Even Taylor – headlining our Anniversary Party

Three years.

Sometimes it seems like a lot less, but usually (to me) it feels like a lot longer, for both positive and not-so-positive reasons.  I feel like Actual Cafe has become a fixture of the Golden Gate neighborhood, and we’ve accomplished much of what we set out to do here.  We’ve become a friendly gathering place for neighbors.  We’re serving great coffee and food.  We’re having interesting and eclectic events (art, music, literary, and other).  We’re not constantly reinventing everything – our systems are mature, our vendors are consistent, our equipment is debugged and generally works.  While there’s always room for improvement, and while constant improvement in a food business is necessary for its long-term viability, we’re in a pretty good place.   On the other hand, it’s been a tremendous amount of work, and I have had a lot of sleepless nights, along with a lack of time off and exercise, which makes three years seem more like 10.

[We're having a party to celebrate, today (Saturday March 23) from 6-10, with live music by our friends Even Taylor and Kim Tillman, along with new folks Genevieve Wolff, Arbielle, and Lindee Hoshikawa.  Beer, cupcakes, friends, and fun.  It's what we do.]

Victory Burger interior

On the horizon, we may experiment with casual table service at the cafe during dinner and brunch.  We’re also about to embark on an overhaul of the cafe menu – now that we have a burger shop next door, we need to refocus a bit.  We want to up our food and coffee game, narrow the menu, and continue to push more and better brunch and lunch specials, while keeping our prices accessible.  We’ve made some significant strides in cafe food and coffee in the past year – we took some things away (primarily our house baking, which got replaced with more Starter Bakery items) that allowed us to better focus on what we do really well, and push that forward.  Our soups and frittatas are better, we’ve done some really great brunch specials (and delicious lunch specials as well).  I’m looking forward to retiring a few menu items, and replacing them with some new ones that I hope everyone will be even more excited about.  We also have a new (to us) espresso machine en route – it should show up shortly.  It’s a heavily modded much more modern machine than the old Elektra we’ve been making your drinks on, and it will help us extract better flavors from our coffees, experiment with other beans, and get drinks made faster to get through our morning rushes better.  All these are good things.

Our parklet has been significantly delayed (sorry about that), mostly because of poor timing.  I expected to get the parklet permit in the very early part of last year, but didn’t actually have it until summertime, when I was already pulling permits for Victory Burger construction.  The construction project consumed all the time, energy, and money that would have gone into the parklet otherwise.  So instead of having a parklet done by last summer (before we started work on VB), instead we have nothing, and no firm plan to get it done.  I’m still focused on just smoothing out the restaurant operation before I take on any new projects, so it might be a bit longer before even a plan emerges.

And unfortunately, all this new stuff has taken some wear and tear on me personally.  I haven’t had a day off in several months, have been working a lot of  12 hour days, and we’ve been getting through the Victory launch mostly through sheer force of will on my part and on the part of lots of key folks on our crew (thanks, crew! you know who you are).  I feel like we’re on the back of that part of the project now, and things are starting to get a bit more controlled and predictable (of course, that might just be temporary), but either way, it needs to get that way soon.  I’m getting married to my lovely fiancee Gail in just three months, and she’s taken on more than her fair share of wedding planning because I’ve been unable to contribute much, so I have some make-up work to get back to something more even.  Also, we’re planning a few days away right after the wedding, and I need to be able to get myself out of here for a week to get married and take that time.  Three months seems like a really short time to work that out, but it’s necessary, so I will.

Short summary:
1) this stuff ain’t easy
2) we’re hustling
3) and we’re getting at least some things right
4) but there’s (always) still more to do

Thanks to all of you who have contributed in all the ways, large or small, to getting us here.  Thanks to all our regular customers who stuck with us as we figured things out, to our neighbors who always have nice things to say, to our crew who’s busted their collective ass to the moon and back a couple times, to the performers who have made beautiful evenings, the artists who have made our walls so interesting, and even more especially Gail, who is constantly supportive of me and gives great advice all the time.

luvya (like always),
sal & the actual crew

We got our final permit and pre-construction inspection this week for our parklet, and all signs are GO!

