Having My Cake and Eating None of It: My Life as a Ramen Baron

I'm living the C-Suite dream over here.  I'm a CEO, people.  Sitting atop my ramen empire, printing money, golden parachute in place if the Board of Directors pushes me out of the fast casual airplane.  Damn, I'm living the life, you know?

OK, reader, I'll level with you.  I wouldn't want you to give you the wrong idea.  After all, Ramen Chemistry is committed to the transparency of the experience.  So let me try again.  Yes, I am a CEO.  No, I do not have an empire, I have a (very busy) kiosk.  If by "printing money" you mean "signing checks," then yes, I am printing a lot of money.  Obviously, there is no golden parachute, although as Chairman of the Board, my risk of dismissal is relatively low. And when I say "I'm living the life," what I really mean is "I have no life."  

Like really, I have no life.  I think I only leave the house to go to and from preschool.  I've been subsisting for weeks on a four-pound bag of M&Ms from Costco.  My existence is just an endless cycle of putting out little fires, office work, childcare, and power naps.  All from the isolated dual-screen comfort of my home office!  I don't even have time to go to work.  Who has two hours to spend in bus transit everyday?  

Shiba Ramen.  I don't actually come here very much.  Gravitational forces keep me pulled toward the home office, pretty much all the time.  

Living From One Power Nap to the Next

Daily routine goes something like this:  I wake up.  I dress and feed a three-year-old child, make said child's lunch and collect sharing toys.  We go to preschool.  I return home, make coffee and eat cereal, put on my lawyer hat, bear down, and spend the whole day drafting briefs, stipulations, emails, and meticulously recording my activities in six-minute increments.  Possibly, I take a power nap.  Late in the afternoon, I return to preschool and collect a napless and ecstatically needy toddler, who I then entertain/hold at bay for several hours, while trying to finish whatever lawyer work still needs to be done, clean the house, make dinner, etc.  

My wife, you see, has been working late in a hot new ramen shop almost every night for the past 3 months.  When she gets home, beer is opened and we finally eat.  The toddler is still awake, happily going about the business of watching shows and demanding snacks.  At maybe 10, we finally put him to bed.  Then I put on my CEO hat and do Shiba Ramen.  At some point I probably eat ice cream.  Or more cereal.  Weekends aren't much different; the lawyer work is just replaced with childcare, vacuuming dog hair, and running errands for Shiba Ramen.  Is it any wonder that I've taken too-frequent refuge in fast food, or that I bought myself a box of Lucky Charms (magically delicious!) as a completely transparent coping device?  Actually, two boxes of Lucky Charms.

At Least We Can Still Enjoy Physics!  A trip to one of our favorite places, the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, while mom was at work.

Running an Empire (With a Noticeable Limp)

I'm sure you've had the feeling at some point in your life that you are doing so many things that it's impossible to do any one of them well.  That's where I am right now.  There are certain things I can't avoid--my day job and childcare--those have to be handled before anything else can happen.  A lawyer can't drop the ball for his clients (or his employer), and a dad can't give his kid short shrift during the middle of a huge life change, especially when mom has been devoured by the restaurant monster the two of you created instead of going in for the (admittedly more traditional) second human child.  

Shiba Ramen gets whatever is left over at the end of the day.  On many days, that isn't much. And there are plenty of Shiba things that, like my day job, can't be avoided.  I've got to staff the restaurant, deal with employee issues, run payroll, and so on.  So most of the time all I can manage is the bare minimum; whatever has to be done to keep the business functioning seamlessly.  The fun stuff, the stuff directed to growing the business--marketing, social media, writing a blog--necessarily takes a back seat.  But when you're trying to pull off this kind of juggling act, knowing your limits is essential.  If something isn't urgent, it waits.

Solace comes from the fact that all this is consistent with expectations, more or less.  We knew opening a restaurant would be pretty brutal, that Hiroko would be at the shop all the time, at least for a few months.  Not that it's possible to be fully prepared for the effect of something like this on your day-to-day life.  It definitely isn't.  You just have to assume it's going to be painful, that the details will fill themselves in as the adventure unfolds, and that you'll adjust. Like by going part-time at work, which I actually did last month to create enough space in life for all the childcare I wasn't doing three months ago.

