This is Yuki making silver dollar size pancakes.
Mothers' Day brunch at The Pineapple Room. Everything looked good. There were a lot of happy people and probably a little less than six hundred people in attendance. A great day for mommies.
Our brunch crowd was probably over 90% local today. I like to visit with the moms at the table and they always tell me everything. One comment was that the beet salad was too sour. So, of course, I tried it with Wade (chef de cuisine) and I said to him, "I like this sour, but just because I like it, it doesn’t mean that the local people will like it." Today we got to listen and cook for the audience.
There exists a tomato salad dressing for dinner that is the crack seed vanilla jus. It has some sweetness in it along with salty; we added that and some pickled red onions that were more balanced than the beets, and a new salad was born. It was more balanced as far as a sweet and sour pickled beet salad goes. The local people favor sweetness as a balance instead of just an acidic pickle.
In addition to visiting with the moms, I like to stay in the back and watch the production, taste, and teach the cooks how to do things better. I always tell them, "There is always a more efficient, faster, better way of doing things; all you have to do is ask." And if they don’t ask, I usually let them keep doing what they are doing and, in a sense, watch them struggle or suffer a little, or take a long time, before I say anything, if I do.
~AW