Update

Bandidas is now in full swing. We have had some nice busy days, and a couple of slow days here and there. It's a funny balance: stressed if it's busy, stressed if it's slow. On the busy days, we can't help but ask ourselves where all these people come from. How do they all know? It it so rad to serve so many people--tacos and nachos galore in the evenings, and brunch on the weekends. At the end of the weekend, we are bagged. The days are still too long for Jacks and Ai. We gotta figure out how to get employees to cover us enough so that we can have a bit more time off. In that way, those couple of slow days days were nice. Gave us a bit of time to get our feet back under us--to file the huge heap of papers that was growing on the desk, to move a few steps closer to getting all the permits we need, to organize the kitchen a bit better, to catch up on our food prep. It's amazing how much food we have to cook. I guess that's what happens when you serve food professionally. But we are still getting used to the proportions of the project.

Here are a couple of photos from our grand opening party:


This is one of the most popular seats in the house. Two rocking chairs at the small table in the window, well decorated with our favorite lamp and a live orchid. We got this lamp for free in a deal for some used restaurant chairs. At first we weren't sure about it. Then Mike suggested we use it as a kind of central decorative theme. It has kind of become that, and does well to draw people in from the street.




Here's a nice shot of our service station, where we make all the tacos. That's a bottle of our house-mad vegan sour cream in the foreground, and a nice platter of tacos in the back.



And here's a beauty shot of our chalk board menu. We painted this cool chalk board paint directly onto the wall, and a friend put up the menu for us, with this beautiful printing. Jacks and Ai could never make it look like that. Now we are trying to figure out what to do with this space though. Our innitial plan was to have a counter service style restaurant. But somehow that just didn't suit the place. It turns out to be a place where people hang out more, which we love. But hanging out and standing in a line at the bar every time you want to get another coffee or order more food just don't go together. So Bandidas has officially become a table service restaurant. Lucky Ai--I finally get to learn how to wait tables. It's so much easier to learn when I only have myself and Jacks to answer to. . . Anyway, I digress. Since we have become table service. We have moved to laminated paper menus at the tables. Now the question becomes what to do with this chalk board space. We like it, but the menu doesn't need to be on the wall. Should we paint over it in white to match the rest of the walls and pretend it never happened? Should we write a note to the people up there? Should we just post our drink and dessert menu there? Hmm. Any ideas?