Action.  The staff is coming together nicely.

The Future of the Ramen Barony

I don't mean to sound all doom-and-gloom.  Far from it.  Objectively things are going great. We've survived the worst perils of restaurant opening.  Despite having our share of hiccups in the first six weeks, our concept has gotten a great reception in the local food press (East Bay Express, KQED Bay Area Bites, East Bay Monthly), we're putting out well over 200 bowls of ramen a day, quality control is improving, and there are tons of repeat customers. We seem to have navigated the worst of putting a functioning staff together and, although we're still bringing on and training some new folks, we're developing a great core of competent and motivated workers.  We have almost twenty employees now, only two of whom were with us on Day One in December.  Seems crazy for what is technically a "kiosk" in a food court, but that's actually what it takes to put out a serious volume of high-quality made-to-order ramen seven days a week, lunch and dinner. At least it is when a lot of people are still in training.  

We're getting to the point where the right people are taking on positions of responsibility at Shiba Ramen, which means Hiroko can get out of the kitchen and spend her time living up to the only-half-joking title we've given her: Vice President of Product Development and Quality Control.  She's also the company's CFO and, as I often tell people, she's more of a QuickBooks person anyway.  And that's the point: as mom-and-pop as this whole enterprise seems today, this isn't a mom-and-pop business model. Shiba Ramen needs to be able to operate without either of us being in the store all the time.  We can only go where we want to go with this business--multiple outlets over a broad geographic space--if other people can run the day-to-day.  

Before that, though, I'll settle for some relief from changing diapers.  I'm confident help is on the way.

Up next, I'll explain how we took our operations from their oh-so-tenuous December days to today's place of optimism.

When the Portal Opens, Walk In, Don't Look Back: The Lights Go on at Shiba Ramen

Last month, after a seemingly endless amount of planning, waiting, and theorizing, the lights went on at Shiba Ramen.  One day, the whole project still was on paper for us.  Daily life was the routine of a salaryman dad and a stay-home mom, increasingly interrupted by meetings and paperwork, but otherwise business as usual.  The next day, in an instant, the world turned upside down.  It was like a portal to an alternate reality opened up and swallowed us whole.  Then, of course, the portal closed permanently.  It's a one way thing.  We own this thing, and vice versa.  Life is Shiba Ramen.

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The World Turned Upside Down. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, 1559.

The Long Windup  

Door to door, it took us 17 months to get from the moment of conception to the moment the lights went on at Shiba Ramen. Considering we were restaurant nobodies at the start, and considering the plodding realities of design and construction, 17 months is really pretty good.  Day to day, though, it felt like things were going in slow motion most of the time.  How could it not?  It gets to the point where everything is in place on your end; you're just waiting on a million other people to get their jobs done.  In situations like this, waiting is a real killer.  All you can do is sit there burning up inside, offering up occasional sacrifices to the twin gods of Negligence and Delay.  

This sense of endless transition was most acute during the 3+ months of construction.  The experience is one of periodic bursts of rapid transformation, followed by weeks where nothing seems to happen at all.  During the former, you think--Great Scott!--this is really about to happen.  During the latter, it's hard to imagine that anything ever will.  Your ideas have begun to take on physical shape, but the whole thing nevertheless remains in the abstract.  Except, of course, the contractor's bills.  Those are really quite real.

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Um, no, it isn't like Top Ramen.  You are not hired.  

While We Were Waiting: Getting Employees

So if this wasn't already clear, we had absolutely no idea when we'd be able to move into our space.  We had an estimate, evolving ever further into the future.  Our job was to find a collection of employees, all to start around the same time, on some date uncertain, two weeks or two months in the future.  The employment market in this business is really fluid; people don't start job searches months before they're planning to make a move.  They want (or need) a job now.  We didn't want to hire too early, or people might get tired of waiting around. Nor did we want to risk not having a staff when we opened.  

