Wine Mark-Ups

Whilst recently enjoying a very (as usual) satisfying meal at William and Victoria’s in Harrogate, the conversation as so often does at such gatherings, turned to wine and the obscene mark-up that restaurants make. As by that time, in the name of research, I had already quaffed several bottles of the offending stuff, I unusually did not make too much comment other than a few disagreeing grunts and a bit of finger pointing in a manner that suggested that I had an important point to make, which I did, but failed to and in fact only succeeded in confirming that I may have had one too many. About six drinks ago.

So I feel compelled to make my point now. You see the supposed huge profit to be made on wine is one of the biggest fallacies which surrounds the restaurant business. Yes there is a large mark-up, but remember restaurants are not selling it as take-away. There is a huge different between mark-up and actual profit. Please let me explain with a few facts and figures:

Your average, decent bottle of house wine costs around £3.50 minimum. Forget any notion you may have that restaurants get to buy wine cheaper from suppliers; I can’t speak for the huge ‘chain’ restaurants, but the independents pay the same price as the public do. But that’s okay; that £3.50 bottle can be knocked out at a minimum of £13 per bottle which gives a staggering £9.50 per bottle profit for doing, well pretty much nothing really other than pulling a cork.

But let’s just look at this a bit closer. There are some people (and I will admit, I am one of them) who will go to a restaurant and buy and drink wine as if it’s not only going out of fashion, but it’s unlikely to come back into fashion in any shape or form in the next four decades. But the majority of diners will not exhibit or support such blatant alcohol abuse that I openly applaud. They will at best share a bottle of wine with their fellow diner. So now that staggering £9.50 profit is divided between two customers; that’s £4.75 each. Still doesn’t sound that bad, until you realise that this couple are more than likely going to make this bottle of wine last their entire evening. So that’s £4.75 total profit from alcohol sales, for one customer, all night. Not that great really is it?

The restaurant has to pay for the electricity and heating whilst they are enjoying this wine. The CD that is now playing in the background is costing in PRS licence fees. Is it white wine? Then we have just shelled out further on ice cubes for the ice bucket. That £4.75 profit is beginning to look a little pathetic. The staff serving this wine have to be paid; every minute that they make that last drop last is costing the restaurant in staff wages. And what if they were to break their glass through some drunken action? Well now we are probably into a loss. And then when they finally leave, they choose to pay by credit card, and so now our so-called flexible friend is going to take his cut of this already negative profit.

But that does not stop customers consistently complaining about wine mark-up.

In our restaurant we introduced a Bring Your Own policy for wine, allowing the customers to bring their own wine and we just charged a nominal corkage charge. Suddenly people started drinking far more than just one bottle a night and we actually made a bigger profit without any initial outlay or stock holding costs.

Read the Label

I’ve always been a ‘foodie’, even before I actually learned to cook. I’d read all the books and watch all the TV programs - 'Ready Steady Can't Cook' or whatever they were called. But even though I read those books with much enthusiasm, for a long time my culinary skills only really stretched as far as opening a jar of pasta sauce. Then one day I was presented with a new book; Nigel Slater’s Real Food and that all changed.

Waiting patiently in line at my local village store, I perused a display of ‘convenience’ packets. Simply out of boredom or possibly for some nostalgic trip back to my Dolmio Days, I selected one from the shelf:

Colmans Casserole Mix Chilli Con Carne 50g
Cook with mince, onions, kidney beans and tomatoes.

So if I’ve got that right then, the packet basically contains chilli powder and some herbs and spices? Where’s the convenience in that? Why, if I am going to the trouble of purchasing beef, onions, kidney beans and tomatoes, would I not just pick up a fresh chilli for a few pence or chilli powder still for probably less money than the packet with stacks left over for other recipes?

Surely there must be more; I inspected the packet a little closer:

A unique blend of chillies and spices to create a tasty Mexican style meal.

Contains traces of egg, Cornflour, Tomato Powder, Onion Powder, Salt, Sugar, Garlic Powder, Spices (2%), Yeast Extract, Wheat Flour, Flavourings, Oregano, Chillies (0.9%), Vegetable Oil, Spice Extract

Egg? Yeast extract? Unspecified Spices (2%), sugar, wheat flour and unspecified ‘flavourings’? Yep, I’d say that was pretty flipping unique!

I’m not going to rant about the contents of food and food labeling (although the mind boggles at the inclusion of egg in a chilli – but I’ve never tried it like that so will withhold comment until such time), but more I want to look at what is not in the product – in this case practically everything required to make a half decent bowl of chilli.

