I know there has been a bit of time between posts on my Chicago trip and I am sorry. I will conclude the recap of my trip home soon.
But this is big!
Yesterday was kind of a crappy day. It was the first day for the city of Philadelphia to feel the effects of hurricane Hannah. It was hot and muggy. The sky looked like it was going to burst with rain at any moment. This made the kitchen unbearable. It was sooooo hot. No one wanted to do anything. We were dreading having to make brunch. Sarah started telling me about stories of the last place she worked at and how the transformer blew up one night and how they all had to tie flashlights to their heads so they could see what they were cooking. I told her about at my last place the heat didn't work for an entire winter and I'd have to cook with the hood off and the kitchen doors open with fans pulling the heat out of the kitchen into the dinning room and the staff would come in to warm their hands over the grill.
I went down to the basement to cool off and start working on some desserts. When I came back upstairs to get a sheet pan all I could smell was burning. I
asked Mel... our resident fuck up that should have been fired months ago... what he burned this time and if he took it out to the trash. The smell was so strong I didn't want it to get into the dinning room. He said, "It's not me. The building is on fire. Don't make that ticket that table left."
WHAT?!!! Sarah came into the kitchen from the dinning room and said, "The building is on fire so we are telling all of the customers they have to leave." WHAT? WHERE? HOW? HUH?! I was only in the basement for 5 minutes when did all of this happen? Then there are sirens and a fireman told the manager up font that we had to leave the building too. I went and got my phone from my locker. Asked Mel if he pulled the potatoes out of the oven, he said he turned all the ovens off and the stoves too. Grabbed my drink and we went outside. There were 7 fire trucks out there. they had Market St blocked from 4th to 2nd and 3rd St blocked from Chestnut to Arch.
We sat on the steps of the restaurant across the street and watched everything unfold. There is a restaurant on the corner of Market and 3rd called Pizzicato. Connected to Pizzicato is a place called Bijou which is a private party space and bar owned by Pizzicato. There are offices and apartments above them. Farmicia, my restaurant is in a separate building but is attached to the other building. Smoke was billowing out of the windows and coming from the roof above Bijou. The air was full of smoke and ashes were falling from the sky. We sat and waited. Radio and TV news people came and started asking questions and interviewing people. I got cornered by one of the radio people. I said that I didn't see anything and she moved on to someone else. We heard saws, timbers breaking, saw smoke and people coming out of the building. The staff of Pizzicato started to show up and were in shock at what they saw. The fire fighters got it under control, put out the fire and started to clean up.
We were allowed to go back inside. By now we only had 2 hours of brunch left and weren't sure how long it would take for the fire fighters to clean up and open the streets back up. When we got back inside I fond that Mel had only shut off his stove and his oven. Everything else was still on. Potatoes were burnt. Fuckin' Mel! I should have known better than to believe him. Brunch went on. Everything else was ok... until it started raining.
Then, the basement flooded. A pipe broke and water was flowing into the basement like water from a fire hydrant on a hot city day. Sarah tried to fix it, running back and forth from the hardware store down the street. It got to the point where she just had to give up and wait for it to stop raining before it could be fixed. When I left there was about 4 inches of water on the basement floor. And the heaviest rain came later that afternoon after I had gone home.
What a day.
