Page 15 of Locked Down In Watch Hill
The main business phone rang again, and Seth gave me a look. “I’ve got this one, man. You start cooking.”
Relieved, I hurried to the prep station and looked at the next order on the computer tablet anchored to the wall near the large oven. Two pepperoni pizzas and an order of pizza bread. Simple enough. As Seth’s voice droned through the main dining room, I took out two prepared pizza crusts and spread my grandmother’s secret sauce over them.
I knew how to make pizzas, and I knew how to make them fast.
That was one thing I was good at—no one could do it faster than I could, and it was all the result of a weekend spent perfecting an assembly line back when the restaurant had to shut down during the first round of restrictions. I took a few days to absorb the initial shock, and one Sunday during a round of beer-fueled frustration, I found myself in the kitchen with a stock of pizza crusts and vats of ingredients. That afternoon, I worked out how to make the food, and make it fast. Then I wrote down how I did it and repeated it until it was almost muscle memory.
Now, the repetition I perfected served me well. I had the pizzas and the bread in the oven in less than ninety seconds, along with a satisfied smile on my face when Seth walked into the kitchen.
“Another order for pizza bread,” he said. “Two of them, and a side of chicken wings.”
I cocked my head. “I think that’s the sixth or seventh order in a row where they have wanted pizza bread.”
“What can I say?” He shrugged. “It’s good. That has to be why.”
“But it can’t just be that. It can’t. People didn’t just suddenly decide en masse to order pizza bread from a fledgling shop in an inner ring suburb. They didn’t.”
“Maybe they did.”
I stared at my friend for another moment, and then it dawned on me. I held up a finger. “Hold on a second.”
I took my phone from the back pocket of my jeans, unlocked it, and opened Instagram. There was the answer, right on top of the posts to the restaurant profile. Ashley had uploaded a photo of the pizza bread a few hours before, along with a caption to go with it.
And to my shock, the photo had three hundred likes, ten times more than any of the ones I’d so unartfully posed in the past. To top it off, about a half-dozen comments rounded out the post.
Laughing, I looked up at Seth. “You’re not going to fucking believe this.”
“What?”
“I think the uptick came from this post.” I turned the phone so that Seth could see the photo Ashley had posted. “Look at the numbers.”
Seth crossed the room and took the device from me. “That’s crazy,” he said after a moment of studying it. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an uptick in sales based on one social media post.”
I took back the phone and shoved it in my pocket. “Still, I guess anything is possible. Why don’t you ask the next person who orders pizza bread what made them want to get it? Might as well run an unscientific experiment.”
“Okay.” He shrugged. “I guess it’s worth a shot.”
He disappeared back into the main dining room, and I turned back to the task at hand—pizzas and pizza bread. I had a number to make, and I barely noticed when Seth returned a few minutes later with a goofy grin on his face.
“You were right,” he said.
“The Instagram post?”
“Yep. It had to be. I even asked a few of the customers if they had seen it, and several said they had.”
I threw cheese on the last pizza in the assembly line and put it into the waiting oven. “I didn’t think Instagram could work that well. I mean, it’s not like that—”
“Or is it?” Seth shoved his hands into his pockets. “We had a few posts that did well when The Frosted Heart was open, and believe me, when it works, it works.”
“I guess that means I have someone to thank.”
My friend blinked. “Ashley?”
“Sure.” I took another round of fresh dough from the nearby cold storage.
“I don't know her all that well, but she seems a lot deeper than the usual women I used to find haunting my clubs, you know the types.” He leaned against the nearby shelf. “She isn’t like them.”
“Agreed.”
