Monthly Archives: October 2010

Into the Great Wide Open

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First and foremost, a gargantuan and endless THANK YOU to everyone who helped make our Grand Opening a success (yes, I am calling you all out one by one). As a token of my appreciation, our Grand Opening participants are currently enjoying a priority access period to our reservations calender to book our kitchens during the high demand Holiday season. These guys are all rock stars and will be taking the Houston food scene by storm!

To everyone who attended our celebration, thank YOU. It wouldn’t have been any fun without you. As a new business with a somewhat abstract concept that has never advertised, I am truly amazed at the crowds we managed to draw in. We hope you all had a great time and hope to see you again soon at one of our upcoming events. Our Events page is being updated daily and you can now reserve private parties online!

For those of you who missed it, pictures are on our Facebook Page with a few highlights below.

Our café is ready for the Edible Market.

The café awaits - custom copper lighting display by my boyfriend, Jesus Acosta, and decorated with photography by the talented Andrew Rebman.

Happy eaters of PeopleFood by Hannah Curry, our first chef demo.

A few awesome ladies that I love:

SlimRitas

Posing with Lucy Corona of SlimRITAS, who had the most amazing margarita themed outfit ever.

Pairing beer and dessert with the TX Girls Pint Out herself.

Pouring beer with the TX Girls Pint Out for our beer and dessert pairing.

Mother and daughter team.

Posing with my mom, who I cannot begin to thank enough for all her hard work!

Chef Diego Salguero of Lucia's Catering

Chef Diego working the crowd for our most popular demonstration, photography by Andrew Rebman.

Chef Sandra Shafer wowing the crowd with "Seafood Made Easy."

Chef Sandra Shafer drew quite a crowd for her silky scallops and delicately seasoned mussels.

Our final demo of the night focuses on cocktails!

Nearly midnight and Alex Gregg is keeping the crowd going strong with his mixology class.

Let the thank you speech begin…

To my incredible and supportive boyfriend and Chief Engineer of Kitchen Inc extrordinaire, Jesus Acosta of MatadorMoto, for being there every step of the way, fixing everything that breaks, creating brilliant solutions to the most complex of problems, carrying the heaviest of kitchen equipment, designing extravagant custom lighting displays out of basic plumbing supplies, keeping me calm, indulging me when I need indulgence and reprimanding me when I need to be put in my place…the life time I plan on spending trying to thank you will never be enough.

To my mom, Audrey Archuleta, who began contributing to Kitchen Inc nearly two decades ago when she nurtured my very first entrepreneurial efforts as early as Kindergarten. For those of you who met her, she needs no introduction. Thank you, for your faith in me, support when I need it but never overbearing when I don’t, for never judging your crazy daughter when she quit her cushy six-figure job to pursue a wild dream, for raising me to do things for myself and giving me the skill set I needed to make this happen, and for all your last minute hard labor pulling our opening together!

And to our participants, thank you for your incredible understanding and ability to pull through in the face of adversity. I’m so happy to have you all at Kitchen Inc, wish you all the best of luck in your new ventures and am so certain of your success! Thank you to PeopleFood for bravery in doing our first Chef Demo of the day even though she had never done one before; to the sisters of Redbird Marketplace for manning our Kids Corner and brightening our café with your beautiful aprons; to Fandango Catering for a delicious demo and amazing gazpacho; to Chef Sandra Shafer for pulling through an incredibly seafood tasting withOUT ovens, as if by magic; to Cuisine by Sallie for making ravioli and preserving sanity with all your chafing dishes; to Lucia’s Especialidades Argentina for frying all your empanadas by hand on that little electric cooktop and completely rocking the Demonstration kitchen with your passion and humor; to TX Girls Pint Out and Troy Witherspoon of Petrol Station for making our beer and dessert pairing; to Alex Gregg for keeping the crowd entertained well into the night with your awesome mixology; to Artisana Bread for all of your hard work and understanding in the gas fiasco, being always lovely no matter what curve balls are thrown at you, making the best bread in the City and completely wowing all of our guests with it; to LaCake Petite for waiting for us for TWO whole years and sweetening up our kitchens with your heavenly cakes; to Pure Catering for handing out fresh and delicious food throughout the entire afternoon and evening with such a lovely display; to Offenbacher Fudge for awesome presentation and a untiring team who greeted our guests with fudge from start to finish; to SlimRITAS for getting our guests started off right, with a margarita, and letting us enjoy your great company well into the late hours of the night; and to Kristi’s Kitchen, Porch Swing Desserts, Salad Secrets, New Mexico Green Chile, Desserts ‘n More, Jill’s Crumbles and Grizzaffi Coffee for adding your specialties to the deliciousness of our evening……
THANK YOU!!!!!!

