I hadn't planned to post a blog, as I'm a pretty private guy who doesn't like to explain myself. But after an onslaught of calls, emails, and whys?, I felt maybe I needed to set the record straight about why the restaurant is closing. I know that there has been a lot of speculation going around and loyal customers and staff seem to feel deeply hurt by this decision.

I wanted to first say that the whole 5 year experience of owning the restaurant has been a wonderful and scary roller coaster. It's very similar to raising kids. You have a baby. You love and nurture it but at the same time that perfect little child that you planned and hoped for can also make your life all the more difficult and challenging! It can be incredibly rewarding and at the same time terribly stressful. This decision, like a lot of difficult decisions, had many factors. First you have the rent and food costs going up, then you have the whole parking lot across the street thing, and who can forget the economy downslide, but honestly the biggest part of this decision had less to do with those things and more to do with me personally.

When I started the restaurant I was young, single, and close to my target demographic. Now I'm married with two kids and live pretty far away from where I work. I saw my dream of the restaurant I envisioned come into fruition and grow into something even bigger. Now I'm ready for life's next challenge. I'd like to be present at my kids' soccer games and actually "be present" and not worrying about the call I'll surely get about the broken freezer, credit card machine mayhem, and well, you know what I mean. So I made the decision to take a few years off and enjoy my family, with the thought that in a few years I may open up a similar concept a little closer to home. So as much I'd like to thank those of you with offers of buying it, franchising, etc., I would also like to respectfully decline.

Christopher Pizza Company was a place where people were family, and you just can't replicate that. So to quote some cheesy(no pun intended) 80's movie, I'd like to say that "This is not Goodbye", just "See You Later".

Chris

Below is a comment from the last blog that I thought you all should read:



This will probably be the least objective and most subjective response you will receive.....I am Christopher's mom. Like all moms, our emotions are closely tied to our children's emotions. I am sharing that roller coaster of feelings with Chris. I know he has mixed feelings, and I hope that with time and perspective, he will remember Christopher Pizza Co. with a smile and a sense of pride.

I remember Chris in college.... obsessed with learning how to make the perfect pizza. He researched and studied and all his friends became his "testers". He managed to perfect the pizza, and after a few years of trying some other occupations, he decided to open a restaurant. Of course, I worried: "How could he accomplish this?" (I am always the voice of worry and concern). He found this crazy little space (it looked like one lane of a bowling alley). He made it work...with Chris' determination, it was going to work! It became a friendly, quirky, cool, wonderful place, where almost everybody knew almost everybody's name (sound familiar?)

Maybe, under different economic times, he could have ridden the "wave of bad times" (kind of like parents of teenagers), but, unfortunately circumstances did not allow that to happen.

Whatever Chris decides to do in the future (there are a world full of children that would benefit from Chris' "daddy day care"), I know he will do it with energy (goodness knows he has lots of that), humor, creativity, exuberance, and, as he always does, with honor and respect for others.

This is not a test-- Christopher has decided to close the Christopher Pizza Company.

After 5 years of keeping the lights on, we will be closing the doors for good in a few short weeks. The last day you can get pizza is itself still undetermined because it depends on how fast we go through our remaining inventory (and I don't listen very well at staff meetings). I am told that music will continue for some time after food service stops, but check back for more details. Alas, now is the time to come in for one last pizza, one last beer, and one last laugh. Believe me, it hurts me too.

I have to admit that I had sensed something was wrong before Christopher broke the news to the staff this last Wednesday. I'm not psychic or anything, but there were signs that day-to-day operations were not running with their usual amount of dysfunction. Things that should take days to fix (and would normally take weeks to fix) were taking months to fix. More than anything, I could tell the boss had changed. Normally, I chalk most stuff up to Christopher being Christopher, but of late, his heart just has not been in it. In any independent venture (especially a restaurant) there has to been at least one person who lives and dies for it-- without him, you're dead in the water and we've been belly up.

The question most people have asked me is: why close? I'm not sure I ever got a straight answer from Christopher on that one. My own personal (and by no means official) theory is that Christopher had the choice to renew his lease with jerk landlords (who are raising rent) and he declined. If you factor in sky-rocketing food costs, the economy in general, and lost business due to the fact that our (jerk) landlords are going to destroy the nice free parking lot across the street with a huge construction project, it starts to make sense to me. It appears that the powers that be think that if they turn this block into another Green Hills (gag) it will make them a boatload of money and if they have to kill or maim anything that stands in the way of that pursuit, then so be it. Consider us the deceased.

