minis en route for pizza… a half ton of fun

the gainesville/ ocala mini cooper club came to see us last saturday. one of them sent me this photo of them “on their way…”

on another note, i am happy to report that the new oven/ movie premiere/ school carnival/ things have passed in good time… all were a success and i feel like i have emerged on the other side triumphant. what more could i ask for really?

thursday night kicked our collective butts but friday night we pretty much won out. i would have never imagined i could put out a 10 large pie order on a friday night at 6:45pm, and not make any other customers suffer in the process… i even told the kind fellow i spoke with that we had no choice but to make 5 at 6:45 and 5 more at 7:20… and then somehow a small window opened up and the last one came out at 6:45 on the nose. all 10, hot. but you see, the philosophy department at UF has been a good customer of ours for years now, and if i wanted to impress anyone, it’d be the philosophers, right?

actually i have a crew to thank who helped me realize my dream oven scenario… and tonight, when we added up the weights of the 4 pizza guys tonight, we had 999 pounds of pure pizza power perfection.

March 27th, 2009 | very nice, work life | Tags: | Comments Off

tim bryant

one of our funny and clever employees, tim, wrote a serious song but he let me poke fun at it by making this music video. it came on the ipod one night and the kitchen guys were saying how great it would be to see tim singing it all serious and emotional out on the prairie or someplace. so tim and i met up one day and made this video. sorta funny, especially if you know tim.

March 26th, 2009 | work life | Tags: | 0 Comments

here we go…

THREE ovens?! lightnin’ salvage the movie?! the beach?! man oh man. sometimes i wish this was a place i could really talk about something.
work is awesome. we are busy as ever. the place is humming along like an air compressor. the pies are crispy like a krispy kreme doughnut. and i heard a rumor that krispy kreme and wendy’s were going out of business. could this be true? i guess i could live without a frosty but could i live without a krispy kreme doughnut? maybe i need to go buy doughnuts more often. i need a chocolate iced right now.

i am a happy man. always anxious about the anvil that must be already on its way to my head, but a happy man nonetheless.

i’ve studied the issue about as much as i could… there doesn’t seem to be that great an argument for yes on 1. (ammendment to vote on march 24.) i don’t live in the city limits so i won’t vote, but looks like the whole bathroom issue is empty as a bank owned house… a vote no on 1 will surely be a step in a positive direction for civil rights.

the good news is that we get to make up our own minds. i don’t even get to vote but i’m trying to pay attention to these things…

thanks gainesville. i love this place

March 21st, 2009 | Uncategorized | Tags: | Comments Off

st. aug

i love the beach… helps me get away from all my work work work and hear the waves and clear my head and relax…

March 19th, 2009 | home life, work life | Tags: | 0 Comments

klezmer and gatornationals

the photo today is the kelzmer kats playing at lightnin’ salvage this past wednesday night. i do love the klezmer kats. they spill out of out tiny stage, they glitter, the entertain, they make me happy.
gatornationals? well, that’s the yearly race happening at gainesville raceway. we had the gatornational people in tonight and i am going to break it down for you for real right now…. i actually think i made more all meat pies tonight than i have in the past year combined. i made pie after pie after pie of pepperoni, steak, meatball, bacon. beef, ham, bacon, steak, steak, bacon, sausage, pepperoni… it was amazing. i even had 6 cases of bud light on hand and we probably went through most of it. friday night was less busy than we expected but still a 45 min – 1 hour wait, saturday night was the usual kick my ass sort of night and i am just pining for that third oven that we will get very soon…

the pies looked great. people were happy, all except that one cheese slice that came back and the customer said it looked old and bad… now that made me mad. they hadn’t even tasted it and they said it looked “50 minutes old”, i was told by the server. that would have been the best cheese slice they ever bit into if they gave it a chance. they must have never seen carmelized cheese on a slice in their short life… they must be the domino’s sort of pizza eater. i was mad. but, i made them a new slice with extra cheese, which obviously looked fresher and newer, even if it does sit like a brick in their stomach. i should lighten up, i know. it takes time to educate some people about good pizza.

by the way, if i haven’t mentioned it already… the movie night is march 22nd, at my house, 8:30pm. for employees, former employees and close friends.