We'd never hired employees or opened a restaurant before, so you can bet this state of affairs was a bit nervewracking for us, especially when we realized how hard it was to find good cooks. The national cook shortage is an actual thing!  We spent a lot of time looking at resumes, talking to candidates, figuring out what we needed and how much we should be paying for it.  We always met with people at the construction site, so that they would get that the job was for real, and was probably not that far off.

This part of the startup experience was definitely the most alien.  This is not fall OCI at Boalt Hall School of Law, I can assure you. I had a kitchen manager candidate ask me if our food is "like Top Ramen."  More than once a candidate just flaked on the interview. They don't write, they don't call, and they certainly don't answer your texts.  "Hey, it's Jake from Shiba Ramen.  I'm here for our meeting. Are you coming?"  One guy showed up to the interview with the papers from some criminal case he was involved with. He told me all about it, in great detail, assuming I understood everything he told me because I'm a lawyer.  I didn't understand a word that came out of his mouth.     

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December 4, 2015: Portal Opens

The contractor scheduled our portal to open at noon on December 4, 2015.  This is when the portal's gatekeeper, the county health inspector, was able to fit Shiba Ramen into his schedule. We were on edge when he showed up.  Who knew if he'd flag us for some arbitrary shortcoming, one we couldn't anticipate having never been through this before?   We couldn't bring so much as a chopstick into our space until he signed off.

When he arrived, his first act was to look upward, disapprovingly, at the wood finish above our counter.  These guys are really sensitive about how wood is used around food.  He remembered we'd talked to him about it last summer, and even though he'd signed off, there still seemed to be misgivings.  I told him we'd taken out the planned counter water dispenser at his direction (no water vapor under a wood ceiling!).  So he responds (incorrectly) "but now you're wasting all this space" on the counter.  He suggested that we put up a sneeze guard and a clear plastic sheet over the wood and "sell some pastries."  He was quite insistent about the pastries, as a matter of fact.  I politely explained that we're a Japanese noodle restaurant, and that we don't plan to sell pastries.  To which he responded, "I'm just trying to help you.  That's what I do.  I try to help people."  After that, the tension eased up a bit.  He stuck his hand in the hot water to see if it was hot enough to be up to code: "yeah, that's hot; I know hot water."  Then he told us that he "really likes our kitchen."  And that was it.  Approved.  

Moments later, our first employee showed up and we got to business stocking the kitchen.  The next morning, I got donuts and did an orientation for the nine employees we'd hired in the fall.  In the afternoon we got down to business in the kitchen.  Little did I know, five of those people wouldn't last a month.  Three were gone within a week.  Today, six weeks in, we have around fifteen employees.  The storyteller in me thinks there might be some wonderful details in there amid all the crazy.  I'll get to work on that. 

The Thirteenth Labor of Hercules: Getting a California Alcohol License

ABC.  The California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.  Now here is a government instrumentality that appears to exist solely for the sake of self-perpetuation.  Sort of like a virus.  Although it's not quite clear what socially useful function ABC is performing, taxpayers can rest assured that whatever the function, it is being performed with maximum inefficiency.  Here in the nation of the War on Drugs (sigh), it's no surprise that we have a massive state machinery in place to regulate the sale of alcohol.  See also, e.g., Prohibition.

Our purpose seems innocuous enough: to sell beer in a Japanese restaurant.  But if you think a short license application and a fee would be enough to make that happen, you are sorely underestimating the capacity of the state bureaucracy to make work for you and, by extension, for itself.  I'm laughing right now because I thought I just heard you ask if any of the process can be done online.

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The Twelve Labors of Hercules.  Roman relief, 3rd century AD.  Getting a license to sell beer in the State of California is about as daunting, and probably less pleasant, than cleaning the Augean Stables.  