I decided to investigate further and picked up a tin of Low Fat Coconut Milk. Coconut milk is one of my favourite things to cook with; an essential ingredient in Thai curries, which coincidently are an essential ingredient to my weekly happiness. But I’ve never used low fat before – primarily because my thought process is that if I am going to eat something that’s got a lot of fat in it it’s probably there for good reason – taste (similarly non-alcoholic lager ranks for me as one of the worlds most pointless inventions).

But in the interest of research I read the label. Contains coconut milk and water. So that’s the secret! Basically low-fat coconut milk contains 50% less fat because it contains 50% less coconut milk! They might have well have just put it into a smaller time half the size for half the price and let us add our own water! But the shocker is the tin with half the amount of the product you want to buy actually costs more than the full tin! So here’s a tip – by full fat, add your own water and make double the amount of curry.

Nearby was a jar of passata – sieved tomatoes, ingredients: tomatoes. Now I know not everyone is a keen cook and prefer convenience but generally speaking anyone taking time out to follow a recipe that calls for passata isn’t going to be too adverse to sieving their own tomatoes, or if feeling a little lazy just blitzing them in a magimix. So I wonder if consumers perhaps think passata is something more. It is not, the only difference as far as I can tell is cost: passata 89 pence, tin of tomatoes, 35 pence.

So the moral is indeed Read the Label. You might just save yourself a few quid.

Chicken Run

I applaud this compelling show and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall determination to highlight the serious issue of intensive hen farming and the national supermarkets seemingly blatant support of this dire practice.

Two chickens on a buy one get one free offer for just £5.00? That’s just £2.50 each. I’m seriously considering keeping chickens here at North Lodge, I’ve done my home work and I’ve learned that I can not buy live, clucking, happy chickens for £2.50 each. But in my local Tesco’s I can: killed, plucked and beautifully packaged complete with cooking instructions. Something ‘aint quite right.

And this is where the problem lies: Supermarkets are setting unrealistically cheap prices for produce through intensive farming which we as consumers are beginning to accept as a standard. Farm shops are NOT expensive. Free range is NOT expensive. It is realistically priced. Please do not be misled by supermarket pricing; they are systematically brainwashing us consumers into believing that £2.50 is how much a chicken should cost and then confining the organic, ethically produced food to the expensive, exclusive Organic Shelf.

Comments from the Axminster Single Mother is typical; “But I can’t afford to buy free range”. I know there are people who are on such a tight budget that they genuinely can not afford to buy free range (I myself have certainly been in that situation), but I wouldn’t mind betting, with just a little education, that most can. A quick peruse through their shopping trolley will confirm this.

I was at a friend’s for dinner just the other evening and we had this same debate. I asked to view the contents of my friends ‘fridge: two whole chickens (two for a fiver), some diced chicken ‘stir fry’ and a packet of chicken breasts. Total cost well over a tenner.

I inquired why? The perhaps not so surprising answer was, whole chickens for Sunday roast (will probably only use one the other will be frozen), the chicken pieces were for a curry that called for chicken strips and the breasts were for some ghastly Worrall-Thompson typically over-complicated recipe that involved chicken breasts and about nine million other ingredients.

I could have got the meat for all three meals plus a chicken soup to boot from just one free range chicken priced at around £6.

It seems that consumers have lost the concept of cuts of meat and actually believe that diced chicken is different meat to that on a whole bird. And the whole bird is exclusively for roasting on a Sunday.

It’s a similar story with eggs. Half a dozen intensively produced ‘value’ eggs will cost around 73 pence; that’s about 12 pence an egg. The same number of free range from a farmers shop will cost around 90 pence, or 15 pence an egg. Is an extra 3 pence really that much? And here’s the thing; how many of us buy a box of eggs just to fry up a couple for breakfast and then ultimately throw the remainder away unused? It’s a false economy. Go to your local farmers shop and ask for just two eggs and chances are they’ll happily sell you them; just try doing that at your local Tescos. So fulfilling your egg needs in this way can actually save you money.

Of course some people won’t have the time or inclination to do this and prefer the convenience of the supermarkets, and that’s their prerogative; but if you really do care about how your food is produced please don’t hide behind the excuse of cost. Learn how to joint a chicken and try out a few recipes.