March 15th, 2009 | work life | Tags: | Comments Off

work work work work work

i closed two days a week so i could keep going. i need the break in the action, the lull in the storm. the great part is getting two days off in a row, the bad part is that sometimes i STILL have to work those days too. sunday i did a mosaic tile project with my family and ruthie’s family out by the treehouse, and joe was there innoculating 150 shitake logs… and monday i did a few repairs that all got bigger and now will carry me over through the week finishing…
i love it. i love to work. i love to be good at what i do. i love the challenge of it. speaking of challenges, saturday night really delivered me one. saturday was the 6 year anniversary of Satchel’s and i was remembering that first night, a friday and 2 tables, and how lonely it was and how i wished i was home with my family… and 6 years later i’ve got 8 deep dish in the bottom oven at the same time, slowing down cooking to a crawl, and i am rotating them all through the paces to get them to finish cooking in the back right where they will carmelize… and moving pies from the top down to finish them and make room for more in the top… and we sent out an hour deep dish, and i knew we could have sent it out quicker if the take out that should have been skipped would have been skipped, and i lost it.

that’s the thing, it’s harder today than it was when i was dead and lonely. it’s harder because it’s still so challenging and humbling and hard. it’s supposed to get easier isn’t it?

the painting is cumberlin island as done by my friend brent. i love this painting. it hangs in my room where i see it every day.

March 9th, 2009 | work life | Tags: | Comments Off

movie update

hold the tux rental…
call the limo rental and suspend your date…

lightnin’ salvage the movie has a possible new date and a new cinema… due to technical difficulties, and contractual awareness, the new plan is to show the movie under the stars with jeff’s projector and screen, at my house, at a date to be revealed.

come to find out, tina couldn’t make it, john orth couldn’t make it… and a sunday is a much better movie release date than monday, so the hope is to find a date when key people can come, and to do what caroline has been arguing for all along, the movie party in the yard.

so now you know.

what? you want to see a picture?

in these troubling times, we need to be flexible, like rubber bands, why look here what rubber bands can do?

March 8th, 2009 | work life | Tags: | Comments Off

ny times

hey hey, lucky us to get mentioned in the ny times today. the resident artist for LSE, john, is in New York and gets a paper and calls me, “hey, Satchel’s is mentioned in the NY times today” “you mean the paper on every corner of the city?” i ask? “actually, every city in the nation…”

wow. that’s cool. in case you missed it, it was a full page spread on visiting gainesville in the escape section and i have copied the paragraph about us here:
After such a contemplative day, you might want to channel your inner college student once more. Do that at Satchelâ€™s Pizza, where Satchel Raye has created a restaurant/toy and magic trick garage/live music space and boccie court that is a far cry from Dominoâ€™s. In an out-of-the-way neighborhood and ornamented with all manner of gewgaws, Satchelâ€™s requires a certain adventurous spirit, but the restaurant is surprisingly congenial and the pizza and salads justly famous. With luck, youâ€™ll snag a table in the 1965 Ford Falcon van permanently moored out front. Your order may take a while, but in this town, thereâ€™s always one topic to kick around while you wait: How â€™bout those Gators?

the article was well written except for one small flaw in the last sentence.. it’s “how ’bout THEM gators” but you can’t expect out-of-towners to know everything.

the website was even listed so i checked to see if we had a spike in traffic to our site, but as of 2pm today, it still looks normal, which is about 100 hits a day.

had a pretty big problem wednesday night with the ovens… there were more than a few pies sent out that were sub-par, but i had worked 7am – 5:30 and didn’t get the memo until thursday morning and the problems have now been fixed. we even had a table walk out i heard. this is sad news. on the bright side i did get a new oven yesterday which will be helping us out a lot, as soon as we get it hooked up, which may be a while… but in the meantime we are good to go, but soon we will be super duper good to go, but i just can’t get into all the details here…if you got a bad pie wednesday night please let us make it up to you and sorry.

i have two favorite quotes from the times article… i love where the author says i have created a restaurant/toy and magic trick garage… what is a trick garage? i’ll tell you what, it’s lightnin’ salvage. and the other part i liked is that she said the van was permanently “moored” out front, that’s cute.

March 6th, 2009 | work life | Tags: | 1 Comment

blog readers know more

this invite only movie will be showing for the employees of satchel’s/ LSE. you are probably the first person to ever see the poster.

the film was saved thanks to danny lore of LSE, and his friend steve:

i’m working on the oven situation… new oven vs. a third oven… it’s complicated. my brain hurts from thinking about it so much. my neck has a kink from talking on the phone too much, trying to use my hands instead of hold the phone….

keep the movie on the down lo – it’s an employee party thing.

March 3rd, 2009 | work life | Tags: | Comments Off

satchblog

Archive for March 2009

minis en route for pizza… a half ton of fun

tim bryant

here we go…

st. aug

klezmer and gatornationals

work work work work work

movie update

ny times

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