Behold the Bureaucratic Plunder, and Tremble  

This process typically starts with a trip to the local ABC office so they can tell you exactly what documents you need to file.  This is actually what ABC recommends you do.  They realize their scheme is so opaque, complex, random, and unrefined that they need to explain it to you in person. So that's what you're dealing with.

I had the pleasure of a trip to the Oakland ABC office (my first of three).  It's up on the 21st floor of a State office building downtown. The waiting room feels just like a doctor's office, except instead of jungle animals and Highlights magazine, there's a huge case of confiscated drug paraphernalia.  Cocaine, meth, PCP, pills, tinctures, bongs, scales.  The works.  All looking especially downcast, like some kind of junkie time capsule that had been filled in 1988 and sealed tight ever since.  Naturally, I took a picture.

I dinged a bell and a rather immense and stone-faced man came to the window.  I told him I wanted a Type 41 license for On-Sale Beer and Wine.  I immediately explained the circumstance that we're a kiosk in a food hall, because you know that's going to throw up about 100 red flags.  That being the intermingling of multiple alcohol licenses covering the same space.  He told me that I'd either have to license the entire food hall just for Shiba Ramen, or else I'd have to license particular tables for our use.  Wait, what? That means either I'm the only tenant in this big place that can serve alcohol, or else I have to find a way to shunt every alcohol-buying customer to a specific table?  That just doesn't make any sense.  

The same guy (I think) had said the same thing on the phone a few days earlier, when I'd first called for info.  So'd I'd done my own research before I went in.  Issued alcohol licenses are searchable online, so I looked up the prior Public Market tenants (multiple licenses) and the Westfield in San Francisco (multiple licenses).  When I told him that there are currently a bunch of licenses issued at the Westfield, and that they have no seating restrictions, he tried to tell me "well, that's San Francisco."  That, of course, is not how things work.  This is a matter of State law, not of local municipal fiefdoms.  

He obliged me and went and talked to someone deep in the warren of cubicles behind the (bulletproof?) glass.  He emerged a changed man, talking good sense and (much to his credit) admitting he'd been wrong about the rules.  Now we just had to prepare a map of the food hall interior and mark the areas where we proposed to serve alcohol.  Reasonable.

He then pulled out a multi-page checklist of forms and manually checked off every one of over fifteen items items I needed to fill out for the Type 41.  It seems we're having a scavenger hunt!  Out came a printing calculator, very old school, and he typed up a receipt for all the various fees I'd incur for this application.  Just short of $800.  

Off I went, forms in hand, pen at the ready!  Filling them out turned into some strangely protracted process, inputting the same bits of basic information again and again, page after page.  It took hours over several sittings to actually get everything in order, filled out completely.  Proudly, I returned in person to ABC (take no chances!) and dropped off my package, and my $800.  

This Isn't Even Everything.  Submission 1 (left), submission 2 (right) in assembly.  With shibas.  

You Didn't Think This Was Over, Did You?

About two weeks later, I received a letter from the investigator assigned to our application.  Included was another seventeen-item checklist of new forms to fill out and new actions to take.  Including posting a notice outside Public Market for 30 days, mailing a letter to every resident within 500 feet (hire a vendor to do this for you), FBI fingerprinting, and giving ABC a ton of financial information: personal bank records and company bank records to demonstrate every dollar of money being invested in Shiba Ramen, corporate resolutions, tax records, share ledgers and stock certificates.  

Apparently ABC is terribly, terribly worried about money being laundered through California's restaurant alcohol sales?  Or what? Do you realize that ABC needed more detailed financials about us than did our landlord, our lenders, or anybody else in this entire enterprise? Spectacularly invasive and totally over the top.  And if the concern is money laundering, has anybody over at ABC (or at the State Assembly, where the laws are made, for that matter) watched Breaking Bad, the show that taught America how to launder money through a car wash?  

I ended up spending even more time on the second submission than the first.  I returned once again to ABC, said hello to the crack pipes on display in the waiting room, and handed over all sorts of seemingly irrelevant and highly confidential documents to the government.  