And why not take a trip to your local farm shop? You might actually be surprised how much you get for your money; not only in quality but also in quantity. Even if you do not give a toss about animal welfare, organics or food miles or any of that other ‘green’ stuff, just try it out anyway; it’s a much more enjoyable shopping experience, you’ll without doubt get better produce, you might actually just save yourself some money and the best thing is you will put a stop to the national supermarkets taking you for a twat.

Master Chef Goes Prime Time

Master Chef Goes Large is back on our TV screens larger than ever!

With its now familiar format and its new prime time slot, this series promises to be even more exciting, and for the contestants at least, more emotional than the other brilliant predecessors.

The only thing missing of course is me.

I took a slightly unconventional route into restaurant ownership, by entering this popular television competition; celebrity judge Greg Wallace had in the previous series promised that winning “would change someone’s life”. Weary of the nine to five rat-race and keen to live out a long held dream of mine, I thought it was worth a shot, but disappointingly I never made it as far as the televised stages and exited the competition following an un-glamorous damp day filming at a Birmingham Travel Lodge.

I thought my Thai Chicken Samosas were little triangular pockets of culinary delight, but evidently the judge did not concur. I’ve met Greg Wallace before, as I have Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, and thought maybe that would have gone someway towards securing my television debut, but obviously I was just placing too much importance on that Saturday morning book signing event at WH Smiths.

Undaunted by this minor setback, my wife and I took the more traditional route and secured the lease on The Riverside, a small, quaint 32 covers establishment in the Lake District, and so without any help from Greg we changed our lives ourselves, although whether this was for the better or not still remains open for lively debate.

Good luck to all the contestants – I just hope you know what you are letting yourselves in for.

Recipe: Thai Chicken Samosas

Serve these hot as a starter, perhaps with a cucumber, spring onion and coriander salad with a lemongrass dressing, as I presented to Master Chef, or cold as a lunchtime snack or a perfect picnic item. Either way delicious, despite the misguided opinion of them at the BBC.

Ingredients

For the Thai curry paste:

4-6 medium hot green chillies, de-seeded and roughly chopped
2 shallots, roughly chopped
5cm/2in piece of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
2 garlic cloves, crushed
small bunch of fresh coriander, stalks and all
2 lemongrass stalks, chopped
1 lime, grated zest and juice
1 tbsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp Thai fish sauce
3 tbsp olive oil

The rest:

2 large chicken breast chopped into small bite sized pieces
Tin of coconut milk
¼ pint of chicken stock
Handful of boiled rice (Thai Jasmine rice is perfect but long grain will suffice)
6 sheets of filo pastry
Butter

Method

Preheat the oven to 200°c

Throw all the paste ingredients into a food blender and blitz into a paste. You will have more than you need, but the rest will keep in the fridge for up to 3 weeks.

Heat some oil in a pan add a quantity of paste, according to taste. Once it begins to start sizzling, throw in the chicken pieces and stir fry for a few minutes. Add the coconut milk and stock and reduce until you have a thick sauce. Stir in the cooked rice and allow to cool.

Take 1 sheet of filo and brush it with melted butter. Lay another sheet on top and coat it with butter and then repeat with the third sheet. Turn it over so the buttered side is down, and vertically slice 5cm strips.

Place a spoonful of the Thai chicken at the bottom of each strip. Starting from the left, fold the filo sheets across the mixture into a triangle, then across again to the other side and so on until you form a tightly closed triangular parcel.

Place on a baking tray and cook in the centre of the oven for around 15 to 20 minutes, or until golden brown and crispy.

Happy New Year

2008 was seen in with just a few very good friends. Over dinner the conversation, as so often does, turned to the restaurant. My friends wondered if over the Christmas period we missed the huge amount of money that we used to make at this time of year.

Christmas. A time of Goodwill, giving, loving, snow, Cliff Richard, Slade, frankincense, myrrh, and if you are in the restaurant business: Gold. Well not exactly. Of course Christmas was an exciting time; the continuous stream of office parties and family get-togethers were pretty much guaranteed to keep the Christmas till bells ringing, culminating with the Big Day itself, when we basically got to charge a small fortune for what is in effect a roast dinner. But what I think people fail to understand is that the Christmas period is just a small slot in the restaurant calendar. The week between Christmas and New Year is historically very quiet, and no one ever really spends money in January on eating out; what little, if any, funds people do have left after the expensive Christmas period is ear-marked for the sales. So what you take one week is loss the next. And this is the pattern throughout the restaurant year; you make money when you can to see you through the times when you can’t. What you have to understand is that it costs a fortune to run a restaurant whether there are customers or not. The fixed overheads: rent, insurances, wages etc still have to be met regardless if anyone walks through the doors or not, and it really doesn’t take many quiet night to get you sweating, despite how busy you may have been the week previous.

