deliveries had completed stocking up the other restaurants for weekend service, the college students had been fed, and the chaos had been reigned in at last.  We stood looking at each other, a bit dazed. "What did we just do?"

One of my cooks shook his head and said to me: "There WERE 200 pounds of bacon ready to cook today.  It's all gone."

Yes, the buffet business is a different animal than the a la carte one.

If you dined at any of the Bailey's Restaurants that day, I hope you went home happy.  It takes a small army to keep the home fires burning for you. Those like me who call the shots in the company work constantly to KEEP the job from ever becoming as hard at is was on 8/17/2013. But of course, we kind of love those crises, too.  Whatever the situation, it's an honor to serve you. Dave and his crew never quit.