Vivi’s Ristorante

Restaurant Name: Vivi’s Ristorante

Owner: Angel

Location: Valley Village, CA

Number of Seats: 35

Number of Staff Per Shift: 5 (including owner/head chef) 2 servers, 1 chef, 2 line cooks

Busiest Shifts: Friday Night & Saturday Night

Angel’s first restaurant job was as a busser as a teenager. He found his passion instantly in restaurants and continued to progress up the ranks working for notable chefs in fine dining establishments. Now, at 35 years old, Angel finally has borrowed enough money from family and emptied his savings in order to open his own establishment: Vivi’s Ristorante. However, Angel is really the only person on the crew with any real restaurant experience. Like the show, “The Bear” Angel has enlisted his sister to help to manage the place, but sister Sheila is a realtor with zero restaurant experience. Vivi’s has only been open shy of two months, and the restaurant is doing it’s best to find it’s legs, but issues like mis-firing orders, sloppy plating, backed up back of house and a new server spell out an unclear future for the fledgling restaurant.

It’s tough to create systems from scratch while training an entirely green staff. Angel knows that being a great chef doesn’t necessarily mean being a great restaurant owner – and he’s worried that if he can’t build the right foundation of processes and systems off the bat, his ambitious dream won’t have what it needs to succeed. It doesn’t help to know that most new restaurants fail in their first year, so Angel has a limited time to get his house in order before it comes crashing down.

Issues

The assistant prep cook Jared is extremely green. He started in the kitchen with no prior experience and accepted the job after applying via an ad online. He makes silly mistakes and gets flustered very easily when the kitchen is busy. He will burn pizzas which will slow down the entire line and make the BOH backed up. It also takes time away from Angel and Juan who need to help and mentor him while they should be doing their own work.

The restaurant is so new (open for 7 weeks) that it doesn’t have an established operating procedure, rather, they go with a “succeed or fail” philosophy: if something succeeds, they keep it as an operating essential; if it fails, they suffer the loss but then never do that again. Without systems in place, the restaurant is struggling to control food costs, labor costs, and service standards.

While Angel is a successful chef and loves to cook, he lacks any formal training in managing or running a restaurant. Although he does have a line chef, Angel is always being pulled in a million different directions.

The line cook Juan has been working in restaurant kitchens for 12 years. He says that one of his biggest frustrations with working at Vivi’s is that the owners don’t always place orders for the correct products. As a result, the restaurant is often missing ingredients or products and either Juan or Jared must run to a local supermarket to buy them, which eats into the restaurant’s profits.

 Cleanliness is extremely important to Angel, but when chaos breaks out in the kitchen, they struggle to keep their workstations clean.

Lead server Justin is fully in charge of the dining room, he struggles to manage the guests while also managing to-go order and clearly communicating with the kitchen. When it gets busy, he is trying to serve while managing pickup orders and also train his shadow Rosa, who is training to also be a server. On a busy night, Justin will also be tagged in to cook even though he has zero cooking experience or training. Justin is absolutely in over his head.

 Although Rosa is coming in to help with the front of house she has no restaurant experience, she worked a desk job for years. She doesn’t understand the multi-tasking and fast paced skillset that being a server demands.

Angel’s sister Sheila took over the role of restaurant manager because she is good with accounting and “back office” duties - even though she has never managed a restaurant. Her experience prior to working in the restaurant was in the real estate industry. She is still trying to balance helping realize her brother’s dream while being a mom and a full-time realtor.

Angel and Sheila are siblings, which means that they have an invaluable short-hand when it comes to understanding and communication, however, they butt heads and they fight. They admit that there is no filter on their conversations so it gets heated, which can be a poor look for the rest of the staff.

STAFF:

Angel (Head Chef/Owner)
Sheila (Sister/Manager)
Justin (Lead Server)
Rosa (Server in training)
Jared (Kitchen Prep/Assistant)
Juan (Line Cook)