Damage Assessment, Damage Control, Whiskey

Why restaurant owners never really have a day off

From around mid 2014 through Fall 2023 my life revolved around restaurants. After my Peace Corps service in Moldova I opened a restaurant with my friends Matt and Vlad. It was called Smokehouse and was Chisinau’s first American BBQ joint and first local craft beer pub. At some point in their lives lots of people fantasize about opening a restaurant or bar. There’s something universally romantic about having your own place and pouring perfect pints of beer while chatting with satisfied customers.

Pouring beer really is a good time actually

Most of you can guess where this story is going - restaurants are really hard businesses, most of them fail, profit margins are slim, etc etc. All that is true, and maybe some day I’ll look at those topics. But today I’ll focus on something else - the hospitality business is weird. Like really really weird.

It’s the kind of business where you have a relatively large staff and you interact with lots of members of the public daily - often when they are inebriated. There’s TONS of room in that equation for funny stories and odd encounters. One time a man brought a full grocery bag of bread up to the bar and proceeded to slowly tear apart each loaf in front of me while talking up their particular qualities. The whole time he was wearing a bicycle helmet. It took me a little while to realize that this was some kind of complaints process / protest against the white bread burger buns we used for our pulled pork sandwiches. This guy eventually tired of the bread game, grabbed a beer and joined a random table of his new best friends. He stayed with them for 4 hours - and never took off the helmet¹.

I’ve got dozens of stories like that and probably so does every restaurant owner and bar tender. There are other stories though, weirder ones that catch you so off guard you really just have to sit and reflect on what just happened.

This was the case one night in late 2015 when I got a call from our bar manager Mircea that wen’t something like this:

Mircea: David! tell me how to shut off all the water to the bathrooms?!

David: Hey, slow down. If a toilet is flooding there’s a water valve…

Mircea: DAVID!!! TELL ME HOW TO SHUT OFF ALL THE WATER TO THE BATHROOMS!!

David: Ok, ok. Stand in the bathroom door. Look down at your left foot, there is a hole in the wall. Reach in and turn the red lever.

Mircea: Thanks… [takes deep breath]

David: What happened?

Mircea: I don’t know. I think you better come in.

In the Restaurant Business Your Time Is Never Your Own

Running a restaurant there are dozens of decisions that need to be made every day. Whether they are big or small people usually look to the boss to figure things out. Owners and managers who try and leave too many of these decisions up to the “common sense” of part time college students usually find themselves unemployed pretty quickly.

Over time you build up systems to manage these issues. You have shift leads and managers, checklists and company handbooks. All this helps you manage the chaos - but every so often there is a situation that goes supernova and whoever is on scene for it calls the boss. Back on that night in 2016 that’s what happened.

We had opened the restaurant the year before in July 2015. By that time we had already spent another year getting permits (long story) and remodeling the place.

The 4th business partner was arguably my Lada which I named Nadezhda. She did much of the heavy lifting in the remodel.

So after 6 months of intensive remodel work it felt good to open… for like a second. Whatever the pace of life was building a restaurant it was 5 times as fast running one. For the first 6 months we 3 business partners made sure that one of us was always there during operating hours. That meant someone got there around 5:30 am as the meat was delivered and put into the smoker, and someone was there until midnight or later after last call. After 5 months we were exhausted and reasonably confident in the systems that we had put in place. So we decided it was time to devolve a bit of responsibility and we named Mircea bar manager. The idea was that he would take a turn in our rotation of management until we started adding more staff to the list of people entrusted with keys and codes.

This all started off poorly, through no fault of Mircea’s. On his first day opening the restaurant he arrived to find the front security gate broken open, the office window smashed in and the front door damaged - but unopened. He called us immediately and within a few hours the police had statements and I had pulled security footage for them. Without the cameras this situation would have forever remained a mystery but with them we saw a strange one-man-show play out in grainy footage.

Around 20 minutes before Mircea arrived for work a very muscular, very very drunk man decided to try and wriggle his way through the iron bars - without much success.

This went on for quite some time and at no point had even the slightest hope of succeeding.

Long story short he finally gave up trying to fit through and kicked the gate in frustration. He was surprised (as were we watching) that the gate simply popped open. He then proceeded to hurl a trash can through a window and generally make a mess before running off. The police took one look, said “we just saw that guy 3 blocks away!” and they sped off. Shortly thereafter they returned with an amount of money they thought would be sufficient to repair the window and told us that the man had been *sternly* warned. They said that if we would take the cash they could avoid a lot of paperwork and that would be that. It was.

The point of all of this is that you never really know what’s gonna pop up. A few months later I was more than a little apprehensive when I accepted a friend’s invitation to a game night. I hadn’t been out in anything approaching a normal social event for around a year at this point. A few expat friends were gathering to play Cards Against Humanity and drink beer - and this sounded great. But I was worried since we really didn’t have a lot of experience without owners on the property. It was around half way through the first beer that I got the call.

