Story Outline

Immersion Project Outline

Our immersion project is going to be centered on the community of Mikey’s Late Night Slice located on East Duncan Street. Mikey’s Late Night Slice is a pizza restaurant that specializes in serving pizza by the slice at late hours. The restaurant opens at 5 pm and stays open until 3 am on weeknights and 4 am on weekends. Their main clientele are people leaving the myriad of bar’s which surround Late Night Slice which include Ace of Cups and Ledo’s Tavern, which is in the same building as Late Night Slice.

The goal of our project is to immerse ourselves in the world of Late Night Slice and show what its like to work for and be a patron of a restaurant specifically designed to cater to the drunken “bar scene” of Columbus. In order to do that we are going to spend time with the staff of Late Night Slice in order to get a behind the scenes look at the ins and outs of the restaurant. We will be observing the entire process of running a late-night eatery from the preparation before opening, through the busy rush that occurs after the bar closes, all the way to the clean up at the end of the night. We will also participate in the process, working as volunteers for the restaurant by helping to make and serve the pizza.

While the restaurant in of itself is our community, the main character of our project will be Eric Graef, the General Manager of Mikey’s Late Night Slice. While we plan to spend time with all the employees of Late Night Slice, Eric will be who we spend the most time with and whose role in the restaurant we will be attempting to immerse ourselves the most in. Through our time with Eric we will answer questions such as, what is it like to manage a restaurant that stays open into the late hours of the night? And, how does one manage a restaurant for which the vast majority of the consumer base is intoxicated? Besides Eric, we also want to talk with the everyday employees of Late Night Slice and immerse ourselves in the camaraderie that develops between coworkers when they must band together to fend off the hunger of the many drunken customers that wander in and out of their doors.

While we certainly want to show what it’s like to work at Late Night Slice, we also want to see what the business is like from the customer’s point of view. To that end, we will also be talking with the customers who come in and out of Late Night Slice and seeing what it is that has brought them to the restaurant. Crazy things happen at late night eateries and Mikey’s is no exception. We plan to meet and talk with all the characters that populate the bar scene of a young and growing city like Columbus in order to immerse our audience in the blurry madness that occurs at a pizza place at 3 am.