Christmas day we did take a lot of money, but we were a restaurant that opened in the evenings – not lunch times. So for us to prepare for a busy, fully booked, paying well over the odds, Christmas day lunchtime service we shut the evening before, Christmas Eve. So any profit we were making on Christmas day was offset on what we lost Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is a ‘normal’ day as far as employment is concerned, but of course Christmas day is the biggest public holiday of the year, so we had to pay a premium in wages. So there’s yet another massive offset on that fabulous profit. Oh, and did I mention that the year we opened for Christmas day, it just so happened to fall on a Saturday? Normally a busy evening anyway, and when you subtract what we would have normally taken on a Saturday evening, I start getting a little depressed about the whole thing.

Christmas day has to be special. I love Christmas and I’m of the persuasion that believes that Christmas lunch should be cooked and ate at home. So if anyone was going to pay us to eat our turkey at our place it had to be something extra special. So there I was, 6am Christmas day morning making fake snow and spreading it around the outside of the restaurant for the benefit of the customers, in particular the children. Another huge cost, and then would you believe it? It went and snowed for real!

So the short answer to my friend’s query was ‘No’. I was much happier spending Christmas and New Year with my family and friends fattening my belly rather than my wallet. Still a little askew from the true meaning of Christmas, but a step I feel in the right direction.

Happy New Year.

It's Not Easy Being Green

Dick Strawbridge, the guy with the funny tash, has demonstrated that it is possible to harness the wind and create biodiesel reactors in the name of sustainable living. Hats off to him. Clever bloke.

But I am not clever. I don’t even think I’m particularly Green. Perhaps more a khaki. I shamelessly became interested in Green matters and sustainable living through necessity, rather than conscience; because of the problems with the restaurant which cost us hugely financially, we inadvertently became Green. We had to save money.

I became very aware of how much we were spending on petrol each month (at this point I didn’t care that I was damaging the environment, just that I was spending money that I thought could be better spent on alcohol), so I traded our 4.2 litre Jag in for a 698cc Smart car.

I was incredibly wasteful in the kitchen. Even though as a chef I was used to having to make the most of every single ingredient in the kitchen and work to incredibly tight budgets, on a personal level, probably because I loved cooking so much, I would waste so much food. One night I would cook a chicken dish and the next I’d try a beef recipe, regardless that I still had chicken left over. But now I was utilizing every thing. Instead of buying chicken pieces I bought whole chickens which I learnt to joint – in true ‘Mum’ fashion I learned how to make a whole chicken last nearly the entire week.

We have a wood burner. Previously at best this was used to display candles. At worse we would burn those artificial ‘logs’ from the supermarket purely to create an ambiance whilst the radiators on full provided the heat. But now I was up early of a weekend collecting firewood. I even invested in an axe.

To save electricity I became adept at knowing at exactly which point to turn of the electric hob so as still leaving enough heat to continue cooking my dinner.

It should not have been surprising, but it was, and pleasantly so, but we did start saving money.

And this is when the obsession set in.

I decided that I was in fact Green. I wanted to save the universe. Hell, I might even grow a big moustache. Everything I do, I now question if it’s Green. If I need a pan of boiling water to cook pasta; is it better to boil the water first in a kettle which uses a lot of electricity, but only for a few minutes, or boil it on the hob, which presumably uses less electricity, but takes forever?

And worse.

I recycle. We have recycling bins provided by the council which is fantastic. But they request that cans are cleaned first. But now I am using precious water to clean the cans. Which is worse?

The water from our tap is warm and murky at first so I need to run the tap for a minute or so to clear and cool it. Very wasteful. So I bought a filter jug which I fill and keep in the ‘fridge. But is opening the ‘fridge several times a day more of a drain on resources than running a tap?

I drink wine and I of course recycle my bottles. But the bottle bank is 3 miles away. My very Green Smart car doesn’t have a lot of space for empty wine bottles (not the amount I get through in a week). So am I polluting the environment making several trips a month to the bottle bank? We do have a Land Rover (yes, I know having two cars is not at all Green, but when one is a two seater and you live in the country with a dog, you do need a second option, and it is purely used for essential purposes). So what’s best for the environment? Several trips in the Smart or one trip in the Land Rover?

And then there’s Fair Trade. I’ve spent a fair time in South Africa and I want to support this fantastic initiative. But what about food miles?

