Opening your open cafe continued (what to do first)

Ok we've got the site for our new cafe - now what do we do? First thing we need to do is prioritise. What are the most important things to do before we open and what can wait? We want to open our cafe as soon as possible because we are already paying rent, we might be paying wages.. besides, we just want to get started. But it is important not to rush in, and even more important not to be seen to be rushing. In a job interview, the employer makes up his mind in the first 30 seconds. Forget about your well-crafted CV - if he doesnt like what he sees the moment you walk into the room, you're out. the same goes for a cafe. Who hasn't been to cafe where everything goes wrong, and the owner, by the way of an excuse, says that it's his first day, or his staff's first day, or the chef's new, or it's a new menu? And you, as a paying customer, do you care? No you just want a coffee or a quiet meal - you don;t need to hear these stories. You might probably never go back. Yes, it's a fickle world. we very rarely give a cafe a second chance. So eugenius, says to you, your cafe must be perfect from the day it opens. The lesson from this blog is - don't rush to open!

On the other hand, you can't sit on your hands waiting for the stars to come into alignment or the editor of the local newspaper to walk through the door and say this place is just fabulous, I love you, your front page of the Food section this week. Opening your cafe is going to involve a lot of trials. It will involve you covering the front window of the joint so that nobody can see in and dishing out a whole lot of food to friends and assorted free-loaders while you are testing out your menu, your flow in the kitchen, your appliances, your ability to stay awake for fourteen hours in a day etc etc. Remember also that soft openings generate a lot of interest. people walking by wonder what all the fuss is about and they will be the first customers to run through the doors once you do finally open, so be a little savvy about the soft openings and you might have a PR coup on your hands. More about this later.

The point of the last paragraph was to get you to aim at the soft opening not the actual opening. if you feel safe with this then the real opening will be a piece of cake. Hmm, let's say a nice moist cheesecake.

Aiming for the soft opening will help you to focus your mind on what you can do and what you can't do. We haven't discussed this yet but say you want to open a  mexican restaurant. You need to work backwards from the menu to how you make what's on the menu. It would be great to smoke your own meat for instance, but you don't have a smoker, so you might decide to roast instead. Storage of raw materials and dishes-in-progress is also a major consideration. You might want to keep a range of tacos in a display fridge to tempt walk-in customers, but how to keep them looking fresh? You might decide to wrap them in cling film for this reason but then how do they look? Where do you keep them if they are not on display? Where do you keep the ingredients that go inside them if you need to make some more up in a hurry/ The logistics of what you make, how you make it, and where you keep it is what makes one place fire and another fail. All this must be ironed out in the soft opening.

Now why do you think you want to open a Mexican restaurant? It may help for credibility that you are Mexican but more often than not these days, it matters not. The most important thing is that you are passionate about Mexican food. If you don't like the stuff, and even though there is no Mexican restaurant around for miles, and Mexican food is 'in' right now, it won't work. Not because you can't fake it - of course, you can - but because you'll get sick of doing something you don't like after a while. Isn't that the reason you got into cafes in the first place - because you wanted to do something you wanted to do after all these years?

Okay, you love Mexican food, but there are three pl;aces already down the street - do you still go ahead? Personally I'd advise you to think about it. I know you think your food will be different to theirs, better than theirs, cheaper than theirs - but have you actually checked them out? Eat in these other places, get your friends to go there independently from you. It may turn out that they are pretty good, even great. Okay now you know. I'm not advising you to give up. It may even be a good thing that a little Mexican precinct may form. It's just good to gauge your competitors. Don't put tickets on yourself. As an aside, let me tell you, it's always good to get on with your fellow eateries - so introduce yourself, and wish them well.

I'm getting hungry so let's finish this here. next episode we'll talk more about what you need to do before you open. As usual please send me any queries or comments you may have. happy eating!

Buying an exiting cafe

So you've decided to open a cafe. Are you taking over an existing venue or starting from scratch? Both options have their pluses and minuses. If you would like to take over an existing cafe whoever you buy it from will be wont to talk it up. If it is currently successful the price will reflect that; if it is not there will be all sorst of excuses as to why. An owner will have all sorts of reasons for selling but you can bet that he won't say that business has been going bad. He will tell you that the books only tell you part of the story, of that I'm sure. Of course, there is cash in the business but in these days of credit cards cash is not what it was. He will most likely tell you that he has charged many more expenses to the business than the cafe has spent from groceries to feed the family, internet, telephone, perhaps even car. All that sounds good and it may or may not be true but as regards you, the purchaser, is concerned it is irrelevant, You can only work on what is in his books.  The rule of thumb is a cafe is worth five times the net profit. Rent cannot be more than a fifth of turnover. Don't look at projections - graphs showing sales going through the roof in the future are all well and good, but are you buying a business or a fairytale?
Ask the owner how much coffee he sells a week then check the invoices from his coffee supplier. Well, you are not going to say to his face that you don't trust him. He may not even know. When you work in a plce and are busy all the time it may seem to you that you are making more coffee than you actually are. In any case, if he is using less than 7kg a week of beans then he doesnt have a business he has a hobby, a lifestyle that might be fun and all, but there's no money there. There's no money to be made in food as a general observation. Money is in coffee and alcohol, if the cafe has a liquor licence.
All this calls into question your motives. Have you asked yourself why you want to open a cafe? Have you realised you may not break even until the third year? Are you prepared to have no time off, no holidays, no life. Anyway I stray. of course, you have otherwise you wouldnt have got this far.
 

