In the first of these notes, I said we were trying to build a neighborhood sandwich shop where, eventually, we know your name and your order too.
Then I asked you guys to write back. You did.
Some of you told me about the food, which I love. But a lot of you wrote about something else. A 15-year neighbor of our Thompson Street shop said he appreciated the openness, and that he doesn't get the same vibe from a lot of other spots in the neighborhood. Someone who moved to Westchester said his penultimate Greenwich Village lunch was us. Someone who doesn't even live in New York said that whenever she visits, Brown Bag is a must-stop. A woman who's been coming since we opened told me her father's first chopped cheese was ours, and he now serves a similar sandwich at his country club in Florida. One of his members apparently gave it up for Lent last year.
I think about that last one a lot. We made someone a sandwich, and it followed them to another state, and then someone else cared about it enough to give it up for Lent. That's not really about us being clever. That's about a person liking a place enough to take it with them.
There's a woman who lives a few blocks from Thompson Street who waited through the opening lines, and who will tell you, pretty seriously, that the chopped cheese is her favorite meal in New York. She gets Miss Vickie's jalapeño chips inside it. She also has a person. She always orders from the same guy at our shop - the one with the braids - because he's nice, and he's cool, and he's hers.
That's the part I care about most. Not just that you have a sandwich. That you have a person behind the counter.
Which is easy to say, and a lot harder to actually do. Because none of that works if the person behind the counter keeps changing.
In our first year, our turnover rate was 150%.
I'm not proud of that number. I'm putting it here because I think it's the most honest way to talk about what this place is actually like to run, and what we've had to learn.
When we first opened, we didn't have any training systems. We didn't have one until April of this year. If we hired someone, we'd basically put them on the line and wish them luck. And if they weren't building sandwiches the way we wanted within the first three days, we were done. We'd let them go. As if the problem wasn't us. (It was us.)
We were asking people to walk into a lunch rush and just know how we wanted a chopped cheese built, how we wanted it chopped, what "right" looked like, without ever actually teaching them. Then we'd get frustrated when it didn't work. We thought we had a hiring problem. We had a teaching problem.
The thing I keep learning, from that first year and still, every single day now, is that the sandwiches are only as good as the way we set people up to make them. Training matters. Systems matter. Being clear about expectations on day one matters. You can't ask someone to care about a regular's usual if you haven't even told them how you want the sandwich made.
We have training programs now. But we've also realized it can't just be training.
Once a week, on Fridays, we pick a team member who went above and beyond. We post them in the Brown Bag feed, write their name on the board, and take a small moment, together, to celebrate them. We give $100 referral bonuses, because finding good people is genuinely hard, and if someone on our team helps us do it, that should be rewarded. And after a record week, like last week, we shut down early on Friday, cooked tacos and steak, and threw a party. We had dinner. We played games.
One of my favorite things we do: every day, the team makes something called family meal - the food they cook for each other before or after service. Sometimes it's tamales. Sometimes quesadillas, chicken and rice, soup, or pasta. Usually it's something someone grew up eating. For our one-year anniversary of the Flatiron shop, I asked them what their favorite family meal has been of the year…they answered bolognese. So our sandwich shop served bolognese for a day.
I loved that. It was a reminder that a shop is a group of people who spend a lot of hours together, and that the feeling we're trying to give you is one they have to actually have with each other first.
A year later, our turnover is down to 40%. That's still work. I'm not pretending we figured it out. We learn something about this almost every day. But 40% is not 150%. And you can feel the difference when you walk in.
People remember that more than we sometimes realize. They remember who handed them a pickle. They remember who was sweet to them on a random Tuesday. They remember the staff that went out of their way during an office lunch. When I hear that, I know the food is only half of what they're actually talking about.
There are 26 people who make this place possible. Prep cooks slicing onions before anyone's in line. Kitchen managers unpacking orders. Line cooks on the chopped cheese during a lunch rush. The person at the register who can tell you what's on a sandwich without looking it up. If you come in and someone already kind of knows what you want, that's them. Not a system. Them. The systems just make it more likely they're still here.
We're still figuring this part out, the same way we're still figuring out the sandwiches. Some of you have a usual. Some of you have a person. Some of you wrote to me from an office that swears by the Chicken Caesar wrap, or from another city, or from down the block. We still want you to tell us when you're coming in.
The goal hasn't really changed. We want to be the kind of place where, eventually, we know your name. And your order. And maybe, if we're doing it right, you know us too.
-The Brown Bag Team
P.S. If there's something you want to know about Brown Bag, something you think we should do better, or something you just want to tell us, send it our way - gilli@brownbagny.com. I actually read them. And if you already wrote me after the last two notes: I meant it when I said to give me a heads up next time you're in.