For the second time this year I have had my final plans approved by the health department.

Recognize this guy:

Same guy we saw in July. The plumbing inspector is like Boba Fett,  the building inspector is like Darth Vader, and  this guy is the Emperor. He made me resubmit plans showing the changes he wanted. OK. So I did. Did not kill me.

Now will you please stop yelling at me about how impossible, and difficult, and oppressive, the government is?! I really am sick of being a receptacle for everyone’s anger. I have work to do, and anger is a very inefficient fuel.

Besides, would you eat in a restaurant with a grade of: “C” posted in the window? No? ok then, thank the health dept.

My only complaint with the bureaucracy is that they do not want to license cooks or restaurateurs. Doing that might keep the inspectors from treating everyone like the clueless amateurs that get all the attention in this kind of endevour.

I couldn’t help but notice that the Health Department is in a building with 13 floors.

A few months ago my friend Aaron put in ceramic tile and grout all around the kitchen and bathrooms.

Today we tore it all out and replaced it with epoxy.

Last summer Manny and I spent days installing a new massive commercial 100 gal water heater. Next week we will do that again from scratch.

We have built, dismantled and built again 200 feet of heavy steel gas pipe. This weekend we will do that all again.

We have measured and had  blueprints drawn and met with plan checkers at the county office at 7:00 a.m., and next week we will do that again. Julia spent the week building cabinets. We will take them apart and build them again. Differently.

We have done and redone so many back-breaking and expensive tasks this does not really bother us that much. Hitting the financial wall is pretty scary though. None the less we have not lost any time and that’s the main thing. There is only one direction we can possibly go.

Be in the moment you are in, for there are no others.

Uncle Paul

Today is our health department inspection. Maybe the first of many final health inspections, maybe the only one. The inspector is the same one who approved our plans ten months ago and he will come to see if I built what I said I was going to build. He will almost certainly give us a list of corrections, short or long, expensive or not. When those  corrections are done to his liking we can open as a restaurant that day. So in a few hours we will be able to answer the question we have gotten six times a day, every day for the last 16 months.

Stay tuned.

Justin and Pam that’s who. My brother Justin and his under appreciated wife Pam (who built this website by the way) have become Ba supporters with a generous loan. They ask that we use some of the money to create a permanent drinking fountain for dogs at the restaurant. This we will do in honor of their beloved labra-doodle Lola. And all good dogs like her.

Justin http://tiny.cc/biIe2b , and Pam:   http://tiny.cc/RfIe2b are way ahead of the pro dog rights thinking.  Los Angeles just this week voted to allow dogs onto the patios or restaurants like ours:  (   http://tiny.cc/VbIe2b )

So thanks to Justin and Pam from me and the dogs of Highland Bark.

Before

We passed our building / ADA Compliance inspection!!! All of my construction work has been approved! It is safe to enter, and it is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.  I’m clean.  I don’t want to brag but… we passed on the very first inspection! I guess we are getting good at this!

After

Now comes the health department inspection. The final test. Got to get 100%, it is  all or nothing.

Tick, tick, tick…….

It’s true. The gas inspection is done. We passed. Our gas pipes do not leak. Fire inspector (who you would think would be the tough one) passed us without much of an inspection at all.  He could have insisted we put in a fire sprinkler system (two months $20,000) but he did not, I’m happy about that.

So we passed gas and fire.

Building and safety/ADA compliance next up. They have the opportunity to make us move walls and put a wheel chair ramp on the back door. They probably won’t but they could.

Wish us luck!

This is what they don’t teach those kids in Culinary school.

This is how I start every day.

After we painted the exterior walls of Ba this week, we continued on to paint the storefront of our neighbor Elsa’s Bakery.  Not only are we renting our space from Elsa and Manuel, they are our colleagues and friends. Now in their eighties Manuel and Elsy Vargas are in the bakery every morning, usually before dawn running the business. They arrived from the Yucatan when they were teenagers, lured to California by a job picking cantaloupes. While the pregnant Elsy cleaned food trucks full-time Manuel learned the trade of baking in a french bakery in Santa Monica.

They purchased this bakery and the building from its builder, who ran the kitchen for forty years, Manuel and Elsy are the second owners of the ninety-two year old building.

Mr Vargas brought his French technique to the business and made baguettes and Pain au chocolate. They bought up the adjoining buildings as investments and  to create homes for the families of some of their five children,  twelve grand kids, and three great grand children.

When the supermarkets evolved into big corporations they did their own industrial baking in-house and that wiped out a lot of independent Mom and Pop bakery’s like Elsy’s. The Vargas’ hung on through their retail business and  the restaurants they cater too. The space I rent from them has been empty since Von’s and Ralph’s left the communities. It is easier I suppose to take a check from me than to get up at three in the morning to bake that much more bread. I suspect Mr Vargas would be just as happy doing either.

So Julia and I  are painting their storefront in the colors they chose to show our  admiration to the original Mom and Pop.