Sizzling Missiles of Meat

The title sounds severe but it really is a bit of a milestone for a small izakaya. It has been a pretty rough start with many issues that has been dealt with or needs further fine tuning.

If anyone reading this wishes to try their hand in kushiyaki or sumibiyaki, our advise is don't. Don't even think about it. If you are dead set on it, then go see a psychiatrist because you are clinically insane or just jump off a roof and save the trouble. It really is that bad. The grill and the logistic for the grill is no end of pain. The amount of labour involved in the preparation of the skewers, the cost of the specialist chef, ingredients, storage and the low selling price, almost means that we are making a lost for every skewer sold. That's not including all the time, money and effort spent on oversizing the exhaust system solely for the charcoal grill.

We faced excessive smoke from the grill when we first tried the grill out and have since gone for a larger fan. In fact, we run two fans. A dedicated fan just for the grill. That helped but didn't solve the problem when we fired it up again, so we added glass surround for the exhaust hood to concentrate the suction. That again helped but didn't totally solve the problem. We and the engineers were perplexed because on paper, that would have been more than sufficient. After much head scratching, we figured there must be some kind of obstruction in the common exhaust ducting that we share with the other restaurants. Being the last on the grid, it's kinda shitty, because our exhaust gases face more resistance and travel further before being discharged. It turns out that our 'friendly' neighbour restaurant has made some of their own well-hidden modification to their duct, basically occluding it to such a point leaving us only about 15% of the duct cross section. This is so that they can get better flow for their exhaust but selfish behavior. At that point, we had a atherosclerotic duct-esclerotic plaque on our hands. If left untreated, it will lead to unstable fangina or even congestive fan failure. We had to act fast. The skilled engineers pulled out the obstruction, stented the duct and flow was restored. No more smoke in the shop! Day saved and beer was passed round. Tenza 1; Neighbour 0. They were not happy campers and now have a smokey kitchen but couldn't do much. We think they should stop being cheap and get a proper exhaust fan like everyone else.

Still on the charcoal grill, we won't be able to start serving grilled items and probably won't be until well into next month. Reason being, labour shortage. We just can't get enough Singaporeans or PRs to work in this industry but we are not able to employ foreign workers yet. Same problem with service side of things, so we are making do with part-timers but that is a compromise in service quality that we are unhappy about. Having said that, the part-timers we get, all from Ngee Ann Polytechnic, are a young and cheerful lot. They are eager to learn and willing to work hard. Great attitude. We just wished that we had more time to train them. In the mean time, we are sitting this out and trying our best to hire.

The fish display cabinet, being a custom design, also went through some trial and error. If we had a chance to do it again, we wouldn't have gone for a top opening design. It takes up too much valuable space in a small izakaya and is not the must practical thing for the chef also. This is not a big issue but it bugs us a little. Maybe we'll change it out next year.

Mostly friends dropping by for meals for now but we have quite a decent walk-in crowd too. We even have repeats! We've sold about 20 bottles of sake so far. We are not complaining. Obviously the daily sales is no where near the daily margin for break even but it's been less than a month and we haven't done much marketing.

We still need to get past the human resource hurdle before we are free to sprint on. Things are more or less on track except for the grill. We can only seek your understanding as to why we really are not able to serve grilled items even until now.