January 9, 2025

The journey has been exciting, strange, terrifying, frustrating, and hopeful. Kenny has been a banker for over 20 years and came home from his first few weeks at a new bank and said, "Let's open a restaurant." He didn't say, "Let's get a food truck" or "Let's start catering full time", NO, he goes big in everything he does.

We reached out to our realtor friend, Mitzi. She does residential but was up for the challenge. For months, and I mean months and months, we would find properties and they would turn us down for 2 reasons, 1. No one has ever heard of us. and 2. We need outdoor space for a 1,000 gallon smoker! 

Finally, we found a location of an a burger, fast food chain, The Habit, that went out of business. We were SO excited when they entertained our ideas! With a screeching halt, he said "No" but that was quickly followed up with, "But how about the old Sizzler building?" YES, YES, YES!  

A lease was signed at the end of September, 2024. All the equity in our home was signed away in November, 2024. Demolition started but everything is slowing down as we wait on permits. Yesterday, January 8, 2025, we were given the green light to move forward!

Our general contractor, Trent from Outlook, has been the biggest blessing. He is calm, hard working, thorough, and helps with items when we have no idea what works best. 

A fear is, who are we going to hire? How will we ensure we hire people that will become part of the family? Will they see the vision that we will take care of them and we hope in return they are loyal and hardworking, like us? I have so many friends that have reached out asking that we hire their children. The problem with that is the ones that are asking on behalf of their children are the ones that deep down know their children are not hard workers and want us to not only hire them but partially parent them. 

This blog is going to record the process of what we are doing to open a successful (hopefully) restaurant. Standby..... more to come!