The Christmas Report.

It’s the start of a New Year which brings the usual New Year resolutions and promises to do things better and quicker and more efficiently. I suffer the same afflictions and hope to be a better person and run a better business in 2009. I also hope to keep this blog running and update it a little more frequently.

I have decided to stop posting the entries here on the various Pattaya message boards. They have been a great help in getting the Pattaya Beer Garden noticed and have led to some very nice compliments mixed in with the occasional brickbat. I must say the owners of the various forums have been very helpful in allowing me to use their bandwidth for a bit of self promotion. So thank you one and all for putting up with my ramblings. I will still be reading the various forums and putting in the occasional post or answering any questions the members may have about the PBG.

By concentrating on the blog alone I hope to be able to post here more frequently as I won’t need to consider a wider audience. This blog gets a surprisingly large number of hits so I guess some people find it interesting. One of my primary reasons for starting this blog was to document the process of getting the PBG up and running for my own benefit as well as anyone else interested in starting a business in Pattaya.

I have tended to concentrate on the problems we have rather than the successes. That’s because the problems are always more interesting and the information more useful. If I posted every month that things were great, business was great and all our customers were really happy, it would be deadly dull. Judging by the comments here and on the forums I think that is largely the case. We get so many positive and enthusiastic comments it would be easy to just concentrate on the positive aspects. Nevertheless any business has its problems and a farang owned business with 55 Thai staff in Pattaya is always going to have its fair share of cock ups. Sometimes the problems are funny, sometimes they piss me off and sometimes they piss off our customers. Whatever the case I will be writing about them here.

So here’s what went wrong at Christmas.

As this was our first Christmas I had no idea what to expect in terms of customer numbers or what they would like from the Beer Garden over the holiday season. I suspected we would be busy and that we would have problems dealing with timely food service. With that in mind and in consultation with out Head Chef I decided to run a Set Menu on 24/25/26 December. An appetizer, choice of Turkey or Lamb dinner and Christmas pudding all for 595 baht was what we came up with.

Come the 24th of December I duly placed a sign at the doorway stating that we were only serving the set menu that night. I then watched for an hour or so as people rolled up to the doorway, read the sign and promptly turned around and disappeared into the night, never to be seen again. By 8 pm we were about 25% full. On previous nights we had been 100% full by that time. Mrs Pete was not happy. Being the driving force behind the Beer Garden, Mrs Pete has never been shy in voicing her opinion and in this case her opinion was clear . . . . . my idea sucked big time.

I was of course calm and collected and said to her, give it time and we will see what happens. Thirty minutes later having dealt with several customers complaining that they did not want the set menu and a still 75% empty bar, I removed the sign and reinstated our normal menu, alongside the set menu. Within 30 minutes we were full and struggling once again to meet demand. How many ways can Mrs Pete say “I told you so”. Well more than I care to remember.

I worked that night on a new Menu for Christmas day. This was our standard menu plus a list of specials that included the Turkey dinner, Lamb dinner and Christmas pudding. I also reduced the price so that ordering the set menu items a la carte now cost 50 baht less. Well we had a huge Christmas Day, our biggest day yet in the Pattaya Beer Garden. Sadly though during the busiest period, 7 pm – 9pm food service was very slow and a few cock ups occurred. If we had stuck with the set menu we would have been able to get all meals out in a timely fashion but the bottom line here is that is not what our customers wanted.

So a valuable lesson learned and I’d like to state right now for the record that we will never, ever offer a set menu again . . . period! This was also a costly mistake in that we had had to order all the Lamb, Turkey and Christmas puddings in advance. We ended up selling only a third of what we ordered and if our staff is now looking a little rounder it because of all the Turkey and Lamb they took home and stuffed themselves with.

Dealing with an international group of customers is always a challenge. Cooking styles and tastes can vary enormously between countries. We had some trouble with this in the early days as the English did not necessarily like the American way of doing things and the Germans had a different view from the Aussis and so on. We have settled on an international style which seems to work for most people. However I was completely taken back when several Americans asked me what Christmas pudding was. I’d just assumed it was an international thing and considered Christmas without Christmas pudding to be sad thing indeed. Well I can tell you now that lots of Americans and Europeans had no idea what Christmas pudding is.

Wikipedia say the following . . . Christmas pudding is the dessert traditionally served on Christmas day. It has its origins in England, and is sometimes known as plum pudding, though this can also refer to other kinds of boiled pudding involving a lot of dried fruit. Christmas pudding is a steamed pudding, heavy with dried fruit and nuts, and usually made with suet. It is very dark in appearance - effectively black - as a result of the dark sugars and black treacle in most recipes, and its long cooking time. The mixture can be moistened with the juice of citrus fruits, brandy and other alcohol.

All the Americans I coerced into trying it actually loved it so I feel I have done my bit for bringing the international community a little closer together. If you have never tried it, do yourself a big favour and grab some next time you have the chance. As I grow older the allure of Christmas has been largely lost but the allure of Christmas pudding lives on.

I have written often here about our struggle to get food out in a timely manner. One commentator on a Pattaya form gave me a bit of stick about this when he got slow service on Christmas day. Your excuses are getting a little old, he said and the problem should have been fixed by now. I can understand his point of view.

Back in May we struggled to do 100 meals a day. When we struck 200 a day in September it was tricky but several changes in the Kitchen and extra staff helped. In November we were almost coping with 400 meals a day and further refinements were added. By Christmas time we were doing well over 500 meals a day and really not coping. Every improvement I made to fix the situation just got swallowed up in extra growth. When Mikey was here he reckoned we would max out at about 500 meals in terms of capacity and I think he was right.

The good news is that the big Christmas rushed ended last Friday and since then we have been coping remarkably well with 400 plus meals a day. It seems easy now that we have peaked out over the Christmas fortnight. I am sure a few more surprises still await me but it’s downhill from here to May and our first full year of operation.

Earlier in December, Venus, Jupiter and the moon combined to smile upon the Pattaya Beer Garden ( and maybe a few other places as well).

New Years eve brought a whole new set of unexpected problems and that will be the topic of my next entry here soon. For now I hope you all had a great Christmas and I wish you all the best for 2009.

Pete