Hi! Today we added to our staff, Amber started as our new bartender. Which means I now have more time to do other things. My to-do list is beyond reason. Two top priorities are one credit cards and two real plates! Believe me, I am right there with you on those things. We are still very slow here but doing better. We need a few better days, to sell a few more dinners a day so that we can hire a busser. Please tell your friends to come stop by and get lunch. We need it. Contrary to popular belief Tommy’s is not profitable. We are counting on a great summer to push us ahead. We need it. On top of a slow SF covid recovery, almost everything here broke. Side note, if you ever want to get into the restaurant business and you are putting together your plan, triple what you think you will pay for repairs and maintenance. We are currently getting the neon sign outside repaired, I am expecting somewhere around $7000 by the time we are done fixing it. And, I just received an estimate to fix our dining room fan and our A/C, $14,000. I think we will be a little warm this summer at Tommy's. All that after I just paid $8000 on plumbing issues. At the moment we do not expect to raise prices. Food cost has stayed steady, although the prices of meat generally go up in the summer. The truth is my goal is to bring the prices down, specifically sandwiches and sides. Did you know that the best deals right now are on the dinners, specifically the slim dinner plate, you get the most food per dollar on that one. I have worked hard to keep those prices down. We have a very small staff and we run a very tight ship. We haven’t raised most prices for three years, which is unusual. Turkey prices are still crazy high, they have not budged since last year’s bird-flu issues. Well, I got to get back at it. Thanks for your support and continued patronage.
Thanksgiving is less than a week away!
Hey,
I am busy busy. Still do not have all the products I need secure. I know I will have the turkeys, they cost %50 more than last year, but still a better price than I thought I would get. We usually buy 100 30 lb turkeys for the day, this year there are no large birds. We are buying 150 20 lb turkeys. We hope to sell 3000 pounds of turkey to about 1500 people in 9 hours. To do that we add 15 extra people to our staff for the day. I am still short a dishwasher for the day, but I think we will find one.
To go with that we sell 900 lb of potato and 1300 lb of stuffing. We make everything from scratch, it takes hours of peeling potatoes, cutting the bread into little pieces, and trimming green beans, among other things. Nothing comes from a can or is frozen. We start cooking turkeys on Wed morning and go on overnight in shifts to get it done. We have 5 large ovens that fit 3 turkeys at a time.
We hope to be busy, we really count on this day to get by. Please bring your friends and family.
Thanks, TJ.