I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

It’s Labor Day tomorrow.  (It’s currently Sunday night).  

The unofficial end to summer.  

For most of you, that means school is back in session, the days are getting shorter, and you can no longer wear white.  

For those of us in the hospitality industry, in a tourist town in the northeast, its the official end of the craziness.  

Tomorrow will be significantly slower than last Monday.  There will still be business, but for those who track these things, the slowdown happens.  If a stranger walked in, they’d think I’m crazy, but a 20% decrease is just enough to breathe.  Sigh.  Know, that for the most part, the worst is behind us.   

When I worked in Kennebunkport, 10 years ago, it was the countdown we did to the end of the summer. The Friday, Saturday, Sunday of Labor Day were insane.  The last big weekend of the year.  On Sunday, we’d keep the whole staff until we were done.  When the last guests were out of the building, we pour beer and wine for the team.  And I’d toast the great job they’d all done to get us where we were.  

Summer there was insane.  Summer at my current restaurant is busy but not like Kennebunkport.  10 years ago, we were doing 600 people for lunch and 600 people for dinner.  We’d open the doors at 11:30 and we wouldn’t stop until around 10:00 when we locked the doors.  It was intense.    

We’d have close to 175 employees for the summer.  That’s a lot of food prepped, a lot of silver rolled, a lot of glasses polished.  We’d push for that first weekend in September. 

Then we’d toast.  We’d breath.  

And we’d come back the next day, to start the count down to Indigenous People’s Day.  

That’s when we could really breathe.  

I hadn’t thought about the end of summer toast for a long time, but I talked to my friend Laura tonight, and she asked if we had toasted to the end of summer tonight.  

We did not.  

We cleaned up, moved some furniture around, so our floors can be refinished tomorrow, and we all said goodbye.  

Happy Labor Day.