Controls, desserts, strikes and bets – Part 27

CONFESSIONS OF A GLOBAL GYPSY

By Dr. Chandana (Chandi) Jayawardena DPhil

President – Chandi J. Associates Inc. Consulting, Canada

Founder & Administrator – Global Hospitality Forum

chandij@sympatico.ca

Scarcities and Buffet Controls

The closed economy policies of the then socialist government of Sri Lanka forced hoteliers, particularly chefs, to manage with many shortages of essential imported ingredients. The government banned importing many types of food items unless essential for general public. Most hoteliers were upset that food items such as European cheeses, stuffed olives, preserved maraschino cherries were not available any more. As all hotels were in the same boat, I personally did not worry about such scarcities. I considered these challenges as opportunities to be creative in using similar ingredients locally available.

Most hotels in Sri Lanka at that time were not sophisticated with concepts such as menu engineering. I simply updated the menus periodically based on the popularity of the dishes, guest feedback, cost and seasonal availability of fresh and inexpensive ingredients. That seemed to work well. The basic target given to most executive chefs on the island at that time, was to maintain the food cost under 40% of the food revenue. I personally aimed at keeping my food cost at 33%. I also attempted to get higher allocation for food in full-board pricing packages. In addition, I was vigilant in recording all unconsumed food items from buffets returning to the kitchen. I also closely monitored and checked any food wastage by checking garbage bins. Such simple tasks helped me to perfect my daily requisitioning quantities of all ingredients from the stores.

Monday Creative Desserts

One Sunday some large quantities of bread pudding, pineapple compote, and cream caramel returned from the buffet tables to the cold rooms in the kitchen. As a cost cutting exercise, I immediately created a new dessert by placing layers of those three desserts in ice cream cups. Next day for lunch I served these as one of the choices for desserts. I covered each cup with meringue and decorated with a local cherry. We had an unfriendly Swedish Tour Leader who stayed at Coral Gardens Hotel for four months, with whom the hotel manager, Muna and I tried to have a better working relationship. I named that dessert with her name – ‘Gunilla Surprise’. For the first time that season, Gunilla smiled. She was so thrilled with my creation, she announced it to her entire group of tourists. We received no more complaints from Gunilla during the balance two months of the tourist season.

After that, depending on good quality desserts returning to the kitchen from Sunday buffet tables, I commenced creating a new dessert for the lunch menu on most Mondays. I named these desserts after returning guests, long staying guests, difficult guests and also attractive guests. This gimmick became so popular that at times I had male guests prompting me to name desserts after their wives or girlfriends on Mondays. Some guests asked me to sign the menu cards which had desserts named after them and took these cards home as souvenirs. They often took photographs of me presenting the dessert and signed menu card to the guest who was honoured. As a result of this creative initiative, I faced a challenge only once.

Butler Raman appeared in my office one Sunday afternoon and said, “Master, Miss Annika wants to see you.” I asked him, “Who is Annika?” While he was explaining that it was a young guest who stayed at the hotel for two weeks at the beginning of the same tourist season, Annika entered my office and gave me a big hug. I immediately remembered her face. “I am back for two more weeks, as Denmark is facing a very cold winter. I need a good tan, again!” Annika told me. “I have a gift for you, but before sharing it with you, I need a gift from you,” she said flirtingly. When I asked what she had in mind, Annika said, “I want you to serve that beautiful dessert you created with my name, for lunch tomorrow.”

Not remembering the exact dessert named after Annika just three months ago, was a challenge for me. Therefore, I created another dessert using some thin pancakes and fruit salad and passion fruit mousse returned from the Sunday buffet. I served it with a small scoop of vanilla ice-cream and topped with mango jam sauce. I named it, ‘Crêpe Annika’ and served it as a dessert for lunch on the next day. “This is not the same!” Annika playfully complained. “You are a very special guest who deserves a second dedicated dessert.” I bluffed. She probably saw through my cunning, but graciously laughed and said, “Thank you very much, Chef Chandi. I feel honoured!” After tasting my dessert, she smiled while nodding her head in approval. Then she said, “Nice! Now, tell me when do you want to unwrap your gift?” After that I commenced recording all my new creations in a special log book, just in case. The columns in this log book read as: date created, name of the dish, recipe, garnish, guest (name, country, hair colour, eye colour) and ‘other’ remarks.

