Spreadsheets and Milky Bars
Having moved out of the flat and turned the first floor into another dining room in the Summer of 1990, we nearly doubled our seating capacity. Although it was more a question of providing ourselves with a livelihood and a future for the family, it was great to hear our accountant say that our profit was now the equivalent of that of a headteacher’s salary. Not bad at all for a cowboy chef and an ex-housewife!
I decided to treat myself to a proper office desk in the vacated attic, a computer and a printer. A regular of ours introduced me to a young IT specialist, Richard who helped me choose the equipment. Although I had studied computing back in the early 70s, using what seems like petrol-driven machines compared to those of the early 90s, I did not have a clue how to turn mine on. Thanks to Richard and a lot of research and late nights, I began to fathom out how to use the computer. The first victim of my sudden jump into information technology was the word processor that I had bought a couple of years earlier from Barlows in Park Road, the site of today’s One Life. While it had proved very useful for menu writing, it was a real fossil compared to my new computer. I spent hours after service, drooling over spreadsheets and reorganising my bookkeeping. I devised stock keeping sheets that provided me with suppliers’ orders when I entered the figures of our end of week stocktake.
I dreamed of a new cooking system that would link computers, fridges and microwaves and get rid of chefs.
The sad reality is that less than three decades on, there are indeed systems that serve you chips and other things from a distributor.
Thanks to the new computer, menus became easy to produce, tweak and print, even though very few changes were allowed by the customers. I did introduce a few new dishes over the years, but the mainstay of the menu and the old favourites survived the change.
Speaking of change, over the years, Karen set herself the challenge of trying to encourage customers to be a little more adventurous. She had a fair number of successes, getting diners to order their steaks on the rarer side of well-done. There was a regular of ours called Keith, who sadly passed away a few years ago. He went from eating cremated fillet to medium, medium-rare, then rare over the period of twelve months and thoroughly enjoying it.
Keith wasn’t the only one whose dining habits were significantly changed by Karen’s gentle coaxing. She also introduced other diners to dishes they would never have dreamed of trying.
On the other hand, we came across many parents and grandparents who were extremely proud to show off their adventurous offspring varied and exotic tastes. I was honestly in awe of a young seven-year-old boy who, encouraged by his well-travelled grandad and under the gaze of his half-horrified grandmother, wolfed down two dozen moules marinières as if they were jelly beans. Speaking of grandmothers, there was another unforgettable one who paid us several visits with her bespectacled blond little grandson. She was enormously proud of him as, for several years, he played the chocolate-sharing Milky Bar kid in the popular television advert. She always brought free samples to share among the staff.