So here I am in Philly. My phone is stolen in the coffee shop across the street from my new apartment. My first day of work, D the owner decides to close the restaurant due to ferocious snow.

My new neighborhood has everything I need. A food playground-y restaurant opens next to my apartment. They have a wine shop, a charcuterie/cheese store, a bakery, and a coffee shop inside. There are bars, most of them gay bars, good pizza, good espresso, the cheapest gym ever, a store to by girlie things, and a big bookstore.

The restaurant is closed Sunday and Monday, which means I have a weekend. A weekend is a luxury in the restaurant biz. In California, I had Tuesday off only, or Monday and Thursday, but never two consecutive days.

"I won't be there," D tells me, about my actual first day. The snow has petered into a cold rain, and is melting into grey puddles all over Philly. The other D, who is the wife of the chef, has been running the front of the house. Wife D will teach me the ropes.

Hello Restaurant, Nice to Meet You

The restaurant is across a gigantic (by city standards) garden from the hotel. G, his wife D, and their partner M own the whole shebang. In the spring, the restaurant seats in the cobblestone garden. The magnolia trees are blooming wildly. It's stunning.

On my first day, the garden was blanketed in snow and inside, the restaurant was slow. The waitress showed me what she did. In lieu of a computer system, she took copies of her handwritten tickets to K the bartender up front, one to P the chef in the back, and saved one for the guest. If it was a big table, it might take long enough to add manually a check for drinks, apps, dinner, dessert, food tax, booze tax, etc to leave a customer feeling neglected and miffed.

Wife of Chef D showed me how to close. After service, she tallied up how many empanadas had been ordered, how many steaks with shrimp, how many beet salads with arugula, which for some reason we called rocket on the menu. She counted the cash in the drawer, divided up the tips, batched the credit cards, and went home.

Warning Signs

I loved the space, it was almost magical. I loved D's excitement and the warm, family-ish vibe. But I was worried because:

1.There were occasional pot-like odors wafting from the basement.

2.The kitchen staff seemed to spend most of their shift texting.

3.The bartender was either sulking, complaining, or angry.

4.The restaurant was messy. Cleaning out the server station, I found the owner's son's notes from school, a tall stack of business cards for an astrologer, an ancient sandwich, and much, much more.

5.When it got busy, everyone ran around like a chicken with their head cut off. There was no structure.

6.We were not making any money.

This was a huge, scary project and an amazing opportunity. I had to look at it like the latter. Nothing couldn't be changed.

Solutions

I tried to quiet the voices in my head that were saying: this is impossible! This an enormous mess! You're 22! Who do you think you are?

I took the advice from the amazing chef who had become my boyfriend. In the beginning, he told me, just watch and learn everything you can. Take a million notes, and mental notes, and observe, and stand back.

I was an anthropology major and this sounded like a reasonable—and achievable—first step. So I filled my notebook with a million scribbles. They said "pre-shift meeting!" and "staff uniform!!" and "computer system??!!" and "what about the BOH?????" I asked a lot of question of Owner D and Wife of Chef D and Chef P and the wait staff.

New Job + New Love

I hate the phone, but my amazing boyfriend M and I sometimes talked three hours a day. His second visit to Philadelphia from New York, he stayed.

I showed him the restaurant, the hotel, the garden. We peeked into the basement, which was both a treasure chest and dumpster full of equipment, chairs, glasses, menus, fryers, and more from previous incarnations of the restaurant.

When M met Owner D, he told her, "you are only using ten percent of the potential of this place."

One Step at a Time

I sometimes wanted to pull my hair out, but M coached me through the terrible moments. We had a staff meeting. D agreed to purchase a POS system, and we drove to Delaware together to sign the contact and learn how to use it. The staff started to wear a uniform. The grumpy bartender left. Things were looking up.

Next Week: An evil bartender and a new job for my boyfriend.