Cafe Luwak Blog

I have been trying to add a full breakfast to the business for several years now. We have had to remodel our kitchen buy new equipment and get everything setup for it. The last step was putting together a menu and programming our point of sale system. This week everything is finally done, and we have started doing a breakfast to order Monday through Friday from 8:00am – 11:00 am. We are kind of learning as we go, so if there is demand for us to open earlier or keep cooking breakfast later, we will adjust to whatever our customers want.

If you would like to see the menu, you can click the link below.

Cafe Luwak Breakfast Menu

Forrest and I put together a cool little setup for Heritage Festival. I made the peacock and he made the cantaloupe flower. This is our busiest weekend of the year, so we are hoping that people will find out about our buffet and keep coming back. With how cold this weekend was, the ice cream sales are down significantly from previous years. Fortunately the buffet has been helping to keep the numbers looking pretty good.

I had planned a really cool mountain scene with a shredded daikon waterfall. It turned out okay, but I think it looked a lot better in my head that it did on the buffet. For Sunday’s buffet I created a fancy basket variation. Everyone seemed to think it looked like a really cool monster. I guess as long as people thought it looked cool, I should be happy.

With 6 months left to go until our 5th anniversary, it seems like all my project that I have been working for the past few years are coming together all at once. Last week we finally got our walk-in freezer installed and I was able to pull three other freezers out of our kitchen. This allowed me to redesign how everything flows. I bought new equipment for the front sandwich line, so we can now do all of out sandwich, salad, and soup delivery all in one place. In the past if someone ordered a sandwich and a salad, someone would have to run to the kitchen in the back to make a salad. This should really help with our efficiency. I also added a second cashier station to the front to make entering orders faster. We still have a couple of pieces of equipment to get before we start doing daily breakfast, but we are almost there.

With all these changes, I am hoping we can improve our speed dramatically. In the four years that I have been here I have hardly ever had a complaint about quality. I don't receive many complaints, but when I do, they are about how long it takes to get served. One of our biggest problems has been whenever there is a line at the front, we only had one register to enter an order. Even if I had three people behind the counter, often there was at least one person just waiting to do something because the cashier was the bottleneck. Now someone can jump in on the second register and help bring the line down. Another issue has always been call in orders. If someone was taking a long order for pickup or delivery, customers in line would have to wait for them to finish. One of the other things we have add is a time clock at the sandwich line. Now every ticket will have a timestamp of when the order was placed and when it was taken out to the customer. This will give me good metrics to work with as we continue to bring our efficiency up.

We are so close to having all of our plans come together and it is really exciting. With two week until Heritage Festival, I am trying to get everything setup, so we can really see how well we do. Heritage Festival is our busiest weekend of the year, so I get to see how things flow under maximum load. The faster we become, the more business we will do.

Now that Forrest is done getting ready for his ride, he decided he wants to start doing some of the watermelon carvings. It has been pretty cool working together on these. Forrest did most of the ship above while I made the shark. For Sunday’s buffet, I modified my shark and created a cool little island while Forrest carved out the wale. I am not sure what we are going to do when watermelons go out of season, but I am sure we will find new things to add to the buffet.

Very seldom do I write anything here that doesn’t have anything to do with the café. Unfortunately this has more to do with the fact that I spend most of my life at the café than with me trying to keep things pure or anything like that. Last Thursday Forrest left on a bus to Traverse City with his bike loaded on a Semi and Friday he started his three day three hundred mile ride back home. He did this ride for several reasons. First of all Make a Wish is a great organization and he really feels strongly about what they do for children and families going through life threatening illnesses. Second, Forrest loves bicycling. For being 14 years old, he puts an incredible amount of miles on his bike just for the pure joy of riding. I like riding with him, but there are days that I wouldn’t consider riding. With Forrest it doesn’t matter whether it is raining, snowing or even hailing, he truly loves riding his bike.

I have talked to Forrest every day since he started his ride. He has been very tired at the end of each day, but he finished each leg of the ride. Anyone who came to the Sunday buffet this week may have received slow service, but I couldn’t miss watching Forrest cross the finish line, so even though we were a couple of people short already, I left the café and went to Chelsea to watch Forrest come home. I really do feel bad about leaving, but I don’t think anyone can really blame me. Watching Forrest cross the finish line brought tears to my eyes. I was so proud of him, and it really looked like he grew another couple inches in the four days he was gone.

After crossing the finish line Forrest grabbed some lunch at the heroes’ hurrah, and then went to meet his wish kid. He received a medal and got his picture taken as Sarah put the medal over his head. The entire event was incredible. Forrest is already planning to do it again next year. Maybe if I worked at it, I could get in shape and do it with him. I am not sure how I would handle 4 days away from the café, but after 5 years here, I think I deserve it.