Still here? There’s a few more:
Thank you to Adam Brackman of Urban Deal for finding Kitchen Inc the perfect home (all landlord issues aside) and all of your incredible connections; to the Downtown Management District for hosting and publicizing the Night in Market Square that drew such an awesome crowd for our event, Sarah Kuntz of Accion Texas for making our small business loan happen (we’d have no equipment if it weren’t for you), St. Arnold’s & No Label for your bada*s brews, my best girlfriend for understanding when Kitchen Inc took over from proper attention to her birthday, and anyone else I may have forgotten who helped make Kitchen Inc a reality and our Grand Opening a success!

Breakdown – a play by play of our race to the finish

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Thursday, October 14, TWO days before Grand Opening
Battle of the glass companies ensues and our storefront is built out. Fire permitting is finally completed and gas clearance arrives from the City. An appointment is made with Centerpoint to get us some gas! At the last minute, we’re hosting an unexpected event for the Houston Green Scene at our kitchens. A last minute cancellation from Byrd’s Market left the important GreenWeek dinner without a home and we couldn’t turn them down.
At 9 pm, 30 or so of Houston’s biggest green scene players are rushing dinner through a space that they’d magically transformed into an elegant dining room, my mom and I are plastering a wall with American Clay, Alex “Classy” Glass, his sons, their wives and even an infant are outside putting the new glass in, my boyfriend is perched 20 feet in the air on a ladder on scaffolding putting in the lights for our café. Everyone is saying that I am remarkably calm. The Green Scene crew calls me in to the dinner to make a quick speech about Kitchen Inc and I get to receive applause and meet No Impact Man whilst covered in dry wall mud and plaster and emitting a sweet aroma of Simple Green.

Friday, October 15, ONE day before Grand Opening
Rosemarie from Artisana Bread arrives bright and early to mix an incredible assortment of doughs to proof and rise for the event. She works diligently in our Bakery all day, awaiting the time Centerpoint will arrive and grant her use of an oven. Boyfriend and mom are on site handling final cleaning and decorating and I’m running around town to secure all the final food, wine and paperwork needed for the big day.
Our donations of St. Arnold’s and the keg of El Hefe from No Label for our beer pairing have been procured and our walk-in cooler happy to receive them. A bottle of brown helps get me through the day.
Around 2 p.m. I put in a call to Centerpoint to check on the status of the gas. They can’t find a request in their system for our gas! Paranoia, phone calls…there was a mixup between my contractor and the plumber (the plumber must request the utilities permits) over the Centerpoint scheduling due to the fact that my contractor can’t properly understand Spanish. Or so I gather from a phone call between my boyfriend and contractor while I’m on the phone with Centerpoint straightening out the situation. “What kind of contractor can’t speak Spanish?” my boyfriend yells and hangs up the phone. It’s okay, Centerpoint is going to send a technician out. I just have to pay an overtime fee of $150. Okay, I can handle that. We *need* the gas!
All Grand Opening participants are notified of the problem and encouraged to bring electric burners and butane warmers that they might have. We wait. The dough waits.
At 4 p.m. I call Centerpoint again, where an unusually sympathetic woman takes charge of our problem and begins a relentless campaign to contact the technician who can come restore our gas service. For two hours she calls, but not a single soul in that entire division will answer their office or mobile phones. Not one. At 6 p.m. she declares that she must go home, but has left voicemails with my number on every possible line. Naturally, no one ever calls.

