Nights at Ruby June Inn: A Whole New Thing
The best way to change an ailing institution is to blow it up. That’s what COVID did to the restaurant model as we know it. I chortle with glee every time I read of ways post-COVID restaurants are mixing it up, changing the rules and kicking the bums out.
And by bums, I mean miscreants in the kitchen. In my restaurant owning years, the pressure to just keep the doors open seven days, seven nights, meant I hired and kept on – as the kid says in Little Orphan Annie – “bad people.”
But staffing shortages have made chefs and restaurant owners see things in a different lite. Instead of cramming their restaurants with bad actors, just to keep the doors open 5, 6, 7 days and nights, they’re saying, “With this crew we have, how many hours should we be open?”
Last week, I was talking to a chef and restaurant owner who has struggled the last ten years with keeping a big enough staff to run full-tilt. At the beginning of this year’s busy season, he wasn’t looking to hire anyone. He fired people instead. Under-performers. Gripers. People who brought the whole operation down. Now, on their reduced days and hours, the whole joint is joyous. I’m gonna guess he will make more money too. Churn is terribly expensive and shortens your life span.
After I sold Nora’s Table in 2015, I started a dinner series, “Supper Club” at Husum Riverside Bed and Breakfast, all by my lonesome. We did a few things that seemed radical at the time: pay in advance for a fixed dinner with a menu you won’t see until you are arrive and sit down. I had a blast for three years. Enter, stage left, Chris Wiggins and Gretchen Wolf who bought the property, and spiffed it. It’s now Ruby June Inn.
We re-imagined the dinner series too, now called Chefs Collective. Today, it’s nine or more chefs who rotate through the summer, presenting a dinner every Saturday night from mid-June to mid-September.
How do folks like this new model, one that certainly takes away a lot of their choices – one seating at a specific time, no menu choices? Maybe some “weird” food they’ve never had before?
This year, the entire season sold out in 50 minutes.
Want tickets? Thankfully (for me) I only cook. You can get tickets by signing up at Ruby June Inn. You’ll get an email every time we offer tickets. The season is now expanding to year round, so get in line. Unlike Lost Kitchen, you don’t have to mail in a postcard.
Two passions: food, words. Some days, it’s a tug of war, some days, a peaceful coexistence.
Best day ever? Create it, cook it, eat it, write about it. I sold my restaurant, Nora’s Table, in 2015, and now I can be possessed by anything in the long day that I choose: writing 400 words, creating the next menu for the Chefs Collective at Ruby June Inn, teaching a cooking class at Jacob Williams Winery, or tromping through the fields with farmer Laurel Bouret.
A rainy afternoon with a foundational cookbook, such as Marlene Mater’s fabulous “Allepo Cookbook” or Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s “Charcuterie” can feed my spirit and spark my creative power. So can reading Maggie Shipstead, Michael Chabon or Alison Kraus.
I live in Hood River, Oregon, with Stuart, also known as the Happy Meal Man. In other words, all I can desire. And then there’s Satchel, our six-year old Idaho Shag who is simply the world’s best dog. We run together, and sometimes, we even let Stu join us.
Our oldest daughter Annie and grandson Levi live in Eugene, Oregon. Annie is cooking in restaurants, like her Mom. Son Max and his wife Hannah and our granddaughter Shiloh are in Portland, where he is a school principal. It’s a good tribe, all the way around.
