The Battlesong of Christie Rafanan

I have been trying write about my experiences at Oxheart unsuccessfully for months now. This is because I don’t ever feel like I can do it justice. The experience is mind altering. Earth shattering. Life changing. I have written and deleted over 20 pages. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully articulate it. There is one thing I can say though: Christie Rafanan deserves more recognition. While Justin and Karen were cooking in fancy kitchens in Napa and abroad, Christie was honing her skills in a similar fashion in the front of many great front-of-houses. She’s a complete goofball. She replaces the lyrics of songs with “meows” and slaps my hand when I’m trying to use the calculator at work, which makes me insane. But when we hear the doorknob turn at 5:30 PM every night, the goofball melts away to reveal one of the most fiercely intense service people I have ever worked alongside.

Oxheart is a chef driven restaurant: the ratio of cooks to servers is 2 to 1. To this day, I am still right there with you, staring into the kitchen, bewildered at the complexity and efficiency of that machine. I hope that everybody in that kitchen is feeling the love, as they work freakishly long hours, and are generally pushing themselves full blast both physically and mentally. That being said, I wanted to take a second to talk about the other side of the equation: the dining room.

Service is an often-undervalued area of expertise in this town, and I think it is of the utmost importance that we celebrate great managers and service in general. It’s easy to overlook, because the best service is the kind that isn’t in your face. You’re never for want of anything, but you don’t feel smothered. Your needs are anticipated. It is profoundly difficult to strike the balanced between a relaxed atmosphere but also build a system that is military-precise.

Even more overlooked is the importance of setting up the dining room before service. Mapping out the evenings reservations intelligently is a goddamn art form. You never see this part of the process, but it has unquestionably affected your dining experience both positively when done well, and jacked it up when done poorly.

Moreover, all of us in the front of house need to constantly be looking at the systems we put in place and saying “How can I make this better (or cleaner, or faster)?

In these regards I am personally capable of doing an ok job. An adequate job. But that really isn’t why any of us signed up for Oxheart. We signed up to break our fists on the face of destiny and pour every ounce of our hearts and souls into that building. We have the right people for the job on food, and presumably I’m a decent beverage director. But we needed a similar level of intensity devoted to service. The answer was meowing at us the whole time.

Christie is the front of house manager for Oxheart. Formally she is a manager, but even before that was her title, she has been the vanguard of service in the building since day one. It takes a special person to be truly great at service, namely an obsessive attention to detail. As Justin and Karen tweeze the final garnishes onto plates of expertly roasted potatoes and flawlessly executed tarts, Christie is writing a floor map that is not only near perfection, but has contingency plans for when things go awry like tables changing in size or coming in late. She is hitting the ground running well before service, and then driving service like she stole it at gunpoint. When I get tired I move slower. When Christie gets tired she actually moves faster. She notices the tiny details that I overlook, and puts together systems to deal with them.  I am continually flabbergasted by her skill as a serviceperson before, during, and after service.

I am devoting so many words to this because people will tell *me* they really enjoyed the service after their dinner. Don’t get me wrong, I had something to do with it as one of only three people in the front of house. But do me this favor, if you’re walking out of Oxheart and you feel that warm glow of hospitality in your heart, take a moment to realize that Christie Rafanan played the major role in refining that part of the experience to what it is now.

Now I have to go be a jerk to her to balance out all this nice stuff I'm saying.