Ambassadors,
I hope all is well with you and yours. I am reaching out to proactively and reactively inform you of a few things going on within our world that will enhance your experience with us.
Proactive Heads Up
We will be closed all day today (Tuesday 5/23) so we can work on a couple of important projects.
Cool Air – We are making a major investment into augmenting our current HVAC system. The engineers have told us it will add efficiency to our current system and we hope to allow our space to properly cool during the warmer months. This is an issue that has plagued us since day one and we think / hope / pray we finally found the right solution. If you want to raise my blood pressure, ask me about it. I am happy to share our learnings from an applied doctorate in how not to engineer your new restaurant space when you are a start up with very little money and experience.
Draft Beer – If you’ve ordered a draft beer from us recently you likely may have been told our system is not working or waited for what seemed to be an eternity to get it. The fancy draft system we installed when we opened Eleanor’s, eleven years ago, has aged out. It is going away and being replaced with a direct line keg cooler, just like the old “red bar” days. We are optimistic the days of easy and cold pours of draft beer are back!
Reactive Heads Up
Apologies, as I am behind in letting you know about two important developments that happened recently.
New Chef de Cuisine & Spring Menu – I am pleased to introduce you to David Gulledge, who has been in command of the M&T kitchen since early April. Learn more about David here> Please introduce yourself to Chef David next time you are in. He would love to meet each of you. He is very personable and loves talking about food and his other passion, music. Check out the new Spring Dinner Menu that David and sous chefs Remy, Mike and Vernon implemented back in April. So far, I’ve tried all the new dishes except for the hanger steak and they are all fantastic! The Spring Menu at MTH Pizza is killer as well.
Valet – If you’ve joined us on a weekend over the last few weeks, you likely noticed the One Ivy Walk complex has gone back to offering complimentary valet as an option just like we had before the pandemic. It is being offered for lunch and dinner on Fridays and Saturdays as well as Sundays for brunch only.
Why Valet?
A good valet service can be more creative and fit more cars in less space. The parking (lack thereof) at One Ivy Walk has always been an impossible problem to solve. The center was not designed to have 4 restaurants and park all guests plus all staff in addition to all the other retail tenants. This is another blood pressure escalator topic for me. If you’ve tried parking on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday at 12:30pm in the last year, you know it is a nightmare. M&T and MTH Pizza have partnered with our landlord along with SCKV and First Watch to try complimentary valet, again*, as we all feel the status quo is untenable for our guests as well as our businesses.
*The valet option used to be staged between M&T and South City Kitchen (pre pandemic) and is now in the center of the development. In theory this is more efficient for the valet company to execute and make room for more parking. The jury is still out on this.
I really appreciate your patience and understanding as we calibrate and do our best to make lemonade out of lemons or figure out the lesser of two evils..
Bread for The Head
The topic of Ancestral Mathematics is a mind bender especially if you are like me and wanting to better understand the blessings and curses I inherited from my family of origin. 🤯
Thank you for all your support, trust and business.
To great food, drink and people,
RT