Finally, after some weeks, I got another letter in the mail.  Mercifully, no new checklist.  Instead, I was informed that I would need to petition for a "Conditional License," due to an "undue concentration" of alcohol licenses in the relevant census tract.  Because issuance of an unrestricted license under these circumstances would be adverse to the "public welfare and morals," extra restrictions must be placed on ours.  I'm assuming that it doesn't take much to reach an undue concentration, or to threaten public morals.  Emeryville is not some kind of red light district, for pete's sake, nor is it in danger of becoming one any time in the foreseeable future.  Anyway, I signed this thing.  It seemed pretty much non-negotiable.

Money Laundering.  Is a Japanese restaurant really the best way to do this?  TV suggests otherwise.  

You Didn't Think This Was Over, Did You? Part II

Some time passed after signing the Conditional License petition, but no license arrived.  So I called the assigned investigator, who told me that ABC was still waiting for info from me.  Strangely (or not), I had never been notified that there were still holes in Shiba Ramen's application.  After all this, what in the world could the government still need?  Well, it turned out that we hadn't perfectly dotted all the i's in our financial submission.  See, one of the things ABC requires you to do is to tell it how much money you're investing in your business, and then prove that you have every penny of whatever figure you provide.  Of course, before your business is open, before you've even started construction, you have no idea how much money you're investing, so it's essentially an exercise in pulling a number out of a hat.  ABC never verifies the actual amount you invest, mind you, but if you say you're investing $100K, you'd better be able to source $100K.  

The problem, of course, is that if your company has been spending money on startup expenses, money that has been invested has been spent, and it isn't sitting placidly in a bank account awaiting inspection by the government.  In our case, I think we had $10-20K less in the collective accounts than our stated investment amount.  Careful lawyer that I am, I had recognized this problem in advance and had submitted a cover letter with all of our financials, explaining this (completely natural and expected) disparity, and inviting ABC to contact me with questions.  Naturally, the cover letter was ignored and I was left to wonder why our application had stalled.  The investigator told me to go back and cobble together bank statements from the past year showing the movement of the company's money.  Good lord, really?  Fortunately I was able to trot out a recently-obtained line of credit and short-circuit the required financial reconstruction.  New sources of $$$!

At Last, Beer Is Served

The last box to be checked is the physical inspection by the ABC investigator.  Once construction is finished, the investigator came out and took a look.  Yep, this is a bona fide Japanese restaurant, not some kind of dubious Albuquerque car wash.  Let beer be sold!

And so, a good six months after submitting our initial application, Shiba Ramen was anointed with a Type 41 On-sale Beer & Wine license.  We have three draft beers on tap, a permanent stationing of Sapporo, and a rotating selection of Bay Area craft beers. This week, we're featuring outstanding beer from Novato's Baeltane and Berkeley's Fieldwork.  Oakland's Linden Street was on tap last week, and will be arriving again soon, and we'll be looking to roll out a keg from Alameda's Faction Brewery in the next few weeks.  Over in the fridge, we're serving canned Japanese craft beer, including the super-popular Belgian-style Wednesday's Cat, and sake.    

Please come drink.  

p.s. This post is not intended to point any fingers at the individual employees of ABC who, after all, are just doing their jobs.  The problem with ABC is systemic, policy-driven, and ultimately political.  

Images of Construction

We're having an unexpected lull this week at Shiba Ramen HQ.  We've been building since August, and were set for our final health inspection tomorrow.  But construction, it turns out, is fraught with perils at every turn!  Shocking, I know.  Milestones are serially contingent on the occurrence of earlier milestones, so one missed deadline can set off a cascade of delays later in the schedule.  At the end of last week, we learned that two subcontractors missed deadlines, delaying our fire inspection by 10 days (perfect Thanksgiving timing), in turn delaying the building inspection, in turn delaying the health inspection.  Damn you unwelded duct!  

