The Hungry Dragon

THE HUNGRY DRAGON
There are those in this world who dare to dream. Their desire for a restaurant consumes their souls as a dragon would consume worlds. They pursue the ache within their hearts with never ending unrest until at last their doors open, their dream is fulfilled, and each day their soul sings with the joy of ten thousand angels celebrating the achievement of all that they desired.

This is not my story. This was never my dream. In fact I believe anyone with this dream must be possessed by a touch of the madness to desire such a fools errand. Yet here I sit on the precipice of our doors opening, trembling, and clearly the driving force behind all of this. How did this happen? How did we get here?

OUR STORY
Just over eleven years ago I started working on Mickey's Pizza. I was told to build it but never set foot in it as I didn't know what I was doing. When our doors opened 10 ½ years ago it was very clear within the first month that we were going to fail. I jumped in, put us on Twitter, started taking pictures, answering phones, taking cash, building pizzas, cooking pizzas, delivering (Yes! Delivering!) pizzas, and we started growing. I added Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. We grew some more. I started learning. I learned absolutely everything about the business. We tweaked recipes. We grew some more. And something happened. As the business grew each day I felt I was failing more each day. As lineups eeked out the door (especially after we were on You Gotta Eat Here!) my stomach twisted in knots. As we sold out night after night people saw success while for me my failure crushed my soul. I wept privately over my failures. Many nights. I was consistently letting too many people down.

There was nowhere to sit, not enough menu items, we could never keep enough dough in stock, the phone lines were too busy, the wait time was too long. The list of my failures seemed endless. The only way to resolve it was to get a bigger space with more everything. I hunted for a year in Clarkson. Nothing. I realized we'd have to go further and we'd need to re-brand. I hunted for another year and squirreled away, dollar by dollar, the money we'd need for the rebrand. We found the place in Oakville and started negotiating.