Till & Tally

That one fix has saved more spreadsheets than anything else I know. One volatile cell, everything else references it.

"Before every session" instead of "when it gets bad" is a real mindset shift. It takes no time at all when it is only slightly out.

Give yourself insurance. A teaspoon of mustard or a spoonful of cream in the reduction before the butter adds emulsifiers and makes the whole thing much more forgiving of temperature. It is not cheating, it is what half of restaurant pan sauces do.

If you have the newer functions, FILTER does not have this problem at all because it does not impose a column type. =FILTER({A:A, D:D}, B:B = "open") gives you both halves. You lose QUERY's sorting and grouping, but for a straight filter it is simpler and more predictable.

They had both asked for that Saturday off six weeks ago and I said no to both. I did not connect those things until now.

The laminated reduced menu is going up this week. I spent that whole Saturday trying to run the normal operation with one person, which was the actual mistake.

Also worth trying a slightly higher finishing angle on a softer German knife. Around 17-18 degrees per side instead of 15 gives up a bit of initial keenness for a noticeable jump in how long it stays useful. That steel is not hard enough to hold a very acute edge through real prep work.

Small thing that helped me: pour off the accumulated fat and juice about two thirds of the way through. It is free, takes ten seconds, and there is noticeably less steam in the last stretch.

Plan for it in the accounts rather than emotionally. I now treat December's surplus as January and February's float and do not touch it, which turns a frightening month into a boring one. The first year I did not do that and spent December's takings in December.

That split is a healthy sign. The version that worries me is flat footfall with falling spend, because that usually means people are trading down for a reason.

It was meant to be a per-row threshold, so E2:E was the fix. Works down the whole column now. I would never have spotted that on my own.

Three onions in a normal pan is also more crowded than you think — they release a lot of water and effectively steam for the first half. If you are spending an hour anyway, do six onions in the widest pan you own and freeze half in an ice cube tray. Same hour, twice the payoff.

Use a marker. Colour the bevel before you start on the 6000, do five strokes, look at where the ink has gone. It tells you whether you are actually touching the apex or riding the shoulder, which is the more common reason a finishing stone seems to do nothing.

The reason it worked once is probably the ribs themselves. Thickness and fat content vary a lot between packs, and a thin flanken-cut rib is done in half the time of a thick English cut. Cook to feel, not to the clock.

This is why I ask a system owner for ISO dates whenever there is any option for it. 2025-11-03 sorts correctly even as text and cannot be misread by anyone.

Counterpoint worth hearing: closing Mondays is easy to do and surprisingly hard to undo. Some clients quietly move to a competitor who is open, and reopening later means rebuilding that day from nothing. If your Monday is genuinely a third of a Saturday it is not dead, it is just quiet.

A middle option is Monday afternoons only, or Monday by appointment. Keeps the day alive, gets you most of the morning back.

Agreed on the speed. The other thing nobody mentions is the slurry — reprofiling three knives on a 220 soaker produces an enormous amount of grey mess, which matters if you are working at a kitchen sink rather than in a workshop.

At 50k rows across 30 sources you should also think about whether Sheets is still the right home for this in a year. It will work, it will just get slow enough that people stop opening it. Not an argument against doing it now, just be honest about the ceiling.

Six months is genuinely early for a capacity investment. The thing I would want to know is whether bookings in the second room are trending up month on month or flat. Flat at eight hours for six months means something structural. Two, four, six, eight over six months means it is filling and you need patience.