We’ve got our friend Wendell working on a frame for the base of the parklet, and we’re hoping to have the deck built and installed in just a few weeks.  We’ve got a bunch of benches, counters, planters, bike parking, etc. to build once the deck is in place, and we’ll be doing community open builds to get them done once the frame is in place…stay tuned.

Worldwide Park(ing) Day is September 21st, and we’re hoping to have the parklet in some usable state (probably not done, but at least partly done) by then.  Exciting? Youbetcha.

If you want to keep up with news of our parklet, follow Actual Cafe Parklet on the Facebook.

The East Bay Express has named Actual Cafe Best Cafe 2012 in their annual Best of the East Bay issue!

Thanks to our crew for doing such an awesome job!
Thanks to all our customers who love us (and say so)!
Thanks to everyone who voted for us in the Express Reader’s Poll!

Not a whole lot more to say here. We’ll keep doing what we do, and hope you all will continue to love us for it.

luvya,
sal and the entire Actual crew

Hey, Arbor Cafe!

We’re so jazzed for Team Bike Challenge in May (thanks to Trumer Brauerei!), that we think we ought to create an East Bay Bike Friendly Cafe subdivision.

We challenge you to a bike-off in May. We’ll use average miles per rider as our yardstick, so it’s fair.

If you win, we’ll treat your entire crew to beers and snacks at our place. If you lose, it’s only your pride at stake.

What say you? Team Bike Challenge, ahoy!

Trumer Brauerei has challenged Actual Cafe to compete in the Team/Company Bike Challenge during bike month this year, and we’ve accepted the challenge.  Trumer has added some twists to the competition, including our Trumer sales for the month as a factor (which you can all help us out with), but we’re pretty confident we can kick their butts even without the beer sales being factored in.  Our crew is about the same size as Trumer’s (they’re 16 and we’re 18), but a large number of our employees bike to work every day, and many don’t even own cars.

Because we need to form teams of no more than five riders, and we’ll all be competing in the Team Bike Challenge as teams on top of this company challenge, I’ve offered an additional incentive of $100 cash to the winning Actual Cafe team.

I’ve spent a lot of time making Actual Cafe bike friendly, and we’ve gotten lots of props for it.  Unfortunately, my own riding has fallen off substantially since having opened the cafe, and I’m glad that Trumer has given me the excuse to get my flabby ass back out on a bike more regularly.

We’ll post updates through the course of the month of May, but you can all track our progress and the competition at youcanbikethere.com.

Game on, Trumer!

-sal

Lots of really cool stuff in our Nerd/Cool show, and a great opening last night. Sorry I didn’t get a chance to post a preview before the opening, but better late than never, right?

We’ve got another great group show coming up in April. It’s called Nerd/Cool, and it’s packed full of great artists, including Jen Oaks, Maggie Hurley, Beca Irizarry, Steven Chunn, and Billy Darr. Drawing on video games, scifi, comics, and the more fun post-apocalypse, Nerd/Cool is really just kinda awesome…see for yourself.

Hey, kids.

We’ve been working for a while now on our new wordpress site – I’ve spent dozens of my own hours massaging content and migrating blog posts from our old blog and art blog, creating new promotional slides for events, updating and formatting our menu for the site, and on and on.  It’s been a fairly big project, in the middle of a couple other big projects, but worth it, I think.

The new site gives us lots of capabilities that we didn’t have before: it allows us to prominently feature events and other announcements, and keep them sticky (unlike facebook, or twitter, which make it really easy to miss what’s going on if you don’t happen to be glued to your monitor).  It gives us a text version of our menu, which makes it easier to search and to update.  It brings our two blogs together in the main site content, and gives more control about how they appear.  It’s easier to modify layout and content in general.  I can create and maintain new pages without hand-coding or getting a programmer involved.  This means I can focus on things that I’m better at.  Wordpress seems like a good platform to do this, and I’m generally happy with how the site looks and functions.

The graphic design of the site still owes much to the original design done by eshutter creative, and the bulk of the wordpress migration was done by our customer, David, of colorgrooves.  Thanks to both of them for their help.

I hope you like the new site.  If you find any problems (bad links, things that just don’t look right, etc.), please let me know.

back to my day job…
-sal