Chapter 12

S*** Happens

“One day I want to open a cute café where people can just come and hang out, listen to great music, sip on good coffee, and eat good food.”

If you consider yourself a foodie, you’ve probably been there (in your head) at some point.

But let me sprinkle a few details that might make you want to revisit your food career fantasy. Unless you own the space where you hope to open your ‘cute café’, unless you don’t care about making money, unless you want a skeletal staff to cook and serve your patient customers, unless you’ve stumbled upon the magic formula of a perfectly curated menu with just the right number of dishes that customers can order again and again without getting bored on any day of the week…you can fuhgeddaboudit.

The magic formula isn’t easy to come by. And yes, it’s hard work, but it’s work that you’re willing to do because you’re doing something that you’ve always dreamt of doing. Right? We thought so too.

When I opened my first café, Food for Thought, to quote a very original phrase, it was like a dream come true. I thought I was in the Land of Dreams travelling on the Wishing Chair with Mollie and Peter and flying off on a new adventure everyday. I felt like my customers were like the little pixie, Chinky, that Mollie and Peter befriended along the way. I was ready for a fun-filled magical and thrilling ride with them everyday.

And it totally was (for the most part). Except that Chinky the pixie didn’t tell us that every time the dishwasher breaks down, the company would charge Rs. 2500 JUST to take a look at what is wrong with it. And then of course, slap you with a huge bill to repair it. Ditto with the refrigerator. Rs. 2000 just to come SEE it. Oven door becomes crooked, gotta repair the hinge. Each hinge costs Rs. 3500. If you put one new hinge, the other one feels left out without its old friend and protests. So of course, you get both replaced! (We don’t want to break up any relationships here). This happened more than a few times in a short span, after which I told our baker to increase the temperature of the oven while baking, to withstand the gap caused by the crooked door. That theory soon crumbled when we discovered that our pita pockets were turning into frisbees and our bread for the avo toast was dying a slow death inside.

Have you heard of the trendy dining experience of eating in the dark? Imagine paying for a multi-sensory experience of being blindfolded or just sitting in pitch darkness and tucking into food you can’t see. And then paying an arm and a leg for this ‘experience’. Well, we gave this dark dining experience to our customers at both our restaurants (for free) on a couple of occasions. Once at the time of lunch service when PLENTY was packed with customers, the lights went off. It was suddenly pitch dark. Our food was prepared on electric inductions, which meant that when the electricity went off, so did our cooking. It was as dark inside the kitchen as my mood is when India loses a cricket match or when I go out on a Friday night and realise it’s a dry day.

The customers who had already been served their food quickly put their phone flashlights on, ate their meals and asked for their bills. Except that when there is no electricity, there is no billing system. The servers didn’t know which table had ordered what food. Everyone wanted to get out of there, because who wants to ‘chill’ in a dark, hot restaurant, right? We had to request the customers to come back later to settle their bills. Some of them were very sweet and insisted on paying an approximate amount before leaving.

This also happened twice at our café Food for Thought when the BEST decided to ‘inspect’ the wiring in the middle of lunch service.

I wonder if a similar meal gone wrong inspired our friends Simon and Garfunkel to sing, “Hello darkness, my old friend.. I’ve come to talk with you again.. “

What is the moral of this story? Stuff happens. We lost revenue on those days and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

On to another story.

Betty bought a bit of butter,
But she found the butter bitter.
So Betty bought a bit of better butter
to make the bitter butter better.

Firstly, Betty had issues.

Secondly, yes butter will make your food taste good, but you don’t neeeed to add so much butter to your food that you lose (literally) some customers along the way.

At PLENTY, a large number of our kitchen staff had come to us from a ‘fine dine’ restaurant that had recently shut its doors. The chefs from this classic upscale restaurant tried their best to get me, a housewife, to start using imported butter that was three times the cost of apna Amul butter (clearly they didn’t think it was Utterly Butterly Delicious). At the time I didn’t even know there was such a thing as unsalted butter in the market. Much to their disgust, I refused to use anything other than Amul salted. Once it was established that their new employer, a woman who has only run a tiny café inside a bookshop that specialized in simple favourites and Sindhi food, had to decide between paying them a higher salary or using imported butter, they magically came around to my point of view.

Funny how these things tend to work themselves out.

One day, I walked into the kitchen and was horrified to see oodles of butter being added to the plain rice, which was an accompaniment for Goan curry and Sindhi curry. I was told the rice would not taste good without butter. They were told their jobs would not be safe if they didn’t reduce the amount of butter in the food and make it healthier and lighter for our customers. Only when we were running a packed house day in and day out did they acknowledge that food can be delicious without trying to put customers’ (and our budget’s) lives at risk with so much butter.

While it was great that both restaurants were always full, the reality was that we were often at the mercy of India’s never ending carousel of festivals and seasons. Our diverse culture brings with it several periods of fasting through the year. When we were new to this business, we were surprised to see many of our regular customers suddenly disappear from the café. We went through a couple of days of second guessing ourselves. Maybe they are fed up of sandwiches and salads? Maybe our prices are too high? The mystery was solved when one of our regular customers called and asked if we had any fasting food. While we did our best to come up with a ‘fast food’ items on our menu during these days, it wasn’t enough to avoid a few lean periods throughout the year.

The same scenario would repeat during exam time. Since my kids were all grown up I didn’t have to stay up to date with school exams. And then, because of the wonder of IGCSE, the population of kids studying for exams was now divided between IB and ISC. The fallout was that their mommies stopped venturing out, especially at lunchtime. And who suffered? Not the kids, not their parents, but us, the restaurants. I mean, is there a stronger need to redesign the education system?😊

We knew about kids’ vacation from school. Did you know about adults’ vacation? Every May our takeaways would reduce considerably because the courts would shut for a month. While we were happy our dear lawyer friends were getting a break from their high stress jobs, what about us? There should be a law against long vacations for lawyers. Oh wait, they don’t have a choice, do they? They have to abide by the law.

So, friends, countrymen and women, now that I have trampled (a bit) upon some of your dreams on owning a restaurant, let me tell you that I would do it again in a heartbeat. Coz, follow your heart. “Baaki sab bakwas”.