Maybe I am alone in this, but I like the fact that this block had some locally-owned businesses, instead of the same stupid chains every other city has. Sometimes I feel like the only Nashvillian who doesn't want every part of his city to be "posh" and I feel like I want to smack every Nashvillian who uses the word "posh." I guess I just have to accept the fact that there a lots of opinions out there, but the ones that have lots of money behind them are the only ones that seem to matter...

Enough ranting.

I have also been asked the following questions a lot: What's Christopher going to do now? Is he going to re-open any time soon? Don't you have another location? Are you selling the tables/any other pieces of the store?

The answers are: I have no idea, but he mentioned Daddy Daycare as an option he was considering. I do not think he is going to re-open anytime soon, but he did not rule out ever getting back into the biz (Christopher has been dreaming about a BBQ place for some time now). No, we only have one location. And finally, there is a possibility that we will be selling/auctioning parts of the store, including the tables, but there has been no final approval of that idea, as of yet.

As for me, I'm not sure what to think. I want to let it roll off my back, but as my bitterness in preceding paragraphs may betray, I'm having a hard time with that. I have worked here for almost two years and, to me (and others out there), this place is like a second home. Where do I go from here? Though I could sense something wasn't right as of late, I'm still having a little trouble processing what has happened; just because it wasn't a surprise doesn't mean it wasn't a shock. I've never been laid off before and it won't be easy finding another job like this one. There's not another boss out there like Christopher and, though are a growing number chain restaurants in the greater Nashville area, there are no other Christopher Pizza Companies.

I remember once writing that one of the greatest things about this place was that it felt like you were in on something-- that you knew about something not everyone else was lucky enough to hear about. As I sift through the dying embers of the Christopher Pizza Company (my lone attempt at being poetic), I can't say that I feel much has changed. There was something about the 12' of space between these walls that was special. Personally, I happen to believe that it was the people who made it what it was. And of all the memories I'll take from this place-- some good, some bad, and some downright ugly-- I know that the ones of which I'm most proud involve the people who felt more like family than bosses, co-workers, and customers. Trained monkey dancing for tips that I am, I think that isn't that bad a severance package.

As for this blog, I'm not sure what will happen. Without a restaurant to write for, I guess I'll have to focus more attention on my own blog and I hope you will keep reading me. I would not be surprised if this were not the last entry. So look out for one last post next week...

At the risk of sounding crude, when was the last time you used our restroom?

I spend an unfortunately large amount of time cleaning our restrooms. Trust me, scrubbing toilets will humble you up real quick and sometimes I secretly dream of looking back at my time cleaning toilets as "way back when--before I made my millions." But in a recent foray into the custodial arts, I noticed something I thought significant: toilet paper. I was not struck by the fact that we have toilet paper, but more the fact that we have nice toilet paper.

Christopher has this whole theory that he wants his restaurant to serve food he would feed to his family. He wants ingredients of the best quality and not any of the garbage you can get at other pizza places. I dig that; it's sadly refreshing to see a restaurant owner who is willing to forego maximal profit for customer satisfaction. I've seen it in action and I happen to think it may not be the smartest way to do business, but it sure seems like the best way to do business. With so much competition, I suppose it's why we are still open. Never in my wildest dreams, however, did I imagine that Christopher's way would extend to toilet paper.

It may say something about me, but the toilet paper here at the restaurant is of a significantly higher quality than that of mine at home.

I know this whole topic is pretty random (and potentially gross), but I do not think it is insignificant. In some weird way, our TP makes me proud; we try hard to be a nice place to eat, drink, socialize, listen, and just be. And I'm happy to work in a place that doesn't scrimp, doesn't compromise, and doesn't hurt.

So next time nature calls, don't worry...we got you covered.

You have to hand it to Christopher-- the man thinks outside the box.

Here's the situation: our beer cooler broke down. Ok, so that happens all the time in restaurants all over the world. Most other restaurants don't have the bar built around the cooler, however. The physical set up of our bar made fixing the cooler impossible without some serious rearranging. Conventional wisdom (or at least my line of logic) says that it would smart to wait to Sunday (when we are closed) and take the bar apart to extract the cooler. That's what I would have done, but not so for some other people around here.

Instead of taking the bar apart to remove the cooler, Christopher's idea was to cut the cooler in half and keep the bar in tact. That's cut the metal cooler and leave the wooden bar. When first I heard this plan, I have to admit I nearly fell down I was laughing so hard. But, as usual, Christopher can make his crazy ideas make sense. It usually stems from the fact I want to save money and Christopher has no problem spending it. Me, I want to resurrect the $1000 cooler, but Christopher says, "toss it." When you look at his logic for that (too boring to go into here) it actually made sense. But we talked him down and I figured we'd have a project for Sunday that involved wood.

