So during my time in the pizza biz, meeting my life partner, and realizing being a manager of min wage employees sucks, I got into home brewing big time. Theresa even drank a few of my homebrews while trying to win me over, but she was actually tricking me cuz she does not drink and spilled some on accident (yeah right ). I was interested in working at a brewery. Crane river hired me as a server.

Hmmmm…… I guess I can really lay into the place now that it is defunct, but I will not be too harsh. As I had mentioned about my Village Inn days, restaurant workers are drunks and druggies. The hippy like atmosphere there only made it worse. Kind of a unique place, really was like a true brewpub. Was actually a clone of Wynkoop brewpub in CO. Same equipment and menu, well really close.

neat thing was employees were allowed to be unique. They did not have to wear a uniform, name tag, follow a script, or hide their individuality. All you needed was to look decent and have a Crane River apron. Oh man did some characters work there. It is a great concept, but it had some issues. The service was notoriously bad. Much of that came from the relaxed attitude of the staff. Plus the place was never really bumping so there was a lot of standing around.

The food was pretty good. Especially the lunch specials. having a bunch of veggi and vegan dishes was pretty neat. While working there I found out that I like a bunch of different things. it definitely expanded my range of foods i would eat. The best was a garbonzo burger deep fried with bacon, oh man. Red beans and rice with the andoullie sausage ruled, gumbo, veggi melt, black and tan brownie.

Thing was the owners worked the day and not the evenings. Workers got good deals on beer and other percs (really nice bartenders ) so the whole staff would come in and take over 1/2 the bar and get wasted almost every night. of course that would hamper the abilities of those who had to work the next morning. It was a vicious cycle.

Oh the kitchen staff was filled with many unique individuals. Seriously folks if you look into the back of any places kitchen you would be frightened, very frightened. Thing was at Crane River you had to walk past the kitchen which was not closed off at all. And well how do I put this nicely? The kitchen was not all that pretty.

Still to this day I am good friends of many I used to work with there. Good people.