Yes, We are open on New Years Day.

We will be open on New Years Day from 7-2. Serving Breakfast all day, and also Lunch after 11.
Thankyou for all the support from the regulars we already have. We appreciate you. (you know who you are!)

A lifetime ago…

I was getting a haircut the other day at OK Barbershop. Mike (the Barber) Whittenberg (or Wittenberg, sorry Mike) is the long time owner and though I’ve known him for 30+/- years, it was my first haircut from him, for which I apologized. He brought up a funny story about me that he said he tells often. Here it is:
When I was 20, I was married and I played a lot of practicle jokes on everyone, including Teri, wife #1. One time, Teri and I were driving down I-5 and she had to go to the bathroom. We just passed a rest area, there were no bushes and it was broad daylight. I said to her, “I know–I will pull the car onto the shoulder at an angle to sheild you from the traffic in our lane, then you open the door, and that will shield the view from oncoming traffic in the other lanes and then you can go right there in that little hiding space.” So, I pulled over at that angle, she opened the door got out in her little hidden car-door-nook and started natures call… At which point, I pulled away. And, there she was squatting on I-5 in broad daylight, pants down around her ankles , heavy into her business because she had to go so bad— traffic coming in both directions. She was pretty impressed with my sense of humor. NOT.
Another time I was driving (I-5 again) and she was reading. I saw a dead deer on the side of the freeway and this deer was real dead. It was turned inside-out dead. I pulled over so that it was right outside her door and asked her if she coud drive, I was falling asleep. She opened her door and instantly heaved all over the mashed deer. Needless to say, that marrige had some trust issues.
I also played tricks on the people I worked with. Willie Thurman was a good friend and so a good target. I was 18, Willie was 55. Willie was black, had a pencil-thin mustache and a great sense of humor, otherwise I would not have survived the tricks I played on him. At work, we would slip raw eggs in the back pockets of Willies pants and send him on a break. We could tell when he sat down by all the cussing we could hear, clear up in the kitchen. Then when he came back off his break, sometimes he would notice right away the mayonnaise we put around the rim of his chef hat, but sometimes it would just warm up and run down his face like white sweat. We would fill his pant-cuffs up with 1000 Island dressing and then watch is fling all over when he walked. Willie, Willie. Once we went to visit a friend in Yreka, this was in 1978, and we stopped in Grants Pass for breakfast. Some guy, maybe he was the manager, came up to us and (remember this was Grants Pass in ’78, and you would hear stories, but this was still shocking) he said, “I’m sorry, we don’t serve black people here.” Willie looked him straight in the eye and said, “That’s OK, I wasn’t gonna order one. Now get me some #@* breakfast!!” They did, and he ate, even though I urged us to go. He somehow was able to enjoy his breakfast too. What a guy.
Willie died years ago. They said it was a heart attack, but I think he just wanted to get away from me. I spoke at his funeral and at one point, told some funny stories to portray the Willie that I knew. His family laughed while they cried and I didn’t get struck by lightening, so I guess all is forgiven. I don’t play so many practical jokes anymore. They’re fun to remember, but when things go awry, they’re too hard to undo. Oh well, back to my chowder and my memory-inducing coffee…

7am Giggles

So….We just started our Early-Bird Specials which are designed to run Monday through Thursday from 7am to 8am. We pick out a menu item or some other tastey special and run it for $1.95 for that hour. This week it is our beloved Corned Beef Hash. It tastes so good, and we want everybody to experience it. I really think people have done hash bad for so long, that it has a bad rap; synonomous with dogfood and so even bigger the surprise when people taste ours.
Today was the first day of Early-Bird, and bright and early our first customer walks through the door, with not a “Good Morning!”, but something like, “Who’s the marketing genius that got me out of bed at 6 o’clock on my vacation day?!!” It was funny, but was made hilarious because I looked up to see my sister Susan and her husband Tom, and I instantly realized she meant every word of it. Hey sis, I guess I got you last!!!

