Permits and such

In order to bring anything into the mall, be it a bag of cement or a pail of water one need to have a permit. Every day is a new permit. Its a little annoying that we have to get one everyday but what are you gonna do? The floor needed waterproofing and then the geniuses at management decided we needed to flood the waterproofing for 2 days to see if it was effective...so there go two days of work... Now were focusing on things other than the half a centimeter thick layer of tar under my kitchen...we focus on permits. To be perfectly honest the permit process here is much simpler than it would be in the US not as tight regulation wise and standards arent particularly restraining. But we need too many permits its just time consuming...all are relatively irrelevant and cheap except for one...liquor. We need to sell wine and cocktails to maintain a healthy profit margin, specially considering that we plan on doing a little lounge thing at night soon. But the price hovers between 1,000 and 10,000 dollars depending on who you know and who you are...wether or not you look chinese, indonesian, foreign etc. I think we wont overpay... But its still a biig reality check.

Good news, good news and some bad

First the bad...our investor, the guy who was going in with us 50/50 has a daughter that is opening a business

and doesn't have a much cash liquidity as he thought so he is probably backing out...thankfully he waited until the last minute. In any case its no biggy since we have enough money to take care of the business and ourselves for the foreseeable future but its still annoying huh? Well...nothing we can do about it. Now the good news...most importantly my dear, sweet and beautiful wife and I are going to have our first baby. I am soooooo happy right now...for those who know me...imagine my face...you know how goofy it is normally...now multiply that by 10. Good news again, our place is starting to take shape..the kitchen area is already marked out in brick and the floor is leveled out...tomorrow we lay down the tile in the kitchen floor as well as waterproofing....things are looking good. The way we figure it we lose a little and gain a baby!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We officially have our spot claimed

A drywall partition now separates our mall location from the mall itself. Right now the workers there are smoothing out the floor so that we can put in hardwood and tile. I don't know if I mentioned this before but our space is small...65 square metere or roughly 600 square feet and we have to take advantage of it as much as possible. We just found out that right next to us there will soon be a discotheque, there is already a poolhall and a couple of cafe's. Its funny for me because I go to these cafe's and their menus are like 10 pages long and offer everything from fried rice to shrimp cocktail...I really dont think anything comes out good...you'd think people here would learn to focus...but its not in the language.
Our partner yesterday said he doesnt have enough money to take care of our project and about 4 others he is involved with and he asked if we can do it on our own. Truthfully its better this way because we dont have to deal with an outsider. We thought we would have an investor to minimize risk, but truthfully we can finance the restaurant oursleves without much stress, and this way we dont have a third party with power over us. It is actually a good thing, but yesterday I was a little upset because of the last-minuteness of it (I mean we open in about 8 weeks!) But I am riding on a wave of good news on the personal front and very happy right now...the only thing that really changes is I may change the deck oven to 2 convection ones or just get 2 decks instead of 3, Poor me right? Next we start planning for the woodburning oven.

Finally the work can begin

We finally got our mall work permit. We start work on the 21st of the month...a ful 21 days after we were supposed to but still... progress is being made and that is all that's important. We are also getting our work benches made right now...right here in our garage by two very resourceful carpenters. The menu is more or less set and the concept is pretty much tropical french with the same focus on desserts. So many beautiful ingredients here, Im liking the playing around in the kitchen the more i think about it.

Still sick

So now we are all sick in the household. On the brighter side of things we should get our work permit through on monday and we can start tuesday to fit out the location.

Temporary Unwanted Vacation

I have been on a temporay vacation these past couple of days. I have had a flu and haven't really been able to do anything. As nothing has happened on the restaurant front, I have not updated. Tomorrow we go to the mall with our concept drawing for the exterior of the shop. truth be told we are about 2 weeks behind on the build out...I expect us to be a little late on the opening as well. But water under the bridge right...our focus is on when we open and being the best little restaurant we can be. I have to say I'm finding it hard to stress out right now....I saw this coming a mile away.

There is always something

Today we tried and I emphasize tried to get all our paperwork through for taxes. You have to go to one part of the city for from A and another part for form B and then you have to go to the central office to hand them all in. Why wouldnt these forms be available at the office where you hand them in? Bureaucracy. For those that know me well...this is why my masters degree didn't lead me to a job in the civil service. We also went to a couple of places to take a look and see if there were any good used stainless steel tables and such. I also fininshed designing my pastry kitchen, which will be divided into areas by delicacy of the work. One for bread, one forassembly of pastries and one for decoration, ice cream and chocolate...yummm. We are somewhere near two months to D-day and I just realized that beyond a rough draft for the menu there really isn't a set menu...in my defense, no food suppliers want to talk to us unless we are willing to put in an order and we are still a bit far from that. Went to the mall and found out that the UP escalator that is right smack dab in front of my store has been turned into a down escalator because some goofball didn't realize what he was buying. SO now I have to deal with the coming down traffic for a while..hopefully they get it fixed soon... There's always something...

Equipment is done with

So as of now we are the proud semi owners of all the equipment on our list. Now the packaging is becoming an issue because we have to get so much of it. Everything is going through the printer and we are just waiting for details to get ironed out. One thing I have neglected to mention so far is the stress this is putting on us as a family and as a couple. It's tough to work with somebody you love. Somehow disagreements always end up getting taken personally. From the personal stadpoint whether or not this business is a success, it's taking an emotional toll. Things are positive on every other front but I wouldnt mind some setbacks if it meant we could have a full day without something in the business turning into a problem.

Long live china...bone china

So today we got our cihna, tableware and crystal. Now when I say we got it I mean we got some good stuff, bone china directly form the distributor. We went to a local department store and sow some stuff we liked (marked up of course) and then we looked online for distributors. We got the stuff from the same people the department store gets it from (in fact the store called asking if the distributor had stock for us because they apparently didn't after they said they did. So...we got tableware, china and crystal for 40 for about 1000 US dollars. I think 25ish bucks a pop is good right? Now we have to deal with napkins. Indonesia doesnt have a commercial/restaurant oriented laundry service for napkins and towels and such so this is complicated, I also dont want to pay too much for them. Does this mean I'm gonna have to make 400 of them myself? Why so many? becuase things here dry out in the sun, not a drier, and we need to have enough in case a circus troupe decides to walk in.