Restaurant News

It is always hard to tell what is going to work and what isn’t when we introduce something new at the café. When we started doing our breakfast buffet it became successful very quickly, but when we started doing breakfast everyday it took months before we started seeing any breakfast business. A couple of my cooks suggested that we give up on the daily breakfast. The turnaround for our breakfast menu occurred when we introduced our grilled burgers and chicken, we expanded our breakfast times to all day and that is when our breakfast items started really selling.

We have had our taco bar running through the month of August, and it is already doing really well, and we are already starting to think about what other types of buffets we could do. I don’t want to be known as the buffet place, but I think it makes sense if we can do things well and serve a quality product in that format. It has always been hard for us to compete in the evenings since we don’t have alcohol, but the café is a nice casual place for families to come, and having quality food in a buffet style makes it a perfect place to take the whole family for dinner. And thanks to the Taco bar, we are also selling more grilled items when groups come in where not everyone wants tacos. Keep an eye out for new items and we are always interested in suggestions from our customers.

Since adding our new grill menu, we haven’t had much luck getting customers to try our new items. So many people who come in are set on getting their favorite sandwich that it is hard to get them to try something new. The customers who have tried our burgers, veggie burgers, and chicken sandwiches have quickly become grill regulars. For those of you who are reluctant to try something new, we have introduced a new special on Mondays. Every Monday till the end of September we will be selling all of the items on our From the Grill menu for Half Off from 2pm - 7pm. This is your chance to try our new items at an unbelievable price.

So my new cook Richie came up to me today and suggested that we do a Taco Bar at night. He said that the breakfast buffet was doing so well, and we have all the stuff for it, so why not setup the buffet table on Tuesday night with all the fixings for people to make their own taco’s. I thought that was a great idea. I remember back when Cross Street Station was still around how much I loved going down there on Tuesday Taco Night. So starting next Tuesday, August 10th, we will have a taco buffet at the café. We are still working out the details, but it will run from 5pm – 9pm with a cost of 6.95 for adults, and 3.95 for kids under 12. If you have any suggestions for what you would like to see on the bar, let us know.

One of the hardest things to keep up with in this business is marketing specials and soups. They change all the time and remembering to update the web site, the display board, Facebook, and Twitter, is really difficult. The past few weeks I have really fallen behind on keeping everything up to date, but I have a good excuse. I have been working on tying it all together automatically. I built a web interface that the employees can use to update the soups on the Web site that now automatically updates the display board (TV) at the front of the café, and sends a feed to Facebook and Twitter. I will probably have to tweak it a bit, but if you follow us through any of these mediums, you will be able to keep up to date with what we are serving on a daily basis.

When I look back on the five years of owning the café, there are a number of things that I had to learn through painful experiences. Handling the memorial day rush is one of those things. The first year we had a bit of an excuse because we had no idea what to expect, but I think it took three years before we finally started doing things right. With the parade going all the way through Depot Town, it makes sense that we would have a lot of customers coming in first thing to get a cup of coffee, latte, cappuccino, or other beverage and maybe something quick to eat. In the first three years it seemed like no matter what we did, we always ran out of coffee, and once we ran out, there was just no way the coffee maker could ever catch up. There is nothing worse than looking at a line full of people needing coffee and having to wait 5 minutes for the pot to brew which still wouldn’t be enough.

The past few years we have had a system that has worked pretty well. I have a bigger coffee maker now and much larger containers to brew coffee into. I have also made sure that I am the one working the espresso machine, and Forrest is right next to me prepping the cups for the next drinks in line, so all I need to do is pour shots of espresso and steam the milk. This year I got in before anyone else and started brewing coffee. By the time we opened at 8:00 am, I had over 10 gallons brewed and was ready to start on espresso drinks. When we started getting busy, things almost fell apart when we got a couple of lattes crossed up and had to remake a couple of drinks, but Forrest and I recovered and made it through the rest of the rush without incident. I wouldn’t say customers got their orders in record speed, but I would say everyone got their order in a reasonable amount of time. It really is nice when things come together the way you want them to.

Well we have picked some of our top grilled specials and combined them with our sandwich menu, breakfast menu, and added an ice cream page to create a beutiful new six page menu. Five if you dont count the cover. I am personally very proud of the menu because I did it all myself. I took the photos, created the layout, printed the pages, and stuffed them into the menu jackets. I think they came out really nice especially with the photo's. Right now we only have the grill open during the day till 4pm, but we are working on expanding our staff so we can have the grilled items in the evening also. We are also going to continue trying out new specials so we can revise the menu and keep it fresh with new items.
Click here to see new menu

Our actual anniversery was back in February, but my vendor was out of Kopi Luwak coffee, so I had to put off our celebration for a couple of months. Five years is quite a milestone for any business, and it seems to have come very quickly. We have had a lot of good times and a few bad times over the years, but most of them have been good. I have met so many great customers as well as wonderful employees. Cafe Luwak has always been more than just a business to me. It is a part of the community and a place to meet where you can feel comfortable bringing the entire family. It was nice to have so many people come in today to taste the Kopi Luwak or enjoy the breakfast buffet and wish us happy birthday. With all the changes we have made over the years and even more so recently, I think we are right on the verge of really growing this business into something great. Hopefully we will still be here to celebrate our 10th anniversary. I do hope by then to have more than two days off a year.

