When the management team gathered the staff for an all-hands meeting after the fire, employees were assured that they'd be paid for the duration of the closure; they were also encouraged to take the opportunity to hone their craft and stay engaged. "Bobby invited the staff to get in touch with myself and Justin [Williams, general manager at Tavernetta] and Rose [Votta], the GM at Frasca, to invite them come up to Frasca...to stage," says Jodi McAllister, assistant general manager at Tavernetta. "We had an overwhelming amount of people at first."
Eventually, fifteen Tavernetta front-of-house team members worked at least one night at Frasca (one of them did eight shifts) working with a Tavernetta manager to observe service, clear tables, run food and change table settings. "We had one staff member with a Tavernetta mentor — a manager or someone who’d worked at Frasca before...and we walked them through service," says McAllister. "Vision of the dining room was something Bobby wanted them to get out of their experience, so we'd run food together and clear tables together so they could see how to serve from the left, clear from the right. It's basic, but it's all about muscle memory, so we were working on that and practicing together, rather than throwing someone in the dining room and having them figure it out on their own."
Many Tavernetta staffers hadn't seen Frasca's service before Tavernetta opened, so this was an opportunity to understand the company's brand of hospitality and the steps that bolster it. "People who’d never worked on a restaurant floor came into our restaurant and were dealt 200 covers a night," says McAllister. "Going to Frasca and working 80 to 100 covers a night, which feels really busy at Frasca, was really special — it was really special to see a person going to Frasca one night and being a little nervous, and then coming in the next night and picking up on the serving cues and basics. We were able to teach those really well."
These Tavernetta employees have been busy honing their skills since Tavernetta closed after a fire in September.
Danielle Lirette
Stuckey nudges his employees to eat at other restaurants of a similar caliber to Frasca and report back on their experiences, and the company encourages stages when members of the team travel; McAllister says she spent a week in New York during her tenure at Frasca, and Stuckey helped her land a stage with fine-dining beacon Eleven Madison Park, a highlight of her trip.
During the break, a few Tavernetta staffers took advantage of those stages, too, particularly those who had previously worked at Frasca or Pizzeria Locale in Boulder. One server headed out to New York City to work at Pasquale Jones — where an owner and the general manager are Frasca alumni — and he came back fired up by all the wine he was exposed to in several days of opening bottles for guests. Another Tavernetta expeditor traveled to San Francisco for a stop at Californios. (Unfortunately, fires seemed to be part of his life as the Napa wildfires derailed his plans to hit the Restaurant at Meadowood and Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc.)
Whether they traveled out of state or not, though, McAllister says, "we really experienced a great deal of positivity through this time. People had great things to report back." She hopes it helped foster a supportive culture at Tavernetta, too.
The staff will return to the restaurant this weekend for a refresher and introduction to new menu items, which will reflect seasonal changes as well as new creations from executive chef Ian Wortham and his team, who also used Frasca's kitchen for research and development during the break.
