The breakup

It feels like a breakup. It feels like as if I’m ending a long-term relationship with someone I really care for. The emotions are mixed. Some days I’m angry with myself. “What did I do wrong?” Some days I’m angry at the world. “There was nothing more I could do; all these forces are against me!” Some moments it’s sadness and depression. “We’ve been through so much together. I’m going to miss you.” There are also the moments of nostalgia. “Remember that day? When everything was perfect and we were all happy?” Then there are the “glimmers of hope.” “Yes! We can still do this! We can fix this, carry on!” But deep down inside, the darkness of reality bites and the inevitable is there, waiting to be accepted: it simply has to end.  And you both know it.

Yes. I’m closing my restaurant. I never thought I’d be one of those people who after barely a year (two months shy!) would be flipping over the ‘closed’ sign forever. I thought I played my cards right. I started slow and small. I ran a catering company out of my home kitchen and garage for three and a half years. Converted my commissary to a chef’s table. Sales were good. I never went into the red … I kept my little corporation going. I didn’t make a lot but very decent money and even managed to give myself a reasonable commission once in a while. In those three and half years my corporate bank account fluctuated but never once did it go red. My little 16-seater private kitchen experiment did well. “Why not make it bigger?” “Open a real resto!” Frankly, I was slowly on the way out of the food industry but the words of encouragement got me thinking. It’s the last step. Why not?!

I kept my budget low. I invested in myself with only my sister as another investor. I kept my place small. “I’ve catered for 800 people, 40 people isn’t so difficult.” I kept my menu simple. “Simple, home-cooked food, easy to replicate. Things I like to eat and try to be as honest as possible.” Let’s keep the décor unique and the location out of the way because the most common compliment I received was, “I love how charming and quaint it is! And it’s not in a mall!” I hired mostly people I’d worked with. I bought furniture in the segunda mano. I negotiated construction prices. I had the support of a good back office. I knew it was hard! But I was ready for the challenge! Yes. If I kept things small and simple, I could do this!

Well … apparently, I couldn’t. I learned quickly that I was often learning on the job. While it’s one thing to know how to cook, it’s a completely different thing to run a restaurant. I’m generally a humble person and the first to be happy to hire people better than me at the things where I fell short. But frankly, I just didn’t have the funds for it. After the consulting period with my good friend Julien was over, I rapidly discovered that apart from creating recipes, decorating and being an excellent waitress, I had absolutely no experience in everything else. While I could organize my own kitchen when I was there, I was incapable of teaching my staff how to do it for themselves.  I had never wrestled with the POS machine before. Never done stocks and inventory. Heck, when they would come to ask me how to prolong the life of rapidly wilting herbs, I would say I was busy and would answer them later. But in reality, I had to Google and print out a guide from Real Simple. I’m proud to say I have what people call the “uncommon common sense.” So I learned. Armed with a Management for Dummies on my desk, super-fast Internet and my chef “phone-a-friends,” every day was like a game of “Who wants to be a millionaire?” There were days when we got everything right! The place was packed: two or three turnovers and absolutely everyone enjoyed their meal. I loved sitting by the bar, glass of wine in hand, observing the diners smiling and having a good time. Good music, soft lighting … my staff dancing the seamless ballet. It was a beautiful show. Then there were days when life throws you a curveball. And you are just absolutely stumped. “Sorry, we pre-fried the eggs because it was faster.” “Ma’am, the aircon is not working and we have a full house.” “Our chicken is spoiled.” And the worst: “So-and-so is stealing money from the register.”

But you learn to deal with it. Those are things I learned to eventually smoothen out. There were, however, bigger issues. Guests feeling disappointed that it wasn’t a fancy French resto. Hindsight is 20/20 — how could I have named a resto Atelier 317 and not mislead people into thinking it was French? I personally knew the meaning and made no distinction of language. But I obviously did not study my market that well. I also jumbled ideas in my head. I envisioned a regular neighborhood café bistro, except hardly any of my neighbors came and customers were mostly people who braved the traffic to come eat at my place and, well, they were sometimes disappointed at the simplicity. I had to change things halfway. Come up with a more exciting menu. Haunted by Clinton Palanca’s review where he hoped that “one day it would become Stephanie Zubiri’s restaurant.” And while mistakenly people thought that meant French food, I managed to change that image. Eventually they knew it was about home-cooked world cuisine. Eventually we had a regular following. Eventually people “got it.” And so did my staff.

Then it was too late. Suffering from a serious lack of walk-ins, deliriously high rent and crazy-expensive redistributed electricity, I found myself in an oxymoronic conundrum. My sales were actually rising, the restaurant was doing all right but we were still losing money.  Once the working capital ran out and I re-infused cash twice over just to stay afloat … I knew it had to be done. The restaurant was a black hole. P100,000 was nothing. It disappeared to pay the bills in an instant and was so difficult to earn back. I was willing to invest some more, but only to invest to improve. The reality was I would just have to invest to stay open. It was money I wasn’t going to see back. Ever.

I was also faced with an identity crisis. I had always been open about not being a chef but a cook and opening a restaurant made that even clearer. If I wanted to truly fix this sinking ship, I had to commit to being the captain. I couldn’t afford a good chef to work with me, so I had to step up and commit myself for the next two years and not just the first year. Problem was, I just got married.  I thought by making my menu simple, it would be possible. But it wasn’t.  And there’s an issue many women chefs don’t speak about but it is there. Starting your career young means putting your family life on hold, and, well … we wanted a family now. And I’m almost 30. While that’s not old, that’s actually not so young anymore. Don’t get me wrong, it most definitely wasn’t my husband pushing me away from the resto, it was myself. I came home early one night after a slow service to find that there was absolutely no food at home, not even canned food. And it dawned on me. I was so busy doing the things that I thought I should be doing that I never spent time on the things I loved doing. I barely wrote for my column. I hardly ever cooked anymore. I didn’t watch the news and stopped reading books. Time off meant blowing off steam, usually with a lot of booze or vegging out watching the Kardashians. And usually the reason why one is overworked and stressed is because you’re earning well. I wasn’t. I was losing.

Sometimes I think I failed. I hated being a student of life. You can work hard, but you don’t always ace the test. Then I think I only have myself to blame because maybe if I committed more then it would have worked. Then in the end I realized that ultimately a restaurant is a business. It’s about numbers. I wiped away the tears and started for once thinking like a businesswoman. I had already sunk so much into fixing my mistakes. Add that to our crazy overhead — even with steady good sales I would never make my ROI back in two years.  It was over.

I had always admired restaurateurs and chefs and I do even more so now. The industry in general has been kind to me. Good friends celebrating their birthdays in our little place. Friends in the food media giving honest feedback and helping us improve. Supportive chef friends sharing suppliers, giving comments, co-hosting events. I have an amazing staff that I will sorely miss. I will always look back on our first weekend, where I sat there counting the cash we earned, going over the orders of the evening, listening to Semisonic’s Closing Time while everyone cleaned up. Despite it all, I have the memory of happy diners’ faces and the joy from my staff after a job well done. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. And as I start a new chapter in my life and really embrace the writer in me, I have no regrets. And when it hurts to think of my losses, I remember what a very wise Marivic Lim of Apartment 1B told me: “Think of it as tuition.” All of a sudden I feel I haven’t lost but gained.