This weekend we had the brewfest in Depot Town, and all of my employees were telling me I should carve a beer stein for the buffet fruit bowl. The problem is that this weekend is also the weekend that Forrest is riding his bike 300 miles for Make A Wish foundation in the Wish A Mile ride or WAM. I had already planned to carve a bicycle, and I just got a new set of carving knives this week, so the beer stein idea lost out. Maybe next year or even next weekend, who knows. I am starting to get pretty decent at carving with the knives, but my weakness is still drawing what I need to cut. I printed out a picture of a bicycle and drew a fairly reasonable version on the watermelon, then I started carving it out. This was the first time I did a carving where the watermelon wasn’t part of the design, it was just the canvas so to speak. In my mind it seemed like it would be a lot easier. I started working on it at around 8:00 in the evening, and I finally packed up and went home at 1:30 am. I also broke one of the new knives halfway through the carving, which didn’t make things any easier. I was pretty impressed with the results. So far I really haven’t made any mush melons, and I think I am getting better at it each week. Hopefully I get faster at it, 1:30 is just too late to be leaving the café.

Forrest just finished the second day of the WAM ride. When I talked to him yesterday after riding 100.1 miles, he was happy but really tired. He took a nap in the afternoon and in the evening when he called, he was getting ready to get a massage and go to bed. Yesterdays ride was a lot of gigantic hills. When I looked at the pictures on the WAM site, I could understand why he was so tired.
Today’s ride is 113.2 miles, but the terrain was supposed to start leveling out. They had rain in the afternoon, but it didn’t sound like it bothered him too much. He was definitely tired again, but really happy, and he completed his second century in a row. Tomorrow they arrive in Chelsea, so if you don’t see me at the buffet in the morning it is because I went to cheer for him at the finish.

After our first breakfast cook left, I was had to take over the fruit bowl carving for the weekend buffet. I really don’t have any artistic talent, so it takes quite a while for me to come up with the carvings, but I really do enjoy doing it. This weekend Forrest said he wanted to do the carving. He had grand plans if doing a bird cage like I had done a couple of weeks ago, but I suggested that he start out a little smaller with a basket. He ended up agreeing with me, and he made a pretty nice basket. Actually it is a lot nicer than my first one a couple of months ago. He and I have been prepping the fruit for the buffet together for the past few weeks, and he has really been wanting to try to do a carving of his own. Now the question will be how will we determine who does the carving each week. I did a carving of a swan out of a honeydew while he was carving his basket, and he accused me of trying to steal his moment in the spotlight.

Often when people find out that I am a single parent and that I work another job besides owning the café they will ask how I find any time to spend with my son. There are days that we don’t see much of each other, but that is usually because his social calendar is so full. Between bicycling and all the other events he is involved with, Forrest gets around town quite a bit. Even so, I would say we spend a lot of time together. Definitely more than the amount of time I spent with my parents when I was his age. He is very involved with the daily operations of the restaurant and I really count on him when I am not here. When we are here together, there is nothing more enjoyable than working together. Forrest loves learning new things, and he wants to know every detail of how the café works. He really loves the café and dreams of running the place someday, so when you see him working hard it isn’t because I am an evil slave driver, it is because he really enjoys it here.

Last night I started getting my watermelon ready for the buffet, and my employees kept walking in the back asking what it was going to be. I had been thinking about trying to do a swan, but they all said I had to do something special for Elvisfest. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to carve an Elvis out of a watermelon, but each of my employees suggested that I carve a guitar. I thought okay, maybe, and I did some searching on Google thinking someone must have posted a picture of a guitar watermelon carving. After about 15 minutes of searching, I ended up not finding anything, so I decided to be 100% creative and do it without anything as a reference.

Fortunately I had a nice long watermelon for the project. I drew a few lines and started carving away. For my first off the cuff carving, I thought it turned out okay, and it really fit the event well.

The July 4th parade is always busy for us, but it isn’t like the Memorial Day parade. I was really hoping that we would have a lot of people come in for the buffet, but it ended up being a very slow buffet day. I guess next year I will have to work on marketing that better. I did make a nice little bird cage out of a watermelon and I even ventured out of my comfort zone and made a little bird out of a kiwi.

Forrest was really bummed that he had to help out because he had an opportunity to ride his bike in the parade with the Bike Ypsi group, but I told him I really need him to stick around. The way parades work is that we are extremely busy right up until the parade starts, then we are completely dead until it is over. As soon as the parade started, the café was empty, and even Forrest was nowhere to be seen. I took a little stroll down the street to see the parade, and when the Bike Ypsi group rode by, there was Forrest riding with them. It was kind of hard to believe that 10 minutes earlier he had been serving latte’s to all the people in the crowd.