Most other things being reasonably in order, we can at least enjoy Thanksgiving.  It's also a rare opportunity these days to devote time to Ramen Chemistry.  There is really a lot of stuff to talk about, a million things are happening.  Existing only on paper just a few months ago, today Shiba Ramen is almost alive.  I'm looking forward to writing about everything from finding employees to our bad (but very illuminating) experiences with service contractors.  And pretty much everything at this point is a legal issue, in one sense or another.  So, yes, much to discuss.

For the moment, I'm laying low and conserving energy.  A lot of work at the home office, newly outfitted with a dual screen and laser printer, I am pleased to add.  But there isn't time for serious writing.  Instead, I've assembled a collection of images from three months of restaurant construction at Emeryville Public Market.  Really an amazing transformation.  Design work by Oakland's Misa Grannis, and signage/wood fabrication by San Francisco's LMNOP Design. CCI from San Francisco is the general contractor running the construction itself. 

In a week or two, I'll be able to post the finished product.  It's kind of unbelievable.  Check it out.  

Ramen Chemistry Underwater: Shiba Ramen Crunch Time Status Update

Ramen Chemistry, have you been on vacation? You don’t call (not that you ever really did), and you certainly don’t write. The Internet says it needs more real-time chronicling of restaurant startup minutiae! Come back!

Well, when things get crazy, the blog is the first thing to go. So you can tell the Internet that Ramen Chemistry has a mortgage and he needs to put food on the table, not to mention that he has to subsidize birthday parties at Children’s Fairyland and trips to Train Town. In other words, Ramen Chemistry has a day job that provides necessary things like “money.” The old day job is busier than at any point in the past two years.  Cases are coming out of the woodwork.  Rather inconvenient, to say the least.  

And then there's that other thing going on.  Shiba Ramen is opening soon!  Like really shockingly soon, especially given the amount of buildup.  So Ramen Chemistry is busy performing tasks all and sundry, converting that day job money into an untold array of goods and services.  Contributing to the economy!  And after all that making and spending of money (how’s that balance sheet, anyway?) there still has to be time to hit Train Town, ride the rides, feed the llamas, etc.

As people are fond of saying in our American Cult[ure] of Work, Ramen Chemistry is underwater. Deep, deep underwater. But here on the NX1 bus from SF to Oakland, I’m finding a few minutes to bubble a Shiba Ramen update to the surface. . . 

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Progress. It Creeps Up On You.

Things are happening, people. After that long slow march toward a set of construction plans and the selection of a contractor, Shiba Ramen is really on the verge of being a real functioning thing. A week ago, the space was still ringed with metal studs. A few days later, it had walls and a ceiling. Now equipment is starting to arrive for installation and finishes are just about to go in.  Tomorrow Hiroko will spend the day supervising the tile subcontractor while they install our awesome Japanese tiles.  

What all of this means is that we’re going to have a functioning ramen restaurant in the very near future. Subject, of course, to avoiding unexpected troubles—particularly with respect to the parade of bureaucrats who will have to anoint us with their blessings before we can be up and running. When it comes to bureaucrats, it’s natural—and necessary—to assume the worst.  But realistically, this thing isn't far off.

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What We're Doing Now

Our involvement with construction has been fairly minimal—I have a weekly meeting with the GC on site, and I field questions when issues arise (example: health department is mandating a seemingly way-too-powerful hot water heater that does not fit in the space we’ve allocated). We’re spending our time running down a somewhat terrifying list of startup tasks.  Here's a bit of what's going on.  

The top priority is to hire an entire staff to operate this place 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. Read: post jobs, screen/interview/make offers to applicants, onboard them, train them, and do everything in compliance with California employment law.  Among the million different things we've had to do to organize this business, this is the most foreign and the most terrifying.  Incidentally, last week I was musing about the surprising lack of cook applicants. The same day, the New York Times put out a piece about the national shortage of cooks. Fabulous. Really.

And then we're ordering everything, meeting with accountants, getting QuickBooks and our point of sale system up and running, launching the website, designing and ordering t-shirts, finalizing the menu.  The list goes on.  

Is anybody ready to eat some ramen yet?

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