WORK OUT YOUR FINANCES

In the last blog I compared a cafe that was busy from before the day it opened to one that never opened. Arguably more thought and money was put into the second cafe but in the end that didn't matter. We don't know exactly why the cafe failed but as the landlord changed the locks on the place we can presume that the tenant didn't pay the rent. The point is when working out finances for one's new cafe it is important to budget for the worst case scenario. Don't expect to be like the first cafe and be busy from day one. In fact, don't expect to turn a profit for the first two years.Most businesses fail in their first two years. You need enough money to get through the bad times - you will need to pay rent, wages, taxes, council fees and services such as electricity, telephone, gas, wi-fi, water, trade waste; you will need to buy stock, packaging supplies, disposables. You most probably will need to do some advertising. All this adds up!
Don't base your business plan on forecasts. That's pie in the sky stuff. Sure, your cafe will be the best ever but hey, that's just in your head at the moment...
There are two things you need to bear in mind - it will take longer than you think to open your cafe, and it will cost you a heck of a lot more than you initially thought.
In coming blogs, we will workshop this in more detail

SO YOU WANT TO OPEN A CAFE

Havent blogged since Sept last year.. Been to busy working.. Not a good idea. I should have kept up with the blog. With social media all the rage, it's a new world out there in terms of marketing and though personally I find facebook posts often dumb and tweets trivial they seem to work in terms of getting bums on seats.
There's a new cafe down the street from eugenius. It's been open around 6 months. From the day it opened it has been packed. Why? It looks nice, cool and funky, but so many other places look good too but they're quiet. The menu is basically the same as everybody else's; the prices aren't especially cheap. They didn't appear to do a lot of advertising - apart from a letter box drop (which i received-and threw out immediately). Put their success down to social media? Yes, partly.
The 'social' part. The owners have a huge network. Thy are young and out there. Friends tell friends tell friends. The social media kicks in - lots of likes on facebook, urbanspoons, melbournecoffeereview, timeout, yelp etc. People walk by and see lots of customers inside. They think this place must be good. The cafe becomes a scene. You gotta go. It's not about the food anymore - maybe it never was, as long as it wasn't horrible - it's the vibe, man,
Another example. Also around the corner is another new cafe. The owners spent four months gutting the place and renovating it putting in a fabulous new kitchen, partition walls, decor etc. Finally the cafe looked ready to open. The tables were set out, crisp white tablecloths lay on top of them. Cutlery and crockery were set. There were even vases of flowers on each table. But the cafe never opened. A sheriff's sign was affiixed to the window advising that the landlord had repossessed the property for failure to pay the rent. The tenant ahd blown his budget setting up the place and had no money to operate it. Nuts? U betcha.

PREPPING PART 3

In the last blog we built a menu up from 'sprinkles' of herbs through to stuffed capsicum. The Bolognese sauce we created that was matched with rice and stffed into a red pepper could have just as easily have transmogrified into Spag Bol, lasagna or a really delicious meat based soup, like old Mr Lazar used to make in his now sadly departed charcoal grill in Johnston St. (It is now an apartment block. All of these dishes are equally yummy so why did we choose to make stuffed peppers?
Remember that Eugenius is a cafe that prides itself on the freshness of its cuisine and you will understand that Spaghetti Bolognese  presents a problem in terms of the cooking of the pasta. As we do not like to precook the noodles because they never taste as good, we can't really do this. Go to Pellegrinis. Lasagna we can do easily but as our patrons are by-and-large weight conscious and often afraid of carbs it's never that popular. I suggest Leo's in Fitzroy Street. As for a meat soup, well that works well in winter, but in summer fahgetaboutit! But even if we could make all three of these dishes and sell them, we wouldn't because it would skew our menu too much into one direction. A well constructed cafe menu covers all bases but doesnt belabour them.    
Stuffed peppers is a retro-futurist dish that is healthy, easy on the eye, easy to keep and reheat, and tastes great. But note that when we designed our menu, we didnt start off thinking of making stuffed peppers. Neither did we scratch our heads after we had made Bolognese sauce and think, what are we going to do with it. Rather, the dish evolved from both directions and its creation was also informed by otehr considerations. When we come to menu design, we will discuss price points, eatability, and other factors that relate to why one dish is chosen over another when a new menu is constructed. happy eating!