It is really too bad that the VW Festival didn’t come to town this year. This would have been the perfect watermelon for it. I found a picture like this online, so I figured I would give it a shot. It was actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. There were so many pieces that had to be attached with toothpicks that it really took a lot of time to assemble. I thought the surf board in the back was a nice touch though.

Getting items from a buffet like pancakes, waffles, or French toast is always hit and miss. If you are lucky enough to get them when they are first put out, they can be really good, but when they sit for even a short amount of time they start to go downhill pretty quickly. We do what we can to keep these items fresh on the buffet, but even when our French toast was fresh, I didn’t think it was very good. We had been using just a grocery style Texas toast for the French toast. It helped keep the cost down, but if I don’t like it, then I have to assume my customers aren’t too happy with it either. I started doing some experimenting with the different breads we use for our sandwiches, and the challah was a definite winner. When it is fresh, I think the French toast with Challah is amazing, but even after it has been sitting in a chaffer for a while, it is still pretty good. So now every weekend, we will be making our French toast with Fresh baked bread from Modern Bakery (another Michigan product).

After our mothers day buffet, we have been having a different watermelon carving each week. We have had a swan, a peacock, a boat, and several others. Now that my breakfast cook left, I decided I really wanted to keep the tradition going. Unfortunately my other cook isn’t very artistic and neither am I. I figured if I started it the night before, and I took my time, maybe I could do something that looks cool. I did some reading online and found some pictures of a watermelon whale that I thought looked really cool, so I printed it out and started drawing lines on a watermelon. It took about two hours to complete, but I have to say, I really think I did a good job.

For some reason I came up with this great idea to put the watermelon in the freezer after carving it. I am guessing in my sleep deprived state this probably made sense, but the first thing I thought of this morning when I woke up was “Water”. A watermelon is made up of water. When I put the watermelon out on the buffet table, he really looked pretty good. He was a little frosty from being in the freezer, but other than that he was okay. After a couple of hours the tail started to sag which actually looked kind of cool. By about eleven o’clock the whole thing was sagging and didn’t look like much of a whale anymore. At the busiest point during the buffet there wasn’t much left of my cool whale. The bright side is that I was able to carve a watermelon, and now I know that the freezer is a bad idea.

Our breakfast buffet is very quickly becoming the cornerstone of our business. It has been growing steadily since we started, and we have quite a few regular customers now who count on us for their weekend breakfast. Imagine my surprise this morning when Forrest and I got to the restaurant right as the buffet was supposed to start and the place was still dark. I knew our breakfast cook was going to be leaving soon because she found a new job closer to home, but I didn’t know that she was going to just stop showing up two days after giving her two weeks’ notice. In the restaurant business it isn’t uncommon for people to quit without notice, but when it is someone you count on to open the place, it can be a little traumatic.

We went into the restaurant and started trying to figure out what to do. I tried calling my other cook, but she was out of town thinking this would be one of her last weekend’s off until we hired a new cook. I was really tempted to just stay closed for the morning, but Forrest assured me that we could get the buffet going. We decided to give it a try and open an hour late so that we could make a decent show of it.

I started cooking some scrambled eggs when Forrest came up and told me I was doing it wrong. I explained to him that everyone cooks a little differently, but the end result would be the same. He looked at me and said he had been watching our breakfast cook quite a bit, and he was pretty certain he could do it. I let him take over at the grill, and he started cooking away. By nine o’clock we had just about everything ready on the buffet. Business really picked up after 10, and I spent most of my time running from the buffet line to the cook’s line to tell Forrest what we needed. We ran out of a few things here and there, but given the fact that we didn’t have the two hours of prep time we normally would, Forrest did an amazing job. He even got several comments that the bacon and sausage were cooked much better than they were before. All of my other employees are college age and older, and not one of them could have done what Forrest pulled off.

I am sure I am like any parent who gets frustrated with their teenagers every now and then, but with a day like today, it really does make everything worthwhile. I really love working with my son, and I think we both get a lot out of it. I am really proud of the young man he is starting to turn into.

A few weeks ago some friends of mine and Forrest’s came in to try our breakfast buffet. Forrest came up to me and asked where the bacon and sausage come from because our friend only eats Michigan meat. I was actually embarrassed that I hadn’t even thought of that. We try very hard to do things as local as possible, but when I put the buffet together, my grocery supplier helped me pick out items and I never even thought about locally made meats.

Once the weekend was over, I called my meat supplier in Detroit and asked if he carried any Bacon or Sausage that is made in Michigan. I was in luck, my rep also handles the U of M account, and they also prefer local products. As it turns out my rep had actually worked for Smith meats in Port Huron when he was in high school, and he told me they had a really high quality product. The sausage is Detroit brand sausage and it is phenomenal, so we now have all Michigan meats on our buffet. Having a local product is nice, but having a local product that tastes so much better than anything else is even better.