Our Kitchen Manager decided that he would not wait until Sunday, but would in fact take the bar apart before we opened on Thursday. Now, I'm not much of what one would call a "handyman," so I didn't have much to contribute to this endeavor (other than my stunning good looks). I arrived in my normal fashion, an hour before we opened, to find the bar in pieces and no end in sight. And by no end, I mean no chance of us opening on time. In fact we didn't even open for lunch; I made a sign saying we'd be closed for lunch and you'd be surprised how many people walked past that sign to ask if we were open.

In the end, we got the cooler out, we put a new one in, and, despite some computer problems, we were open for dinner. Now we have a whole new bar set up and, hopefully, a few more weeks before the cooler breaks down again.

So come in and have a beer... and think outside the box.

In my recent attempts to have "less talk and more listen" in the pizza part of my life, there has been one phrase I keep hearing that really sticks out: when you get a minute...

What does that really mean? I asked some fellow servers about what they thought and there was a wide variety of responses. The bitter were sure it was a way for customers to feel better about being rude, the sweet thought it was the customer's attempt to be nice, and I was mostly confused by it. My initial interpretation was, in keeping with my personality, that it is intended to say, "I'm not one of your jerk customers." I thought of it as a way for people to ask for something without feeling bossy. Then I started paying attention to how it was used in my direction...

I get the "whenever you get a minute" in plenty of different circumstances, but one really sticks out-- when I really do have a minute. There have been times of late when my only table will say my new favorite phrase. This is my only table and, but for the Yahoo Crossword puzzle I started, this table is the only thing I have going on. And I understand that most people aren't aware of other tables or what a server is doing when he's not dancing for the nice people, but is it not easy to recognize that you are the only table in the entire place? How could your server be so busy as to have to find a minute for you? It seemed kind of insulting when that first dawned on me...

Then I got over myself. I thought that the only things that separate me from the bitter servers I never wanted to become are perspective and attitude. If I don't just assume that people treat me like dirt, I'm generally a happier server. I remembered what I once wrote in this blog about how my job was, pretty much, to stay out of the way of a good dinning experience. And if saying, "whenever you get a minute" helps my customers enjoy Christopher Pizza, then so be it. As any person with a 4th grade education can plainly see by the content of this blog, I am most certainly not the word police. And something so innocuous as "when you get a minute" should not get me into a tizzy.

So, as I work through my issues, I hope you continue reading the blogs and coming in to see me-- that is, when you get a minute...

I've noticed an assumption that most of my customers make (besides assuming I am Christopher) is that I am "in school somewhere around here." I try to take it as a compliment that I look like I'm 19 again, but I can't help but wonder two things about me coming off as a college student:

Do I act in a manner that expresses a college level maturity? Or is it an assumption that anyone who would stoop so low as to work here must be in school and must have a better future ahead?

I am a college graduate. At the risk of sounding older than I ever thought I would, I can look back fondly at my college days as a thing of a hazy past. There are parts of college that will always stick with me and there are parts that I've already chosen/managed to forget. Even though I am not too long out of school, I think I carry myself as a relatively well-functioning adult. I go to work, I pay my bills, and I have back problems-- can you get any more adult than that? I don't think I come off as someone free of the crushing weight of responsibility (i.e. your average college student).

Maybe it's not me, it's the job. Most people assume that waiting tables is hard, low-paying, and generally unsatisfying. Not all of the time, but sometimes I am inclined to agree. With those attributes, it's easy to see why people think most server are students-- being a student is essentially learning how to put up with as much crap as humanly possible, so the two would seem to go hand-in-hand. I understand that people make that assumption about me as a way to engage me, a stranger, in polite conversation and that they are in fact trying to be nice (or at the very least, sympathetic). But as someone still searching for a next chapter in my life, it doesn't always feel good to be reminded that I have job a trained monkey/Physical Education major can do.

I've come to a solution to my problem: a time warp.

I think, from now on, I will just adopt the college student persona. If someone asks, I can say,"yes, I am" and milk the person for sympathy tips. All my serving mistakes will be wiped from the slate because "I have a really big exam tomorrow." I will make up a new major for each person who asks and try to get creative with it. Best of all, I will approach waiting tables like a college student: with an extreme sense of not caring.

From my limited experience from student co-workers, most student/servers don't care about work. As it should be I suppose, class comes first and work is something of an afterthought. Students can treat school like work and work like a second job. I think that's awesome. I want to not depend on this job. I want to care more about achieving future goals than up-selling and tip totals.

Where I am now, that is not an option...but that is why I'm adopting the time warp.

Gotta run! Off to class...