PREPPING PART TWO

So we have established that cooking for paid customers requires more discipline than when cooking for family. By discipline, I mean to say that there needs to be consistency, timeliness, attractiveness and reliabilty. At a cafe, you never know how many people are going to show up, when, and what they are going to eat. Ok, some family members can be toey if their dinner is not served on time but in general they don't walk out as can happen in a restaurant. Customers can't be expected to hang around indefinitely for their meals. On the other hand, a cafe can't turn a  profit if there is a surfeit of staff. Also, storage space both for ingredients and prepared meals is an issue especially at a small place like ours.  So flexibilty and adaptability is of the utmost importance.

Eugenius has quite a substantial menu but I'll let you in on a little secret - a lot of the dishes we serve are made from the same basic elements combined in different ways.

In order to provide consistent meals in a timely manner, prepping is very important. I dont mean half-cooking the risotto - I never order risotto in restaurants for this time-saving shortcut to bad cooking. Neither am I referring to blasting in the microwave or having a soup boiling away. By prepping I mean preparing building blocks from which various meals may be constructed. It's the culinary equivalent of a macro. Once these building blocks have been made, they can be used straight away or else stored for periods of time, either in the fridge or freezer. having easy access to them,  frees the chef to be able to consummate tasks that require his or her more immediate attention. I'll give you a short example here to illustrate what I mean. More substantial expositions will feature in forthcoming blogs.

SPRINKLES TO STUFFED PEPPERS
SPRINKLES: Chop up fresh herbs eg., parsely, coriander, dill, rosemary. Use these sprinkles on scrambled eggs, salads, food on display in the fridge, to add that restaurant pizzaz.
PARIS BUTTER: Add sprinkles to a blender together with a dollop  of garlic, sesame oil, ginger, mustard, lemon rind, hoprseradish, whisky, soy sauce, ketchup, chilli powder, tabasco and a block of butter.  Mix till the butter is evenly speckled. Put what you dont need of the Paris Butter in small containers in the freezer. Use Paris Butter when scrambling eggs, frying mushrooms, grilling a steak - it has a thousand uses. Put it out with the bread to show your clients what you are made of!
PEPPERONATA: Fry onion, red pepper and fresh tomato in Paris Butter. Pepperonata is delicious by itself or as a relish. It's fantastic on toasted polenta.
NAPOLI: Stew Pepperonata in tomato paste, a dash of white wine and some more Paris Butter. Napoli forms the base for many dishes, from saltimbocca alla Romana, to delicious tomato-based soups.
BOLOGNAISE: Fry minced meat in Paris Butter, add Napoli sauce and a zeffrito of carrots, tomato and onion, chuck in a splash of red wine (drink teh balance yourself) and Luigi's your uncle.
STUUFED CAPSICUM: Cook some basmati rice in your rice cooker and add it to your Bolognaise (same amount of rice as sauce) and feed it into a cooked capsicum. Simple, eh!
So you can see how one thing leads to another. There's another secret for you..    

PREPPING

I know a lot of you blogniks out there are excellent cooks but cooking for your family is not the same as cooking professionally. It's not a matter of quantity - at eugenius we often only make a limited amount of something whereas at home you may be cooking for a truckload of family or friends. It's not a matter of presentation - though at our family dinners food rarely makes it to the dining-room table as it is attacked en route. It's not a matter of kitchen appliances - at eugenius we make do with a sandwich press, a convection microwave, a Bamix, a couple of frypans and a camp stove. It's not a matter of cost - though the rule of thumb is the selling price of a meal needs to be at least 5 times the cost of the raw ingredients, at eugenius we use top-shelf materials and as our prices are cheapish we often fall below this rule.
So what is it a matter of?  Consistency for a start. If a customer loved his Breakfast burrito last week when he orders another one this week he expects to get the same thing. So the key is:- have a recipe, source the same raw materials and present the dish the same way each time. Most chefs know this in principle but if you are thinking about opening a restaurant you need to thoroughly bed down your proposed menu items before you commit them to the printed menu. And it is not just the one item you need to get right, you need to consider how each item works with the others. What narrative are you trying to achieve? Is it a type of cuisine, a way of cooking, a style, an emphasis? You need to consider your storage options, your purchasing agenda, your profit margins...
So once youve done all that and you believe the menu item will work, then you open your restaurant and you have to make the thing. And here comes the most important thing...PREPPING.
We'll get onto that next blog