Handling situations on the floor with customers and more.
We are living in uncertain times. Running a bar in a pandemic is one of the biggest challenges we’ve ever faced as an industry. As restaurants and bars across the world are being forced to close or pivot to pickup and delivery sales only, many are struggling to survive. One of those bars is Paper Plane in San Jose, Calif. in a county that has seen both the earliest and highest numbers of COVID-19 cases in the state.
My guest today is Mary Palac, bartender at paper plane. She’s been in the industry since she was 15 and holds such accolades as Season 7 Ms. Speed rack California, two time Bar Mania champion, president and founding member of USBG Silicon Valley, and much more. She’s been a huge inspiration to me, and she had a lot to share about how she and Paper Plane are handling this crisis.
One of the things that impressed me the most about Paper Plane was how they didn’t react immediately and they instead took the time to do things right, and that’s really paid off for them. With circumstances changing daily, it’s really important to slow down a little bit and do things safely and correctly.
If you’d like to help Mary and her colleagues at Paper Plane, you can donate to their employee relief fund, or order food and cocktails to go from their Tri Force menu.
Check out our conversation in the player or wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to visit our homepage for much, much more. Thanks so much for listening, stay safe out there and I’ll see you next time.
Hospitality is our number one job. It is literally the name of our industry, but it’s often hard to be hospitable when you have other challenges going on in your life. Difficult customers, trouble with family or partners or simply being exhausted from work all make staying positive during service a big challenge. With a few good mental tools, however, we can learn to stay positive with our customers no matter what is going on in our lives.
Handling drunken holiday crowds is a challenging inevitability in our industry. Days like St. Patricks Day, Cinco de Mayo and New Year’s Eve can bring massive crowds of imbibers to your bar. Often, these are groups of people who have already been drinking elsewhere, and it can be hard to tell how much they’ve had already. This can be a dangerous challenge when you are extra busy with the high volume of customers and your awareness is lower. So how do we survive these crazy drinking holidays?
