The "Big Bird" was a local icon with it's ten foot chicken on the roof. It had formally been a KOA campground and was slowly converted into the eclectic little spot that it was. Wooden picnic tables filled the main dining hall. Rolls of paper towels on the table with sqeeze bottles of BBQ sauce. The broasters lined the back of the kitchen wall pumping out chicken after chicken. A bank of microwaves reheated the succuletn ribs that had cooked in a pressure smoker. They were SO SO good. We went through 1200 pounds of chicken, 1100 pounds of pork ribs and 800 pounds of beef ribs a week. Plus burgers, homemade JoJo's, made in the shower room of the old KOA with our army potato peeler. We peeled the fat off the chickens, so the flavor would be true and stay crisp longer. It was all locals who worked there. Girls and single moms trying to make a living. The locals came in to eat chicken and ribs. They would get coveredin sauce. When I got there I was introduced to most all of them. They shook my hand covered in saice and I shook back. This was a small town. The paper was full of articles about the neighbors and who se car was left where overnight. Whose pets got out and who was heard fighting with who. Kind of a Mayberry Twilight Zone. We tried to change the menu a bit, to offer new choices and make it a profitable venture. We moved upstairs to save money and worked seven days a week. We took no paycheck for the entire time I was there. Not quite what I had imagined. Another learning experience. But at what price. Valarie left to go to summer camp fed up with the losses and sacrifices she had made. But I had to follow my dream.
"Never live above your restaurant if you sell fried chicken. Everything you own will smell like it." How's that for a bit of wisdom.
It was late summer and I had picked some local huckelberries to make strudels. I came in and found Rich making them. I was so mad that he would use my berries for his strudel. We had a fight and he bought me out before the end of it. The stress had finally cracked us both. We had been super close friends for over 3 years and a strudel destoryed that.It was the end of the road for me and Val at the Big Bird.
I moved out of the building and into a small trailer on the campground. I bought a rebuilt VW Baja and began to fix it. Valarie returned after camp and we packed up our stuff and towed the VW up to Sandpoint to stay with her mom until we could afford a place to rent. I had found a job that I would start as soon as I got there. It was a French bistro, was this going to be the dream?
No comments:
Post a Comment