Over the years I have had a couple of managers to help run the cafe, and they have all brought something new to the place. We recently lost a manager we had for over three years, and I decided that we needed to really have a team of working managers. Now we have three team leaders who each have responsibility over different parts of the business. As we expand our menu and how the business operates, having one manager wouldnt work anymore. We are incorporating a lot of changes into the restaurant and we are really focussing on a team approach to everything now. There is always adjustment when a long term employee leaves, but in this case I think when the dust settles, we will have a much stronger staff and improved customer service.

Over the past few years our soups have really gotten kind of boring. We used to have a cook who was really into making soup and we always had cool new soups on the menu. When she left, she had only a fraction of her soups written down, so we have made those and a few different ones, but we havent had enough variety to really be thought of as a cool soup place. Well now that we have multiple cooks with a variety of styles, we are working on putting together an updated list of recipies. If you havent tried our soups in a while, I would really suggest you give them a try. So far the customer feedback on the new soups has been just outstanding.

Since last summer we have been trying out having waiters and waitresses on the weekends during the buffet. We have had some ups and downs with doing table service, and it is a bit of a learning curve, but the improvement in efficiency is really noticeable when we do it right. Instead of having dine in customers waiting in line at the counter to place their order then having to go find a seat and wait again, having a server gives dine in customers quick attention and they are able to place their orders in comfort. This has an advantage for the takeout customers too in that the lines are shorter becuase the dine in customers are already seated. The cafe now has a wait staff daily during breakfast and lunch, and we hope to expand table service to the evenings as soon as we expand our grilled menu to the evenings.

Now that we have our breakfast running every day, we are working on putting together a new menu of grilled items. Over the next couple of months we will be trying new things and testing out specials during lunch. So if you get a chance come in and try some of our new grilled items and let us know what you think. If there is something you think would fit the cafe well that you dont see, let us know, and we will be happy to try it out.

I have been trying to add a full breakfast to the business for several years now. We have had to remodel our kitchen buy new equipment and get everything setup for it. The last step was putting together a menu and programming our point of sale system. This week everything is finally done, and we have started doing a breakfast to order Monday through Friday from 8:00am – 11:00 am. We are kind of learning as we go, so if there is demand for us to open earlier or keep cooking breakfast later, we will adjust to whatever our customers want.

If you would like to see the menu, you can click the link below.

Cafe Luwak Breakfast Menu

Forrest and I put together a cool little setup for Heritage Festival. I made the peacock and he made the cantaloupe flower. This is our busiest weekend of the year, so we are hoping that people will find out about our buffet and keep coming back. With how cold this weekend was, the ice cream sales are down significantly from previous years. Fortunately the buffet has been helping to keep the numbers looking pretty good.

I had planned a really cool mountain scene with a shredded daikon waterfall. It turned out okay, but I think it looked a lot better in my head that it did on the buffet. For Sunday’s buffet I created a fancy basket variation. Everyone seemed to think it looked like a really cool monster. I guess as long as people thought it looked cool, I should be happy.

With 6 months left to go until our 5th anniversary, it seems like all my project that I have been working for the past few years are coming together all at once. Last week we finally got our walk-in freezer installed and I was able to pull three other freezers out of our kitchen. This allowed me to redesign how everything flows. I bought new equipment for the front sandwich line, so we can now do all of out sandwich, salad, and soup delivery all in one place. In the past if someone ordered a sandwich and a salad, someone would have to run to the kitchen in the back to make a salad. This should really help with our efficiency. I also added a second cashier station to the front to make entering orders faster. We still have a couple of pieces of equipment to get before we start doing daily breakfast, but we are almost there.

With all these changes, I am hoping we can improve our speed dramatically. In the four years that I have been here I have hardly ever had a complaint about quality. I don't receive many complaints, but when I do, they are about how long it takes to get served. One of our biggest problems has been whenever there is a line at the front, we only had one register to enter an order. Even if I had three people behind the counter, often there was at least one person just waiting to do something because the cashier was the bottleneck. Now someone can jump in on the second register and help bring the line down. Another issue has always been call in orders. If someone was taking a long order for pickup or delivery, customers in line would have to wait for them to finish. One of the other things we have add is a time clock at the sandwich line. Now every ticket will have a timestamp of when the order was placed and when it was taken out to the customer. This will give me good metrics to work with as we continue to bring our efficiency up.

We are so close to having all of our plans come together and it is really exciting. With two week until Heritage Festival, I am trying to get everything setup, so we can really see how well we do. Heritage Festival is our busiest weekend of the year, so I get to see how things flow under maximum load. The faster we become, the more business we will do.