Sue and Tom

I got sunshine on a rainy day

I believe in good luck, magic and all that. I believe that Busick had magic when I was there. It seemed everything always worked out even with the most unlikley of characters that sometimes worked for me. We had a lot of fun there. Often we would laugh about something in the kitchen and it would turn into the giggles and then turn into the hard core guffaw that you can’t keep quiet. The servers would hear us and start laughing and soon the dining room full of customers would catch it. We would hear them in the kitchen, which made us crack up even harder, which made the customers laugh even harder. The whoLe place would be laughing hysterically and if you could ask anyone there why they were laughing, they wouldn’t be able to tell you. I can’t imagine what anyone would think that might walk into the place in the middle of all that. Eventually, it would get quiet again until somebody looked back at the whole incident and would giggle. The whole dining room was on a hair-trigger and it would start all over again, complete with coffee spitting and coffee through the nose. Donna Jean still works there and she’ll tell you all about it. It felt good. It usually happened at the busiest, most tense of times; it was magic.
Every day that I started the day at Busick, I would walk in and turn on the tapedeck and play “My Girl” (I think from “Good Morning Viet Nam” soundtrack) and it would start, “I got sunshine, on a rainy day…” On my first day at Two Harbors, I walked in at 5am, flicked on the radio just in time to hear, “I got sunshine, on a rainy day…” I felt the magic and it made me feel that everything would be OK.
Before we got the building we’re in now, I noticed a homeless man living in the bushes. I said something to the current owners and they said, ” We know…he’s good luck.” Well, far be it from me to interfere with a good luck charm, although in the back of my mind I knew something had to happen sometime with that arrangement.
A couple weeks later, one of the contractors chopped down the “condo bushes” to get to some equipment. I secretly cringed because the bush-guy was supposed to be good luck, but also secretly rejoiced, because the inevitable happened and I didn’t have a hand in it, not directly anyway.
So the next day an Environmental Enforcement Officer stopped by to ask who dumped the cement waste water in the parking lot next door. You know, the waste water that was approaching the storm drain that goes into the stream that would kill the salmon that lived in the stream that Jack built. That waste water.
I wasn’t there when Environmental Officer Fear (his real name) stopped by and interrogated the cement contractors that were working for me. They denied they were the villains — I’m sure they didn’t convince anybody. But, late that night, the real villain crept outside with wire brush, mop-bucket and containment devices (old mopheads) and proceeded to scrub the gray from the asphalt first with the wire brush, then with the mop, careful to not let any water get Jack’s fish. It took me, I mean– It took the real villain three hours of wire brushing, sweeping and then mopping up half a block down a parking lot and half a block in the gutter all the while knowing this wouldn’t have happened if Joe Homeless Person was asleep in Bush Condo . But alas, Jack’s fish are safe, we have the cleanest gutter in Salem and no police stopped to ask what I was doing at midnight mopping the gutter.
Meanwhile, during this winter storm, I was working away in the kitchen when I felt this big THUD! I looked out the window and saw that a big red pickup had slid on the ice, jumped the curb and almost hit the building– but not before running through the stubs that was once Bush Condo. Had Joe Homeless Person, aforementioned Good Luck Charm, had his bushes to sleep in, he would have been ran over and so I hereby declare Good Luck upon Word of Mouth and that good luck charm being no dead body in the stubs of Bush Condo.
The magic is back. And it tastes great.

We were gonna name it…

Becky and I had been planning to open a restaurant for a couple of years, waiting for the right time. Then we realized the right time would never come , at least not if we were waiting for it, so instead, we had to open the right place. Then, what would we name it?
We had a name in mind- “bex bistro” a play on “Becky’s Bistro”, since she is the “foodie” and slaps me around a lot in the kitchen. She wasn’t too keen on having her name on the sign.
We came up with an idea to have a crazy breakfast place, “Annie Bananies”, modeled after the Flying Biscuit Cafe in Atlanta, but I didn’t want to name a restaurant after our dog, Annie Bananie. Although, she does have a great smile and a caricature of her with a big ol’ smile would have been funny.
Bex Hash House rolled around in our brain, but we didn’t think it would be conducive to lunch.
As a joke, we told our friend Ralph, the owner of Best Little Roadhouse, we were going to name it Bex Little Roadhouse. Then we told Jim, the owner of Busick Court, that we were going to have music in our courtyard and call it Music Court.
At one point, we tried to think of the most messed-up name we could think of ; so for a breakfast, lunch dinner place with a bar we came up with “Poached & Toasted”. We still like that, but it didn’t fit the building we ended up in.
At one point, and I was really excited about this, we looked at the Anderson Sporting Goods building; they divided it up into different spaces. The lessee was telling me that for x amount of rent, you get four walls, one bathroom and a ceiling- a “vanilla shell” he called it. That evening Becky and I were out having dinner and we were talking about our place-to-be and I said, “Whatever we do we have to build it around the kitchen–the muscle (and money) has to be in the kitchen; the restaurant has to be built around the food”, and it hit me—”Vanilla Shell” could be the name of a restaurant. When you open, all you have is a vanilla shell (four walls, ceiling and floor) with the complete kitchen and then just the tables and chairs in this big expanse of room. Then each week, you would build something else; maybe the bar on week 2, the window side of dining on week 3, the other half on week 4, etc. All the time, the food would have to be stellar, the prices low to get people in at first and get them to buy into your concept, but it would get people talking, get lots of publicity and people could come in each week to see what got built. The theme of the restaurant would be “Built around the food”. We even planned to have the art of the restaurant to be the pictures in chronological order of the progression. But with the economy, we knew we should stay small, keep our overhead low and be very flexible. Vanilla Shell was too big.
Often we would meet people (or Becky would-she makes friends with everyone, especially at Dog Park) and Beck would tell people we were opening a restaurant. I would never tell people that- I didn’t want them to think I was stupid or crazy. Anyway, they would tell Becky that “word of mouth” would get around about our food and everything would be OK. And that felt real good to Becky, and me too, so we named it “Word of Mouth”. Then we added “Neighborhood Bistro” because we like the neighborhood we are in (we live on 14th) and it seems it brought us down a notch from declaring ourselves some hoidy-toidy “bistro” that might be too fancy or too expensive or have food you never heard of before.
So “Word of Mouth” is 2 things. It is the name of our place and jokingly, the only type of advertising left in our budget. I guess it’s three things–it’s also what motivates us to get our butts out of bed at 4am each day to make sure the word of mouth will be positive.