I won’t pretend we’ve never faced a close opening situation. But I don’t think it’s been this tight. Our contractor had been trying to get the plumbing inspector in since last Wednesday, that was the only inspection outstanding yesterday morning. We finally got our permit issued at 11:10am, for an open at noon. We couldn’t bring food into our space until we got our permits, so it was a mad dash to get everything in place.

At 12:01pm I was fiddling with my computer trying to get our menu for the day posted, and I heard Dave (our new VP of Operations) taking an order. So we made it on time. I ran out and saw an absolutely enormous line. Look closely at that picture. I couldn’t capture the entire line in the image. It was nuts. And exciting. We sold out a bit faster than expected.

Now I’m surrounded by excited customers as we’re doing an open house today. Free coffee and parsnip fritters all day. We’re opening for real tomorrow. We try to give ourselves a recovery day (today) to catch up with the stuff that breaks on the trial run (yesterday). But tomorrow we open at 7am and we won’t be closing. 24 hours or bust!