Damage Assessment, Damage Control, Whiskey

When I got to the restaurant I found a scene that was both nightmarish and normal. On one hand the dinning room was full and customers were basically enjoying their food and drinks as usual. On the other, something clearly terrible had occurred in the bathroom and my staff seemed to be managing a multi-stage triage disaster situation.

So at Smokehouse the bathrooms were through a door right off the main dining room more or less midway through the space. Through the main door there was a small entry room that had doors to access 2 bathrooms. All of this was above the main dining room up 2 steps. I immediately saw that the bathrooms had flooded enough to spill down the stairs into the dining room before Mircea had found the cutoff valve.

While Mircea was trying to control the water with a mop and buckets the table nearest to the bathroom was a makeshift aid station with a waiter having a mild head wound treated and another waitress sitting in shock. She was off duty that night but she, and her white dress, were soaked through head to toe as if she had been sitting in the restaurant one moment and then been chucked into a lake the next.

Damage assessment and control. The first order of business was obviously safety - thankfully no one was hurt even if people were shook up. The second order of business was lavatories - 60+ customers drinking pints of craft beer were not going to make it for very long without functioning bathrooms. Our bathrooms were clearly not gonna work so me and the team organized a quick workaround. Thankfully our landlord owned an adjoining property that was vacant. We had the keys because our fire escape went through this abandoned hair salon so we got that property’s bathroom cleaned up and posted some makeshift signs directing customers how to get there. Next order of business - whiskey.

This was not my first late night call and certainly would not be my last. Over time I developed a ritual. After dealing with the immediate flood / fire / SWAT team situation I would pour myself a glass of whiskey on the rocks and do a deeper assessment of what went wrong. That night I poured myself a liberal glass of Jamesons and settled in to hear the story. To this day I have never been able to make sense of it.

The Mystery of the Exploding Pipe

So here’s how the story goes. The off-duty waitress, Tanya², I mentioned above was having dinner and drinks with her friends when she needed to use the restroom. She and her whole table were pretty deep into their cups by this point. Tanya went into the bathroom, had a seat, and then felt a firehose blast of freezing water hit her in the back. She screamed and tried to extricate herself from this suddenly hellish situation. Our security cameras pick up the unfolding disaster here, as she exits the bathroom back into the dining room drenched head to toe and screaming.

Two waiters quickly respond to her screams and come to help. Once consoles her while the other runs into the bathroom to try and manage the problem. He goes in too fast, slips and falls knocking his head into the toilet bowl. Waiter #2 goes in after him and fishes him out of the rapidly forming lake situation. This is when Mircea emerges from the office, pulls out his phone and calls me. Luckily, the bathrooms did have a master cutoff and since I did much of the remodel of the place myself I knew where it was. After he “convinced” me that this was no time for my questions and that he needed this information NOW, I told him how to find it and he turned off the water just as a waterfall was starting to cascade into the dining area.

Those were the facts. So what broke? When I looked in the bathroom I found that a brass T-pipe junction had been violently damaged. By my reconning I *might* have been able to break the pipe like this if I had a steel mallet and really went at it. The location and angle really didn’t allow for any other kind of attack. Perhaps someone could have climbed on the toilet and kicked it a bunch of times but I really doubt it. The positioning of this pipe was just behind the toilet so when it broke(?) it sprayed poor Tanya with the full force of an open ended pipe.

I ruled Tanya out pretty quick. She was tiny and drunk and very very upset by this situation. She also wasn’t hiding any heavy tools on her person. So I went through our video footage to see if someone else might have damaged the pipe only to have it give way later - nope. No one had used that bathroom for at least 30 minutes before this mess. Before that I was able to rule out anyone else who used it in the past 2 hours. The pipe simply failed - somehow.

I wish I took a picture of it but that wasn’t where my head was at. The damage was such that I knew I couldn’t fix it and would need a plumber in the morning. In the meantime, I knew I couldn’t go back to my game night because drunk customers were staggering through a storage area to use the bathroom in an abandoned hair salon - that seemed like something I should keep an eye on.

So I settled in, sipped my whiskey and waited for closing time.

It wasn’t the last late night call, or even the most dramatic - that involved either the SWAT team and Mr. Bread from above, or when an air conditioner caught fire - but it still probably is the most perplexing.

Those stories are for another time, for now, enjoy this perfect pint of beer and go back to daydreaming about your own perfect restaurant business.

1. I know you’re reading this and you know who you are :)

2. I’ve decided to change her name here for privacy. This could not have been a fun night for her and even though we laughed about it later I can imagine not wanting my name tied to it somewhere on the internet.