One Week Back in the Du

Well I've been back in the big Du for a week now, and have finally gotten over the Jet Lag monster. Although following quickly on it's heels was the Kathmandu Cough, which thankfully also seems to be receding. Still getting back into a rhythm here isn't easy, even if these ailments weren't bothering me. Aside from the normal chores one faces when the apartment has been empty for a month, I also found that my internet shut down and my phone ran out of minutes. Now these don't sound like difficult problems, but they are things that Kim had been doing for us, and I was a bit unsure how to fix them.

The phone was a piece of cake, just stop by any corner store, get a charge card for my carrier and text some code in. The internet however was a bit trickier. Because internet is horribly slow here we pay for some kind of premium service that gets a certain amount of "high speed" bandwidth every 3 months. Once that amount or time has been exceeded you have to go down to the office, give them your account number and pay up. Problem was that I didn't know our number, and I had no idea where the office was. After asking the staff at Imago, I found out the office was just down the road from Bhat Betini in Naxal, just a quick walk around the block. After some searching I found our account number and went and paid the lady at the desk and my internet supposedly was going to be turned on. After another trip back to the office and a four hour interval it finally was.

The thing about all these little chores that kept popping up was that they were getting in the way of what I really wanted to focus on, which is getting the restaurant up and running. While I was away not a whole lot got done, and I'm still waiting on my business visa, which I will supposedly get this week. I stopped by the building site and the plumbing and electrical have started to get put in. They have also filled in the giant hole in the ground where there had been stairs in the middle of my dining area. The walls have an initial coat of primer like white paint and most of the debris that had filled a lot of the space has been cleared out, giving the sense that it could actually be turned into a restaurant in the near future, which is somewhat exciting. It almost masks the lack of progress that has been made on other fronts, or setbacks like finding out our elevator may be delayed until November.

One thing I really wanted to get fully back into this week was the Saturday market at 1905. In preparation I went back to the fully expanded selection of salsas, pulled pork, chili, pasta sauce, tzatziki, etc. While I was away the hot sauces I had made have matured, so I was able to sell them as well, both a Louisiana style sauce and a chipotle sauce. I also made a buffalo wing sauce of Frank's Red Hot. Most importantly I'm rebranding the products with the restaurant logo and trying to push that connection to drive up interest. With the market now also taking place on Wednesday from 4-7 I have the opportunity to train staff in how to prep many of the condiments and sauces in preparing for these markets, that is as soon as our kitchen is ready and we actually have staff.

 All in all it's been a hectic thrust back into the life of Kathmandu, and in many ways it's not as exciting to write about as trips up into the great Himalaya (this time last year I was going up to Everest), but to live it is in many ways more exciting, and I can't express how much I am looking forward to getting things up and running here. For now it's baby steps toward the opening, and one of those steps includes working on vanilla and cocoa vodka infusions tonight and getting designs ready for the jars of next weeks market. Almost like climbing the trail, these are the steps we must take now so that later on we might sit back and admire that which we have surrounded our self with.

Why go back?

The single question that just about everyone close to me asked the last time we got together before I flew back to Nepal is "So why are you going back?" It's a question that I've had to increasingly ask myself as Kim will be staying in the US another three months in order to expand what Harilo can do from the US, and she has made it clear that we need to come up with some kind of plan to transition out of full time living in Kathmandu in the future. People look at me dumb founded when I tell them I live in a place that goes without electricity for up to 18 hours a day, water is only available if someone remembered to pump it up to the roof from the cistern- and that's if there is water in the cistern. You mention the pollution and the dust, the shit and trash in the road, the incredible amount of corruption and the hair pulling insanity that is the Nepali bureaucracy and people think that possibly you're a little insane to want to go back into this.

Friends, Family and Stuffing My Face Up & Down the East Coast

One of the things that I do miss while being in Nepal is of course my friends and family that live back here in the States. One of the reasons my posts during this trip have been so sparse is that I've been running around trying to see all of them, all the while trying to pick up some stuff for the restaurant as well. On the first weekend I was back on this side of the planet my dad had a good sized get together for that side of the family, and it was great to see everyone. That was followed up by a cook out with a bunch of my close friends and their families at my friend Bob's house the next weekend. This was followed by another cook out the next weekend at my mother's house for that side of the family, and again it was a lot of fun catching up with everyone and stuffing my face with even more grilled food.

