Part 67 Idle Gossip

Restaurant gossip, mushroom fudge and triple pasta bake.

Hey, if you put a Like at the end of this, the battery on your phone will always be at 100%

Hiya, welcome back.

Right then, the aircon is fixed, Darren the aircon man has been shocked and we have a team who are ready to start.

We put toilet rolls in the toilets and checked the lightbulbs. You forgot about things like that didn’t you?

Then menu pricing. This was difficult.

A brief explanation. Restaurant law says that you take the cost of the food, and allocate it like this*.

You work out the cost of the ingredients, let’s say three quid, as example, for the food, three pound for the overheads and three pound profit. So we would need to sell that plate of food for twelve pounds.

Now, someone will try to contradict the next remark, but they’re wrong. That rule of thirds just doesn’t work.

If your plated food cost is three pounds, and you’re trading in Grimsby, then your overheads will probably fit into that equation.

However, if you’re trading in Mayfair, with Mayfair rent and rates, you’d be bankrupt in a week.

And also, it sometimes just doesn’t fit. Watch this.

Lets say the cost of a cup of coffee breaks down like this, roughly-

Decent ground coffee- 50p

Milk- 25p

Sugar- 5p

So that cup off coffee has a cost price of 80p, therefore we have to sell it at £2.40, using the traditional method. But if you sold a coffee for that price in somewhere like London, you’d be the cheapest in town, people would assume that it was some rough stuff. You just have to use the same selling price as everyone else around you.

So how did we reach our selling prices? What method did we use? Which mathematical equation did we put in place?

Well, we just looked at everyone else’s prices and copied them. Yup, we did a few Google searches and took the prices of other restaurants and then stuck them on our menu. Easy!

And we did something else, and this was based on our experiences in York.

Instead of stating prices per course, you know, five pounds for a starter, ten pounds for a main, we stated it as a price for two courses and a price for three courses.

As a rough example, fifteen pounds for two courses and twenty pounds for three courses. This forced diners to have a minimum of two courses.

Why?

OK. Vegetarian restaurants were, at the time, considered as a place to fill up, somewhere to have a yummy pasta, pasta and pasta bake. Somewhere to pop into and grab a wood chipping chimichanga. Or maybe an exciting vegetable stir fry, can you imagine the sheer joy of that.

The ingredients for a pasta, pasta and pasta bake.

Sorry, not every vegetarian restaurant, but nearly every vegetarian restaurant.

But we wanted to change that. We wanted diners to have an experience, just as diners did in a meat restaurant. We wanted them to have at least two courses so that they would taste dishes they had never had before. We wanted diners to travel to us because we were Vanilla Black, not to just saunter in because their stomachs had a bit of a rumbling going on.

So as soon as they sat down, we needed them to know that this wasn't the usual carb pit stop.

We made our own bread, and served it with that butter which was also sold in Harrods, don’t you know.

And we would be serving amuse bouche, those little snacks which appear while you wait for your main meal. Vegetarian restaurants didn't do that then, that practice was only allowed to happen at a fancy meat restaurant.

One of those early snacks was a little shot glass of spiced tomato juice sprinkled with a little celery salt and served with little Maldon sea salted crisps.

This threw Jim and Jean into turmoil, many times over.

“Oi, garçon, we didn't order this, so we’re not paying for it.”

So there we go, menu pricing sorted.

Oh yea, and staff training, nearly forgot, we did that also, it’s necessary. And it was especially necessary at Vanilla Black, the dishes were pretty unusual at the time, so they needed explaining.

When a table of two opened the menu and saw dishes such as aerated Londonshire Brie with walled garden salad, celery jam and crispy Branston Pickle, they always had a question. In fact, every dish prompted a question. So the front of house team needed to taste every dish, understand it, and then explain it to diners.

“Yes, this is our version of mushrooms on toast, but in dessert form. So, the brioche is the toast, the mushrooms are represented by the mushroom fudge and the burnt honey ice cream is…..”

“Thanks for explaining that, and what is that fluffy green stuff next to the beetroot?”

“That’s whipped wasabi cream. Enjoy your meal.”

If you think that we deserve a three pound coffee, that’s the button right there.

And this first training session helped us to get to know our first team members in London. We could strike up conversation with them, ask about their home countries, find out why they were in London. We found this incredibly interesting, most of the team were from overseas so they all had a fascinating story to tell.

It also helped us to understand how some other restaurants, but not all, operated.

This is called, gossiping.

Would you like some of this historical gossip from 2008?

OK. One guy told us that while he worked at a particular two Michelin star restaurant, after he had finished his 7am until 2am, shift his feet would bleed as he had been on them for so long without a break.

Or this one. A chef who worked at a particular restaurant told us that when they were boiling pan after pan of pasta, they had to use dishwasher salt to season the water.

Or the poor young lady who had a terrible story for us. At one particular London restaurant she worked at, the female members of staff were told, that before they went onto the restaurant floor, they had to unfasten the top one or two buttons of their blouses.

Or the story about the chef who had burnt something, so the head chef picked him up and sat him on the hot plancha.

Or the head chef who, when he was telling someone off, would stand in front of them, screaming in their faces, and give them a swift kick in the shins.

We can’t give you anymore, this Post would be too long. And of course, none of this ever happens these days.

We always collected gossip from new members of staff, there were some shocking, and sometimes amusing, colourful stories.

However, as all this was going on, as we were setting ourselves up for the big opening day, there was something missing, there was a coldness, a feeling of detachment.

We had a friendly team, but this wasn’t the York restaurant. This place was much bigger, it was on two levels, and everything was scaled up. Bigger team, bigger wine menu, bigger bills. The York restaurant felt like wearing a pair of comfortable fluffy slippers. The London restaurant felt like wearing a pair of baggy jeans which we were always trying to grow into. Maybe this was just because we had made some big changes to our lives.

Anyway, enough of that emotional guff. We were nearly ready to open the restaurant.

A trade magazine called The Restaurant magazine, yea, original eh, had contacted us for details, they wanted to run a small piece on us. This shocked and amazed us, how did they even know about us?

And we finally gave Time Out an opening date, the pests.

But we needed this publicity. Twitter existed but very few people were using it, and our phones wouldn’t have handled that app. Instagram wasn’t a thing, and although we had heard of Facebook, we didn’t actually know what it was. Many years later the younger entrepreneurs would ask us how we managed without social media, because to them, it had always been there.

So our PR and marketing strategy was to print off some leaflets on A4 paper and post them in the towering office blocks in the local area. Flashy eh?

In hindsight, those leaflets were probably thrown in the bin by someone from the reception desk and nobody actually saw them.

But it didn’t matter too much, when we opened in York we were busy almost immediately, and this was London, so we would be twice as busy.

But in the background, in our real life, something odd had happened. Our house in York just wasn’t selling. This was a bad thing, we had the mortgage to pay and a huge rent on the London flat to deal with. Regular pester calls to the estate agent resulted in absolutely nothing.

But we couldn't focus on that too much, we had a restaurant to open.

Okey dokey, thanks for reading this blurb and catch us next week to find out if we ever open a restaurant in fancy London town.

Donna and Andrew

*When a chef creates a new dish the traditional method of working out the selling price is to calculate the cost to the ingredients on the plate, that’s the starting point. Then they add on the extras to get to a selling price.

We heard a story about a particular chain of cafes which has a different approach. They start with the selling price, then remove the tax, VAT, overheads, such as wages, distribution, rent, rates, insurance etc.

Then, whatever money is left, that’s allocated to creating the sandwich. It’s as if the product development is the least important. But they make a lot of money, maybe they are the clever ones.