The first full week is over and apart from a little gas trouble (see last weekend) it's gone well. I don't exactly feel like an old hand but last year at this stage I felt a little out of control. I seemed to be incapable of going even one day without having to visit the cash and carry or the farm shop or, at the other extreme, getting the bread order right. We were drowning in bread in the early weeks. And drowning in cream in the later ones. We were running out of change, and milk. The card machine was temperamental. We struggled with the froth for the cappuccinos.
It's not been perfect this year and I'm still making mistakes but the weather has really helped get us off to a good start. We haven't had a bad day since we opened, so the outside tables have been in full use - last year we started with rain and lots of mud being walked into the newly-cleaned carpets. I remember one rainy Thursday asking Nancie if she'd ever known a day without customers.
She hadn't.
I was convinced that day would be it.
It wasn't.
I'm much more proud of our menu now. Someone asked me today what I would recommend and I could rave about it all. It would have been wrong of me to recommend the paninis given that we'd run out by 1.30 but I could easily wax lyrical about the Witley Asparagus soup which made its seasonal debut today and will be making frequent appearances for the next few weeks.
One more big change from last year.
We've asked the council to take away one of our huge bins. Last year we paid them weekly for two but only ever filled one. What a waste of money (more than a tenner a week). Why did it take me the whole season to realise that?
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