My Dad Grilling Steak Tips and Chicken

Readjusting to the Old Normal

I've spent almost the last two years converting rupees to dollars every time I made a purchase, so I found it odd when I was at the supermarket today and I found myself converting dollars to rupees. I was doing this while staring somewhat slack jawed at the price of produce in the US, 2.99/lb for tomatoes, 3.20 for a bunch of Basil, 3.99/lb for red peppers. To think that you pay less than a fraction of that for things per Kg in Nepal made me realize joust how inexpensive produce is there. Then I had to wrap my head around the size of the produce here; garlic and tomatoes larger than my fist, red onion triple the size of any thing in Ktm, and a selection that dwarfs even the best stocked stores in city. While the produce seemed extremely expensive, the cheeses and meats were either cheaper or about the same. Still I ended up spending what would be roughly 4,000 Rs for a single meal for 4 people, much higher than if I had made this meal in Nepal, even after you consider the cost of imported cheese.

Back in the USA

So it's been a few very crazy days. As my flight approached in Nepal, I still didn't have my business visa, which for all intents and purpose I kind of need to get back into the country. I spent the last few days running back and forth to government offices, and banks to try and make sure this would get done. As they say though, the best laid plans of mice and men... Now offices in Nepal open around 10am, and essentially close by 3pm. Some private offices may stay open until 5pm, but nothing new really can get started after 3pm. How anything gets done, I'm not entirely sure. Anyway, to make a long story short; on the day I was flying out I found myself called to the immigration office at 5pm, and after almost two hours I left without a visa. As my flight was leaving I had to rush to pick up Kim and get to the airport.

So no visa, despite having everything completed and ready to go,despite having the company fully registered and even the required letter from the department of industry. What a pain in the ass. Well on the other side of things we got to the airport and were upgraded to business class, which was a nice treat at the end of a rather crazy day, adn a nice start to 30+ hours of plane travel. Our first leg was to Abu Dhabi, and after a short layover there it was on to Paris, both flights with Etihad airlines. Friendly service, decent food, and the airport in Abu Dhabi was nice as well. Charles DeGaul airport on the other hand is a confusing mess of an airport whose layout doesn't make a bit of sense. That said, we had no issues in Paris and then flew Delta back to Boston. Now normally I think American companies excel at service, but our airlines are a grade or two behind most foreign competition. While the flight was fine, and no one was unfriendly, it just lacked in quality compared to any other airline I've flown in the last year and a half.

Going Home?

It's now been roughly 19 months since I was back in the US. In that time I've spent the majority of it in the Kathmandu valley, but I've also made trips to Annapurna, several to Langtang & Everest, a stop over in Tibet, another in Bhutan, a holiday in Thailand & Cambodia, and most recently my short trip to Guangzhou in China. I've written a book that I wanted to write, I've stayed rather active on this blog, I've supplied the population of Kathmandu with salsa and other foods, and will be opening a restaurant some time this fall which has consumed most of my time and energy since the Spring. It has been an interesting few months to say the least.

About one week from when I'm writing this I will be landing in the US, at Boston's Logan airport to be precise. It's been a long time to go without seeing family and friends. Thanks to the blessings of technology like this blog, Facebook, e-mail and Skype I do get to regularly stay in contact with those from back home to varying degrees. But that whole notion of home is something that for me has been in flux for so long, I'm not entirely sure where it is. My Father joked with me on a recent Skype call that I had lived in Nepal now longer than most places that I had lived in the US, and I think that has some truth to it, but I felt obliged to point out that we also were already on our second apartment over here. A rolling stone gathers no moss I'm told.

Guangzhou- Where shopping is literally a way of life

I often wonder if Mao is spinning in his grave with such velocity that the Chinese could harness it as a power source. There seems to be no country that has become more driven by consumer markets than China...well aside from the US, which supplies much of the demand, but still it's a far cry from some communist utopia. Now this isn't to say that China is some market driven utopia either, their construction policies are clearly centrally planned, and market demands would never create a city like what I just saw in Guangzhou, as I think occupancy rates are under 40% in most of these buildings. Despite this you can't help but be impressed with the engineering and the layout of this modern city in China.

View from outside my hotel 

Mr Smith Goes to China?

As the horribly slow process of registering a company and getting a visa here continues, I'm scheduled to fly out to Guangzhou China on Monday to pick up the majority of the kitchen equipment, furnishings and dishware for the restaurant. For those that don't know Guangzhou is a large provincial capital that sits just on the mainland side of Hong Kong. If it means anything to you it was known (and still often is) as Canton in the west.