I tried to work it all out, but it made my head hurt and I had to drive to the shops to buy aspirin. And I’m still not sure if the tin foil they were packaged in is recyclable.

So now I reckon that all I can really do is my bit. And if everyone does the same, maybe we can make a difference. We can certainly all save some money.

And I believe I have the ideal solution: Not everyone recycles bottles. And that is wrong. So I reckon the more wine bottles I buy, drink and subsequently recycle must surely mean some kind of saving on the universe than if I left the bottles on the shelf of my local off license for someone else to buy that doesn’t recycle? And if I buy Fair Trade wine that must be a good thing too?

I think I’ve got it right….

Restaurant Diners

During my black days as a Restaurant Owner, I quickly learned to categorise diners into one of five groups, perhaps you can spot which one you fall into:

Bernies
The biggest group of all, christened after the infamous eighties steak restaurant chain. Normally the parents of a thirty-something; everyone knows a Bernie. Their brief is big portions, cheap price and to hell with quality. They have a huge problem with change or experimentation and will turn their noses up at anything that does not come with chips. Nothing will see a Bernie exit a restaurant quicker than a menu which consists of anything remotely described as Thai Style.

They will seldom ever complain to the servers face; they are the a-typical English customer that will whine continuously to their fellow diners about everything from the firmness of the carrots to the thickness of the gravy, until their waiter inquires if their meal is okay, at which point they declare “ooh yes, absolutely wonderful, thank you”.

Clickers
A particularly sad bunch of diners, who, although they believe in their own self-importance, cause embarrassment for anyone at the same table as them. So called because of their annoying habit of clicking their fingers every time they want attention. What they fail to understand is that within the restaurant business, clicking of fingers is the universally acknowledged declaration of “hey everyone, look at me, I am an prick!”. Remember that next time you or someone nearby clicks their fingers at the waiter.

The most nauseating cross-section of diners of them all, generally they will spend the least amount of money but will brag incessantly about the expensive restaurants they have supposedly ate in before. Will complain just to try and look intelligent in front of their fellow diners.

Freeloaders
Will complain to either a) receive a discount, b) to get a free drink or meal, or most commonly, c) a combination of both. Their most common complaint is their meal was a little bland. Not cold or undercooked. Not burnt, raw, frozen, off, scorched. Not tasting awful. But bland. That word that doesn’t really mean much except that maybe they would have preferred a dozen birds-eye chillies thrown in with their green salad. Usually the complaint will come at the end of the meal when there is no longer any proof of the offending dish. Some Freeloaders have become some adept at all of this that they will actually tell the waiting staff what they expect in way of compensation.

Critics
Fairly harmless, these are the ones that have watched far too much Master Chef.
They will make stupid, meaningless comments, either positively or otherwise on each and every mouthful, such as “I’m getting a lovely aftertaste of chilli and lime coming through”. They will ask dumb questions of the waiting staff, such as the origin of the food on their plate, which is fine if they know what they are talking about, but they seldom do, and pass on pointless suggestions on how to improve the restaurant, the food or the service with no actual point of reference.

Advocates
The Restaurant Owner’s favourite group! Advocates seldom complain without just or reason, and when they do, it’s always in a polite, constructive manner, and they never make the waiting staff feel uncomfortable, the exact opposite in fact. They enjoy experimenting and are always keen to try the chefs’ specials. They appreciate the whole restaurant experience; the ambiance, the service and the food. Most people like to think they fall into this category; if only! It is in fact a very small, elite group consisting mainly of ex-restaurant owners.

The thing about these Customer Categories, not totally dissimilar to traditional star signs, is that you can be on the cusp of two. For example a Freeloader may show certain traits of a Critic. The most common is the cusp of Bernies and Clickers, and this is most evident when Bernies travel abroad. Suddenly this normally fairly reticent faction become temporary two week Clickers to anyone whose first language is not English and begin to talk down to them. I witnessed a fantastic example of this recently during a trip to Italy. The Bernie-Clicker at the table next to me was ordering coffee:

“I’ll have a cap-a-chee-no please, understand?”
“Si, a Cappuccino”
“Cof-feeee?”
“Si”
“you understand? Yes? cap-a-chee-no?”

This episode of embarrassing ignorance went on for a painfully long time. Bizarrely the Bernie-Clicker did in fact have an English-Italian phrase book with her. It was a shame really she didn’t use it then she would have discovered that the translation for Cappuccino is in fact Cappuccino, what with it being an Italian word and all.