How did you spend your Friday Night?

This weekend I had quite an experience. A team from our restaurant went to a huge convention center event to run a food booth. This was not any event though, but an annual all night RAVE called Electroglide. So that meant we would be selling food from 9pm at night till 7am in the morning.

We did this same event two years ago, along with 9 other restaurants, but this year was quite a bit different. First off, the event itself was larger. Roughl7 20,000 people attending. And then this year, instead of 10 food stands there were only 4!

we decided on a nice menu of 3 kinds of things served on rice. Vegetable Thai Curry, Beef and veggies, and Chicken Terriyaki. So far so good.

After a week of prep in the restaurant, at the same times as preparing for service for thanksgiving dinner for 300 the day before--- we loaded up our vans, and headed to the convention center spot, Makuhari Messe, about 1 hour outside of tokyo. Arrived, set up, and were feeling really good about ourselves.

Until...

we started service, our booth was instantly popular (we were also selling vanilla brownies!) and the masses started to swarm. Suddenly, two things happend.

1. We ran out of the rice we already had cooked much faster than we thought we would.
2. the large rental rice cooker we brought BROKE! and we had only one small one left!!!

so now with hundreds of people lined up in front of our booth, we had nothing but brownies and beer!!!

My boss drove all around the area and came back with noodles, and we quickly switched to noodles, while still making rice in the small cooker and selling it as quick as we could make it.

This kind of crazy frenzy went on for about 8 hours! when exhausted and having sold any food we could come up with, we finally finished the evening. We sold thousands of beers, hundreds of waters and orange juice, thousands of brownies, and then we all collapsed. My husband and two of my friends came out to work the event with us. We had a total staff of about 20 people. We definately learned a lot from this, and hopefully there will be a next time! But it was one of the craziest nights I've had in the food business...