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.