Moving out and moving on up…

From the early days after we opened Krimo’s, we decided that our customers would have their table for the night. Their table would only be used once, whether they arrived when we began service at 7.30 pm or much later, at 9 pm. As a result, for more than five years, we catered for a maximum of 32 diners five evenings a week. The restaurant was booked up months ahead, and we were unable to accommodate hundreds of disappointed customers every week. We once totted up the numbers of people we could not fit in, and the total ran into the hundreds at weekends.
In the beginning, there were very rarely any no-shows, the term for people who fail to turn up for their booked tables but as time went by, this became a problem especially when we were refusing bookings. If a couple did not honour their reservation, this would usually wipe out our profit for the evening. We decided to take people’s telephone numbers when they booked and call them on the day of their booking to confirm that they still required their table. This exercise was tedious but became necessary to avoid ending up with empty tables.
In 1990, we toyed with the idea of extending the restaurant. There were just two options. On our left lived a lovely old lady called Constance. I plucked up the courage and knocked on her door. I asked her if she would be willing to sell us her house for an extension. She understood why we would request such a thing but explained that, as her older brother had just moved in with her, she would not have the heart to put him through another upheaval in his advanced years. We, therefore, opted to extend upwards. We needed to move out and turned the flat into a first-floor dining room, install a dumb-waiter, double the size of my kitchen, and relocate the toilets upstairs. For weeks, Karen scoured the property pages looking for a new home in Hartlepool, but we ended up opting for a house in Horden where she had often played as a kid. It was convenient seeing that one of our nieces lived close enough to look after Adam when we were at work. We moved out a few days before the restaurant alterations started. They took place during our usual annual two-week holiday. When we reopened, we came across many hiccups, one of which was the new chairs we had ordered. They were made of rough rattan and clicked many ladies’ beautiful dresses. We immediately got them exchanged for better ones, and our insurance paid for the torn garments.
In the past, all our food leftovers went to the Dalmatian breeder who lived behind the restaurant, but as she had sold up and moved away, I decided to include a food waste disposal in my kitchen plans. The first time we used it, I made the mistake of clogging it up with plastic wrappers that came with the new cutlery. I later read the manual which clearly stated that only food scraps should go in it.
The dumb-waiter and intercom system also caused us a few headaches until everyone got used to both of them.
On the plus side, we had nearly double the number of seats, with those first-floor ones overlooking the North Sea, becoming the most popular.
Living in Horden meant making the return journey between home and the restaurant twice a day, barely having time for lunch and the obligatory short siesta before heading back to start the evening shift. For someone who only had to climb down one flight of stairs to get to work, it took me a while to get used to the travel. I must say that it had its ups and downs. One of the ups was going down Crimdon and Horden Bank on a late summer’s evening and being able to smell the wild garlic that grows around Castle Eden Dene. Another up or maybe a down was driving along Church Street late on weekend nights and having to avoid the partygoers that made it a bustling part of town until the arrival of the new licensing laws.
But that’s a story for another day.