The Asian Buffet

During my first tourist season as an executive chef, I also made some miscalculations. I was eager to showcase the Asian dishes I learnt during my training period at Bentota Beach Hotel and the Chinese, Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian dishes I taught myself in 1975. I introduced a weekly Asian Buffet, but that was not very popular with our guests who were predominantly European and Scandinavian. After a month I suspended that weekly offer.

Lesson learnt from that failure is that no new product should be introduced without a customer preferences survey or research. Later in my career as a Food and Beverage Director and a General Manager of large five-star hotels, I arranged quick surveys before deciding on any new weekly theme night or food festival. Often hoteliers decide on such events, but the key for success is to ask the most important people – customers. Determining the needs of the customer and offering products and services to satisfy those needs is a such a simple concept. One never goes wrong with that in terms of profitability of hospitality operations.

Token Strikes

In 1976, we frequently faced another problem – monthly token strikes organized by the trade unions controlled by leftist political parties. These brief strikes lasted 24-hours and intended to convey strength of feeling on a disputed issue. Unfortunately, these disputed issues had nothing to do with hotels or hotel employees. For example, if there was a long-unsettled strike at the Colombo Port, the LSSP which controlled most trade unions arranged an all-island token strike in solidarity with the workers at the Colombo Port. I saw no logic in these show of power actions by the political parties, but decided to keep my mouth shut.

By then, I had developed a close bond with the kitchen brigade. Therefore, they always gave me a heads up about the timing of these token strikes. I planned to prepare simple dishes on those token strike days. To help me out, the kitchen brigade did most of the advance preparations for the three meals, the day before. On average, once a month, I cooked all meals needed for the whole day by myself and arranged buffets without any frills. Muna helped with the restaurant service and clean up. While the employees were co-operative, they became very hostile if any fellow employees crossed the picket line and worked at the hotel, during any token strike.

Monkey Business

One day a cook asked me if I’d like to have a monkey as a pet. I laughed thinking that it was a joke. He said, “Chef, I am serious. In the back yard of my house in the village we found three baby monkeys. We are keeping one and my son took one. If you like, I would love to give the other monkey to you as a gift. After I had one look at the baby monkey, I fell in love with it and so it became my pet. We made a small shelter for him just outside my apartment. He used to nap in the afternoon and the Maintenance Engineer for both sister hotels (Coral Gardens and Bentota Beach), P. P. Abeywardena (Abey), often made a big noise to see the monkey’s reaction. As it always jumped up when it heard the loud noise, Abey named him, ‘Dudumskie’ (or the sound of an exploding grenade).

Dudumskie was simply hilarious. In the morning when I was at work, he ate flowers in the garden and the hotel gardeners hated him. When he got bored, he visited the balconies of guest bedrooms, and at times dropped glasses to the ground from upstairs rooms. That angered the room boys. Dudumskie also terrified the four rabbits we had at the hotel as pets. However, Dudumskie was very popular with most of the hotel guests, who often fed him with goodies. I held a bet with Muna that Dudumskie could be trained to be an obedient pet, within three months.

As most European countries did not allow monkeys as pets, interacting with Dudumskie was a novel experience for hotel guests. They thought that he was funny and intelligent. Whenever he saw white tourists, particularly ladies, he acted as if he had been starved. As a result of frequent feeding by tourists, after a few months he started gaining weight and became less athletic in his jumps from tree to tree. Every time I came to my apartment between lunch and dinner service for a short break, I sat in the garden and just watched Dudumskie engage in all types of mischief. He never let me down in providing some entertainment before I went back to work for dinner service.

Winning a Bet

By April 1976 when the tourist season ended, Muna and I were praised by the head office for having the best tourist season ever since the hotel had opened 10 years previous. I was promoted to Assistant Manager, in addition to my role as the Executive Chef. My duties remained the same but I was happy with the glorified title. My salary was increased to Rs 1,000 a month. That was a very good salary at that time for a 22-year-old young executive in any industry in Sri Lanka.

I then remembered that I held a bet the day I graduated from the Ceylon Hotel School in 1974. The bet was held with a student two years my junior – Keheliya Rambukwella. Like me, Keheliya was a trouble maker at CHS, and was very friendly with me. The bet was that before he graduated from CHS in two years’ time, that I will be earning a four-figure monthly salary. As I reached that mark six months ahead, I called Keheliya and reminded him about our friendly bet. He congratulated me but, somehow with a ‘cock and bull story’, got me to forget about the bet money. At that point jokingly I told him, “Machang, you should enter politics. I am sure that you would do well!” I have not met Keheliya for some time, but I am impressed with his decades-long career in politics in Sri Lanka including cabinet ministerial posts with a few governments.