Saturday, October 16, SHOW TIME!
Our Grand Opening participants trickle in to set up for their demonstrations and tables. I’ve procured an electric burner top and amazingly, our chefs have brought in many of their own. They work together seamlessly, an oasis of elegance in a sea of chaos, to exchange burners, propane and chafing dishes. Posters are hung, last minute problems solved.
I’m preparing the dishes for our beer pairing and covered in ganache. It’s all finally happening. At 4 p.m. sharp, our first guests arrive for our first chef demonstration. The will continue to arrive in a constant stream until after 10, filling Kitchen Inc with the roar of a dense and well-fed crowd. It feels like half of Houston is here!

Sunday, October 17th, 4 a.m.
I arrive home. The last of our guests left well after 3 a.m. and one even had to be driven home. I haven’t thrown such an incredibly successful party since high school. I’m infinitely grateful to people that I’ve been grateful to for a long time, and to new people I’ve met recently who I think I will be very grateful too again in the near future. A party two years in the making – what a beginning!

Won’t Get Fooled Again

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Anyone who has ever opened a restaurant or really any business knows that the learning curve is though. Luckily it is an incredibly swift learning curve and an entirely exciting ride.
You may have noticed that I haven’t updated the blog in quite some time. Getting Kitchen Incubator up and running for this past week’s Grand Opening took me far way from the computer, ripped off the shoes of web mistress and business manager, and threw me directly into the hot seat of general contracting and commercial construction.
While I can be overly ambitious, I accepted my limited knowledge here and did hire a general contractor to manage the construction at Kitchen Inc. While he was great during the initial buildout, things tapered off the last couple of months and he was unable to meet deadlines. Committed to our October 17 Grand Opening, I was forced to take things into my own hands.
Day to day construction activities were the simple part – I can patch some drywall and lay flooring with the best of them. Commercial kitchen specific tasks required a quick lesson – grinding stainless steel and laying FRP. But it was dealing with the City and permits that truly got the best of me!
Clueless, I waltzed into the midtown commercial permitting office with full set of plans in hand (and nearly too heavy to carry), and was passed from office to office trying to determine what I needed to get us open in just a few fast approaching weeks. Amazingly, everyone from plan review to plumbing was friendly and helpful!
The goal was actually just trying to turn our gas on. While we could throw our Grand Opening party without technically being open for business (I’d secured a temporary Food Dealer’s Permit just in case!), we couldn’t cook without gas! All of our equipment is full gas commercial, from the smallest range top to every oven. My contractor had ensured a simple process: head to the permitting offices with the plans, get them reviewed and get the gas permit. Things weren’t quite so simple.
It turned out we had a great deal of fire alarm and sprinkler work to be done before the gas service could be restored. Just a week before the company my contractor had hired to do this work was dramatically shut down by my landlord in the midst of beginning work. It turned out my contractor hadn’t cleared this fire/sprinkler company with the landlord and Ernie, the building engineer, had a particular beef with this company. He rushed into our space screaming at everyone with such fervor that I nearly feared the man was going to have a heart attack. Trying to apologize to the unsuspecting fire and sprinkler team at the same time, I made unsuccessful attempts to calm Ernie down, but his face was red and steam, I swear it, was leaking from his ears.
The incident left us with a single option: the landlord and evil Ernie would be handling the fire alarm and sprinkler work. The only problem is that they scheduled it for two days before our Grand Opening. I wrote a letter explaining the situation and that the date was unacceptable. To no avail.
So I did some sneaking around. I was able to find out the name of the fire company and the sprinkler company that my landlord uses and called them to reschedule directly. They were, of course, far more flexible than my landlord would have ever let on and did their best to come in earlier and get everything done. Whew, I was a lucky girl.
So what then, was the big problem with the gas?
