Tuesday is both the start of the restaurant week, and my bookwork day. We don't do lunches on Tuesday - its a day to get organised for the week to come, which involves for me, clearing and responding to the answerphone; removing all the opened wine from the preceding week - the red comes over to the house to go into my beautiful french oak barrell that I've written a previous blog about, and which gets converted to red wine wine vinegar.
The white that doesn't get used by the kitchen is poured down the sink - sacriligeous I know, but preferable to serving a customer oxidised wine.
I then plant myself at my desk and work thru all that needs to be down to get uptodate - wages, wine stocks and reordering, pay bills, deal with enquiries and quotes, and try and clear my inbox. It never stays cleared for long, but at least it gives me a temporary feeling of satisfaction.
Whereas my husband avoids the desk or sitting still like the plague, and instead 'does' stuff. Today he got stuck on the roof after cleaning out the gutters, when he realise he wasn't going to be able to reach the ladder - so he had to call for help...
He assures me there is a great view up there!
I need occasional forays over to the restaurant for restorative cups of espresso - and Rick and I had one this morning sitting out the back in the sun, trying to decide how the courtyard will look once the building alterations get underway, hopefully next year. Becos we'll be excavating down underground for the cellar - I can't quite picture at this stage how it will look from our existing courtyard, but I'm sure all will be revealed in due course.
We went up to Auckland yesterday - ostensibly to pick Courteney up from the airport. She was flying in from Australia, having spent the last 2 weeks over there racing, and becos she wasn't due until 6pm, we made the most of the day by visiting a few suppliers and having a lovely lunch at The Grove Restaurant. Beautiful food, in that stylised presentation that makes a plate look more like arranged jewels than morsels of food. Fussier and 'cleverer' food than what we do, and nice to experience and analyse. We always find it interesting. And was almost reassured by the table of advertising types seated next to us, who were indulging in a liquid and protracted lunch, and very much putting the lie to the current hyperbole in the press about business in general being in hunker down mode. Someone had obviously forgotten to point that out to these guys!
We called into Schott Commercial to find some new coffee cups for the restaurant. I love good china and glassware, and I also like ringing in the changes with how we present food. Certain trends sweep thru the food world, and I try to stay away from those that are too generally embraced becos it all ends up with much of a muchness. Watch out for glass plates - they're the up and coming trend at the moment.. I was there to find coffee cups and something to serve our licorice icecream in, and ended up being sidetracked by a dinnerset that we both really liked, and thought would make a change for the restaurant. Being me, its good china ( ie. not cheap!), so rather than blissfully waving my arms around and ordering it, I decided to be a little more sedate, and come back home and calculate quantities, and get a quote before we make the final call. It has to be brought in specially from overseas, so is not a decision to be made lightly, but the subsequent discussion over lunch would indicate that its a step we'd both like to take. Part of the alterations we're doing next year will include the installation of a kitchen table, and I've been quietly acquiring some truly exquisite plates and service gear for that table, in full recognitiion of the fact that we want it to be very special, but they're in too small quantities ( partly becos of the price) to be used in the restaurant for general service.
Found some coffee cups which will mean I'll be able to retire the clunky ones we currently have, to catering stock. I bought them in a fit of pique a few years back, after getting a stream of complaints about my then existing cups being too small. An interesting aspect of human nature is that people tend to equate value to quantity, which in the instance of coffee especially is quite wrong. If you espress coffee to make a bigger quantity you will make a bitter inferior tasting cup. Or if you add extra milk to pump up the volume, you will dilute the coffee flavour - both of which seem to me to be contrary to the notion of a good cup of coffee. I'd far rather have a lesser amount of appropriately espressed liquid. But alot of people don't agree with me. On a similar vein was the fascinating fact that my then cups were tall, with a small diametre, so people felt they were too small. When I finally gave in, and bought some conventional flat white cups thru our coffee supplier ( the kind of thick lipped ones that are everywhere) the complaints disappeared. These cups were short and squat and had a much wide circumference and people obviously felt they were getting better 'value'. Visually the new cups looked bigger, but in actual fact they were only about 15-20mls bigger ( I checked, out of curiosity!), proving how deceiving measuring something by eye can be.
However the thick, clunky china has been depressing me, and when I laid it out for a catering job on Sunday, I decided that it was definitely time to be proactive, and get something for the restaurant that was a finer china but which would still look like a reasonable size cup. I think I found that yesterday, and it will be interesting to see how they are recieved once they arrive. Ironically I suspect most people won't even notice, becos the difference is in the quality of the china rather than the shape. Ah well! At least I'll be happy!
We've also found some steel cups to serve the licorice icecream in. For years we've been using some lovely red china goblets - but, as sometimes happens when I go to reorder something, they were no longer being brought into the country, so I've been on the prowl for some time for something that would be appropriate. I remember eating at Longchamps - the fining dining restaurant at the long gone Regent in Auckland, and being served icecream in exquisite silver containers with lids. That is what I'd have like - but I'm settling instead for stainless. We're hoping to be able to keep the bowls in the fridge so they're cold when the icecream is plated in them - making them better from a service point of view. They're a little different - so I'm a little ambivalent at this stage as to how they will work, but we'll see once they arrive..
Resotech was next on the list. A fantastic company for patissiere requirements - whether the fact its owned by a frenchman has any significance with that fact I'm not sure, but its where we get a number of our baking needs. They also have a range of great equipment - I know it sounds odd, but I was drooling ( figuratively, not literally, you understand!), over some truly beautiful saucepans. There's something about the shape of some saucepans that are just especially voluptuous and sexy, and just make you want to use them. The added advantage of these particular ones was that they also work for induction tops, something we've been pondering getting becos of the control it gives us over certain pastry preparations. Discussing them with the owner opened up the possibility of maybe using them in the stand alone benches that we're looking at for the new cookschool kitchen, where they would give us the mobility that we need. And becos our conventional steel pans won't work on them, I'd have to buy a whole lot of new saucepans.... Damn!
Also came back with 2 new sets of scales - very precise scales which we need. I like buying really good equipment, and I like the fact it makes what we do so much easier. Now I'll be able to measure out exactly 183gm of icing sugar, rather than taking a stab in the general direction. The more baking I do, the more I've come to appreciate that approximations don't work. You need to be exact.
Then Country Road to check out their plates, and we got some frosted bowls for the sorbets ( sounds crass, but aren't!), and some red bowls for the Union Square style chips that we're now serving on the lunch menu. I pay retail price there, but its worth it sometimes, just when you're looking for something that will give a flash of something a bit different. The candle holders that I use on the tables for the tealights, are actually from Country Road, and are tumbler glasses not candleholders. But I liked them becos the glass is opaque, and I find the flicking light of a candle at a table hurts my eyes, if its not filtered in any way, which is why I like these. The opaqueness of the glass creates an attractive glow, rather than a bright light.
And from there to the airport to pick up our daughter, who emerged looking fit and gorgeous! Nice to have her home.
And now that I've finished for today, I have enough time left in the afternoon to indulge in another Tuesday ritual - a quick flick thru the pile of magazines that Courteney picked up for me in town today. As much as I use the internet for research, in increasing amounts, I haven't noticed a corresponding decline in the sense of pleasure I get from nestling down to peruse a pile of crisp new mags!!