I've never been to mainland China with the exception of Tibet, but then Tibet is Tibet and China proper is something else entirely really. I really don't know what to expect. From the pictures that I've seen it looks very much like a well to do modern city. In fact quite a bit should look familiar there as much of what I've purchased over the years back in the US was shipped out of this area. With everything in Nepal also imported from China, it just seemed to make more sense to go to the source to get everything. That and the selection here in KTM is really abysmal. Often types of glasses or dishware you are looking for can't be found, and if they can be found there is only one or two options available to select from. Asian dishware is often made to fit Asian eating styles, so finding bowls that are better fit to salads and not rice, curries or soups is often tough. Plates are also either too small, and those made for Indian audiences often have these horribly gaudy patterns. I'm hoping to find stuff that is ready to be shipped across the ocean to western clientele as those products will obviously better accommodate the food I'm planning on serving.

Other items I hope to find are kitchen appliances. Some items that we need,like fryers, griddles on a gas range, char broilers, and cheese melters would have to be custom made in KTM or possibly imported from India if even available there. We're hoping that we can also hunt down cooking equipment that is made for western forms of cooking. We will also be looking for refrigerators and freezers, though these are items I know we can get in KTM, it's simply a matter if it will be cheaper to get it in China.

All of this though hinges on whether or not the Chinese decide to grant me a visa  to go or not. Hopefully I'll find out tomorrow. If you are from most countries the cost for a single entry visa costs 29$, but for Americans we have to pay 150$. While I'm use to paying more for a visa as an American, the scale of the difference is kind of crazy. Anyway crossing my fingers that I walk out of the Chinese consulate with a visa tomorrow and get to fly out on Monday.

Making a Menu in Nepal

Doing business here can be challenging and so can cooking. If you combine them together you can get one really good sized headache, but as they say the harder the challenge the greater the reward. Putting a menu together here has lots of challenges ranging from seasonal or unreliable availability of many ingredients to strange pricing structures that make it hard to cost things effectively or even accurately due to variation. Despite this we set out to create a high end pub style set of food that we believe we can reliably make at a cost that people will find acceptable. Exciting for me as well is the fact that we were able to put together a full western style menu complete with graphics and proper descriptions, I think a first in Nepal. It's still not done, and I have no prices actually listed, just place holders but in this post I thought I'd talk about the menu's development to this point. For those that are curious I did the design work in a combination of MS Expression Design and Publisher.

Menu Cover 

The only thing to say about the cover is the logo. We've gone through roughly a dozen logo incarnations, and have almost settled on this one, any further changes should be rather minor. One of the challenges we faced in logo design is that the brand will not be just the restaurant, but a variety of packaged goods as well that we already will be selling at the farmer's market here and hopefully at some of the grocery outlets in the not too distant future after launch. Thus we needed a logo that could transform to fit other foods, but still be the same base logo. Other logos had fonts and flames that couldn't be transformed without removing all resemblance to the original and thus any connection to the brand. This logo on the other hand can keep the same geometry, the same font for "Brian's" and just change the colors, remove the flame and change the font in the center and have individual product packaging that resembles the original closely that people realize it's all related.

Buildings & Condiments

So things are continuing to move along with the restaurant. I stopped by our floor the other day and walls had been knocked down, new doorways erected and service windows were knocked out for the kitchen. It's exciting to see the plans becoming a reality. I was most excited to see the north wall opened up where our bar is going to be, giving me the first actual view of what you will be able to see while sitting there. Even with the monsoon rains and cloud cover obscuring the Himalaya it was still really nice, and I'm really looking forward to what see what the views will be like in the Fall when the monsoons clear and visibility is at its best.Below are a couple photos showing the space under construction.

 The open terrace area on a clearer monsoon day

 The north wall, where the bar will one day sit- clouds obscuring the great view.

Looking inside from where the bar will be. 

 Entrance, that opening on the left will be the service window to the kitchen.

Still lots of work to do!

As the construction continues we're still working on plenty of other things. Refining the menu, filing paperwork,putting together seating plans and figuring out how we will train staff. One other thing I've been doing is working on which recipes I want to use for things like condiments and sauces. Some I've made for years and are quite comfortable with, like the Tequila-Lime marinade and the salsas. Others I've learned since I've been in Nepal and have become comfortable with as well, like mayo, and pasta sauces. Some others though are things I'm either less familiar with or I am still playing around with different recipes to find something that is at least as good as the stuff that comes in a bottle. For instance BBQ sauce is something I'd like to do myself, but I won't use my own until I can make something that I'm as happy with as say Sweet Baby Ray's- and as of yet I haven't found that. I'm still playing around with ketchup as well, but I'm happy to report that I may have finally stumbled upon the recipe I want to use yesterday, as that batch came out very close to what I want.