Well, as I made my way through the permitting offices it was pointed out that a Fire permit was missing under our project. Impossible, I insisted. I saw the fire alarm company doing work in the space myself. I knew it had been done! I was ushered downstairs to meet with the Fire Marshall, a broad element of Texas pride of a man and everything you could want or expect in a fire chief, right down to the loud stepping boots. He vowed to get down to the bottom of the issue and drove straight to our site.
I arrive a few minutes behind the Fire Marshall, but was told that upon entering he walked straight up to the music, shut it off and declared “Who’s in charge here?” An array of subcontractors and various works stared in awe and my poor boyfriend was left to answer to him.
So begins our saga – our landlord had never taken out the fire permit for their work. Work was shut down and a hold put on our project number that would not allow us to restore gas service until a proper fire permit was in hand.
Unable to trust my landlord with managing this process, I worked with their fire alarm company directly, and it is a good thing I did because evil Ernie couldn’t even provide the proper set of approved building plans (he insisted that a rough floor plan taken from our lease was ‘his plans’). They were able to push the permit through and get the work done and up to code, just in time!
Meanwhile, Kitchen Inc was experiencing further drama in the storefront with the battle of dueling glass companies. The buildout of the storefront was technically the landlord’s job and they maintained a separate contract with my contractor for it, but I knew I would need to manage it if I ever wanted it done. My contractor told me he had ordered the glass weeks ago and that the glass company was ready to go. Finally, I at least got his team in to knock out the wall and make room for the new door. A week later, we still had a storefront of plywood.
Believing my contractor, I thought blame lay with the glass company and hired an independent glass guy on my own to at least replace some of the other hideous black glass windows with lovely clear glass. As luck would have it, the two glass companies showed up at the exact same time.
One guy remarked that he was there to replace the glass and the other company insisted on the same. Insults were exchanged. The one my contractor had hired called him, declared his feelings with verbose obscenities and vowed never to touch this job site again. The guy I had hired called me and filled me in. I rushed to the site and tried to remedy the war of glass companies, but it turned out the problem had a much deeper route.
The glass company my contractor hired insisted that they had not been paid for previous work done at our site and refused to touch our building without cash in hand. Since I had cut my contractor a check for that work months ago (the glass that separates our bakery from the café), it looked like a few people had some explaining to do. I would have gladly paid the glass company directly, but the work was my landlord’s and they would never reimburse me for doing something that wasn’t in direct contract. I explained the discrepancy to the glass company and made arrangements to buy the glass from them and have my glass guy install it. Interestingly enough, it was also revealed that the order for the storefront had only been put in a few days earlier and they had been told “no rush.” I was appalled. I had just been hit with the realization that my contractor had been lying to me.
Not knowing who to believe, I relied on the two people in the world I knew I could trust: my mom and my boyfriend. Together, we got everything done.
Luckily, my glass guy developed a crush on my mom, and the ample opportunities to ask her out relentlessly kept him at the site working diligently into the night. I managed to find a guy asking for handy man work on the street to help out with some of the walls and other things. And my boyfriend, never ceasing to amaze me, cut stainless steel by HAND with a hacksaw, ran electrical and fixed everything imaginable. My mom, who’d flown in from New Mexico just 5 days before the opening, worked 12 hour shifts helping me clean, paint, truck wheel barrows of rubble out of our café and procure supplies all week long.
Maybe I had trusted a few people I shouldn’t have, when all along I needed to just do them myself, but now I had the best team ever making sure that our Grand Opening would be a success. I’ll probably end up getting my own contractor’s license to help other food businesses built out their kitchens with all of the lessons learned. One thing is certain, I won’t get fooled again!