Opening a Restaurant

I never thought I’d actually get to the point where we were planning on opening a restaurant, so the next few weeks might veer off the usual subject matter of broken down vans and bad weather to cover this while I still have the energy. After that I can only assume that eating and breathing will be luxuries and the blog may suffer slightly as a result, but I’ll make time when I can. The core Jabberwocky subject of tea will, of course, remain.

Opening a restaurant is basically the same as starting a street food business, but there is more of it. For a start, you can’t do it by yourself. Assuming you have days off (which would be great) and more than a dozen customers at a time (again, great) you are going to need extra human beings who can do the legwork that was otherwise done by the customer, back when it was all simple and inside a van.

Which brings me to another annoyance in restaurants: To serve exactly the same thing in street food as in a restaurant costs more money. Mostly due to these extra people, but also because people are funny about eating things out of paper bags in restaurants. Or standing in the rain while they do it. This means an extra level of care for customers that is not normally your concern; as well as finding somewhere indoors to seat them and plates for them to eat off.

Our current idea of indoor seating and plates.

Luckily there are benefits to having a restaurant, especially one like ours. Once Queensway Court is fully occupied there will be several hundred residents living just above us and lots of parking right outside. Rain, which I know I said I wouldn’t mention, suddenly becomes our friend. To begin with, however, the apartments will be largely vacant. We need to spread the word and encourage the folks of Leamington Spa and beyond to come and check out the Mock Turtle so that we can, in turn, make sure that there are enough extra human beings to bring them things on plates.

That is the basic conundrum of the independent restaurant industry, as far as I can see. Do you have enough staff to cater to a large audience and consequently serve more people, or do you have a tiny staff and scrape by however you can? We are going to try and aim big, because I don’t want to look back in six months time and realise we are wallowing in status quo with no staff, no time and no customers.

The plan is, therefore, to give you every single reason to come visit The Mock Turtle on or after the 2nd of April, 2015. I’ll start you off with a few. We’ll add more on twitter over the next few weeks.

1. Barny will be cooking his own epic food, much of which can be consumed in a format other than toasties.
2. It’s a great way to hang out with older people, even without mingling: A restaurant full of all kinds of people is much more sociable than one with a single section of society.
3. Manwiches every day of the week. That can now happen.