The first week, just like the first night, was a total blur.

Bookings came thick and fast, but as Karen, who was running the front of house of a restaurant for the first time in her life was still trying to learn the business, we decided to take only enough reservations to fill the seats once per evening. That very quickly became what we got to be known for, our USP: “your table for the night”. It turned out to be a great idea but we soon realised that, although the restaurant was getting booked up just about every night, half the diners were ordering pizzas and pastas. Given that those dishes were priced at around £4 each, we worked out that if we were to continue the same format, of only taking a maximum of 32 bookings per night, we would end struggling to pay the bills, let alone giving ourselves a livelihood.
After the end of the first week, I sat at the dining room table and devised a new menu, discarding those items. The cheapest item on the menu was now soup at £2.20 and the dearest, at £9.50, was the Tournedos Madère, an 8oz. fillet steak served on a round of toasted bread, topped with pâté and served with a rich Madeira sauce.

Karen and I were both learning on the hoof. Although she was still terrified at the start of every shift, she was getting the hang of things and become more comfortable making conversation with customers. For two solid months, she worked really hard lunches and dinners, did the laundry, cooked for and looked after the family. Things eased up a little once we found a lady who took over the laundry and a young waiter, Shawn who replaced at lunch.
One Saturday evening, as she was coming down the stairs to start a very busy shift, with a few large parties booked, it suddenly dawned on her that she was no longer worried about having to face a full house.
We held a party for all those who had helped us set up the restaurant including Bert, our bank manager and Steve, our building society manager, without whom the project would’ve been a non-starter. In the first two months, we had already repaid the money that Bert had lent us to get us started. They both knew that they had placed a safe bet in us.
After a few weeks, as we began establishing a great restaurant team, our daughter Lisa, who was then 17 years old and still living at home, was the only member of the family that carried on helping out in the kitchen, making starters and desserts at weekends. Her wage was a gigantic Banana Split which she prepared herself at the end of the shift to enjoy in her attic bedroom. Many years later, she confessed that she laced her favourite dessert with Tia Maria and Crème de Menthe when no one was paying attention.
As a cowboy chef, I kept not just my knives in the kitchen but all my other tools, screwdrivers, hammers and power tools as they were often called for. On a few occasions, my jigsaw was called upon and worked wonders.
Quite a few of the tables left by the previous owners were round but, as we began getting many large parties, Karen suggested that we should perhaps buy a few square tables to place next to the oblong ones. I scratched my head and came up with a solution. Instead of spending unnecessary pennies, I decided to saw all the round table tops into square ones, resting them on empty beer kegs and using my trusted jigsaw.
Mind you, not all my attempts at DIY were successful, but that’s another story.