05/11/2026
In honor of Motherās Day, Iām going to do the opposite of my own momās life-long adviceā¦ āDonāt complain, donāt explain.ā It proves useful in endless situations, but if you were here yesterday, you deserve some acknowledgement, so long post aheadā¦
THANK YOU to everyone who chose to celebrate Motherās Day at Treehouse. It is truly an honor to be the place where you want to spend a special day with the people you love the most.
That makes this post even harder to write because we know many of our guests left feeling disappointed. Almost everyone was so kind & understanding, and we are beyond grateful for your support. Most days, we are confident in our abilities, but yesterday, we were just beyond our capacity in more ways than one.
The best explanation I have is thisā¦āHindsight is 20/20.ā We really did try to plan a menu that would work under pressure. We reflected on issues we had last year, made intentional decisions and plansā¦some of them turned out to be the wrong ones. Some of the issues can be resolved with better planning AND sometimes things just go wrong and we have to keep going, knowing we are not delivering the experience that guests deserve.
The 1st of many issues was overloading our fryer, despite considering that when planning the menu. We are so excited everyone loves our new features, fried chicken & fried catfish, but our fryer just could not handle the popularity of both at once, and it was impossible to continue. So, the fryer went down, the waffle iron quit working, the ice maker was leaking a small river through the server station, we ran out of cups & silverware, we ran out of food, everywhere I turned there was a full pan of dishes to carry back to the solo dishwasherā¦
We had the same amount of orders in 3 hours as a decent 9 hour Saturday and were simply overloaded in multiple areas. We needed more food, more staff, more tables, more dishes & silverwareā¦MORE of everything! We are sure the answer is a buffet (new equipment), more staff, and more tables, but the reality is more takes time, more costs more, more takes up space we donāt have.
Many people say, āWell, thatās a good problem to have.ā I agree, and cannot overstate how grateful we are for every single customer. While abundance comes with so much gratitude, yesterday it came with the reality of making one hard decision after another, under extreme stress, with a room full of hungry people looking at us, knowing we were disappointing people left and right.
Despite all of that, I am beyond proud of our entire staff, including ourselves and our kids. Some of us cried, some of us got mad, some of us panicked and frozeā¦but we all kept going and gave everything we had, and Iāll never stop being amazed at what our staff can get through.
We spent all night and will spend all year talking about all the things we SHOULD have done. We will do our best to prepare & improve AND will certainly face different issues next year. We can problem solve, order more, change menu offerings, adjust for next year, AND we will always be working within the constraints of our very small kitchen, limited storage space, razor thin profit margins, and the biggest limitation of allā¦we are HUMAN.
If it was your 1st visit, we hope you will return on any other day of the year, get to know us, and enjoy this beautiful mountain and some delicious food.
THANK YOU to everyone who continues to support us as the work-in-progress that we are and always will be!
