The Busy Life in a Laid Back Country

So with the holiday season ending it was time to really start moving on getting stuff done, and that's exactly what has been going on. This is also why this blog has experienced it's longest black out since I started writing it. Every time I would think about sitting down to write something I just couldn't justify it, because I had a meeting to go to, or some cooking to do, or pricing spread sheets to work on, or something else that I should be doing. In fact even now I really should be arranging lists for the upcoming International Food Festival that will be taking place this Saturday, but that can wait until tomorrow anyway.

So what's been going on?Well of course the restaurant is still the big focus. The floors are in, the granite counter tops for the bar and service windows are being cut, the stainless steel counters and shelves are being manufactured and many of our interiors are coming together. We even have the sliding window for the bar apparently figured out. Also Kim arrived back from the US just this last Monday and so I've been trying to spend the little free time I do have with her.

In addition to the physical space coming together we are also getting the the word out by catering events here and there, and next we will be participating in the previously mentioned food festival that is sponsored by the Himalayan Times, representing the US. The menu was kept fairly simple with dishes that we thought would quickly have cross over appeal to the Nepali audience. So we are doing Cajun fries, beer battered onion rings, Buffalo or BBQ wings and burgers with the option of chicken/beef/veg. I'll be putting together large amounts of ketchup and mayonnaise from scratch for the burgers, rings and fries as well as the Buffalo & BBQ sauces. I'll also bring a bunch of the bottled products to sell, including the chili, hot pepper sauce, Buffalo sauce, and BBQ sauce. All this combined with the normal cooking for the markets has left me spending about half my week in the kitchen, and we haven't been able to find any staff to start training, so I'm still at this essentially by myself.

Due to budget and a lack of local experience with foreign restaurant set ups I've been wearing a lot of hats on this project. I am defiantly the establishments chef, so I have no problem embracing this roll, but I am also at times acting as our general contractor for the building site, the companies representative to other parties, our graphic designer for the menu, logos, and product packaging. At times I'm designing the bar space and kitchen set up, other times I'm programming spread sheets to calculate product costs from a database of suppliers products. I rush from one location in one role to another location in another- all the while wondering how I got so busy in a country where it takes weeks for even simple things to get done.

As always the differences of how things are done here as opposed to what I am accustomed to in the US makes things just that much more difficult. Coordination of events and times are very haphazard and every day I find  out something that I didn't know before about what is going into our floor of the building. Still things appear to be moving forward which is good and we'll get from point A to point B it appears even if that line is a horrible zig-zag instead of a nice straight arrow. The latest set back is that the building may not have power until some time in January, but even this can be worked around. It's just a matter of working with what you do have before you, and not dwelling on what you wish you had.

All this said, I hope when people one day sit down and enjoy a bacon Swiss burger with a strawberry daiquiri   cheesecake for dessert they'll appreciate the sheer difficulty of what we have accomplished by pulling all of these elements together in Nepal. Because I can attest that setting this up here hasn't been a piece of cake, but as they say, if it were easy everyone would do it.

Some Thoughts & Pictures from Around Kathmandu

When I first got to Nepal I use to carry a camera around in my pocket and take photos on a rather consistent basis. As time goes by, no matter how exotic the locale, it just becomes the place you live and it is less likely to stir in you that need to take a photo every few feet. Still Nepal tends to have situations that catch even the long time observer off guard, and since I got a smart phone during my trip to the US I'm back to having a camera in my pocket to document the things that go on in day to day life.  Below are a few photos from the last few weeks and some thoughts about them.

 Oktoberfest at Imago Dei

Imago Dei has an excellent kitchen staff, and I hope I get a staff that is at least half as competent as these guys.A few weeks back I had the pleasure of working with these guys while helping to cater a birthday event here. The above picture is at an Oktoberfest event that raised money for charity to try to help get dental care into the hills and mountainous regions of Nepal, put on by Patricia and her family that owns Skylight. The Imago staff in this photo are cooking a very large number of German style sausages. The meal included the pictured sausages, ham, goulash (both meat and paneer), sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, and a tomato and mozzarella salad. It was a good time and a great event.

Laundry on the Line

Brian's Red Hot Nepali Chili Sauce

Of all the products I'm producing at the restaurant, the one I think I am most excited about is the Louisiana style hot sauce. After a few test batches I got an idea of the exact mix of peppers I wanted to use to make a really great flagship pepper sauce at the restaurant. It uses mostly the very light tasting but somewhat hot local Nepali chilies (what their actual name is I have no idea, everyone just calls them chili, as if there is no other) and then add some chipotle peppers to give the flavor a little more depth and reduce the taste of vinegar on the front of the sauce.

Nepal's New Premier Pepper Sauce

I've learned how to make a lot of things from base elements this year, and pepper sauces are something I have always really enjoyed but never made myself. The one tough thing with tinkering with them is that they take some time to age and get just right, so you don't know the results of making some changes until a few months has passed and you can taste the sauce itself. To get around this a little, I made a few smaller batches using different combinations of peppers, spices, cooking and storage techniques. After trying those I was able to identify what I thought worked best, make a single sauce out of it and see how that was. After getting what I thought was a great sauce I've gone ahead and started to set aside batches that are at this rate about a month apart. Today I thought I'd go over what is involved in making a pepper sauce, this batch below will be ready just after the new year.

First Thing- Lots of Chilies

She's a Witch!

Monty Python's Holy Grail Mocks Declarations of Witchcraft

Growing up at the tail end of the 20th century I believed that accusations of people being a witch was something that was far in our past. Growing up just a few hours north of Salem Massachusetts I was aware of our sorted past of punishing people for absurd crimes that it was not even possible for them to have committed. Then while in my first year of college I attended a Christian school (it's a long story) and around Halloween I was informed that there would be prayer vigils to help protect people's souls from witchcraft. I thought I had landed on another planet. Really? As we prepared to enter the 21st century there were people in the industrialized world who thought there were people consorting with magic and demons? Yes, in fact there were. 

Aside from this being slightly absurd and reducing the stock I took in humanity as a whole, it wasn't like these people were burning people at the stake. As misguided as it might have been at least they were just praying for them, which aside from stunting logical thought seemed rather harmless. Although I had heard stories coming out of Africa about people being accused of witchcraft on occasion, I thought that this was really the limit of where this kind of absurd behavior stopped. Then I moved to Nepal.

Nepal's Visa Debacle- Making Sure Nepal Keeps Out Investment & Talent

The last six months have been a roller coaster dominated by one exceptionally difficult goal, to get a business visa in Nepal. This post might be especially relevant since there have been calls to make the year 2012, foreign investment year...which just like Nepal tourism year would consist of them declaring it so and then doing just about nothing else to achieve any kind of relevant goals. In a sensible world one might think that a self styled impoverished country that sends large numbers of its working age men overseas to do very difficult labor in places like the gulf states or South East Asia would welcome with open arms injections of foreign capital and business, or talented young professionals that are looking to do meaningful work in the country- but this assumption would be incorrect. Unlike countries like Cambodia, with arguably much better living conditions, where business visas for foreigners are so say to get that you can apply for them through travel agents, Nepal has created a nightmare procedure that would test the patience of a saint, costs tremendous amounts of money in legal fees and quite a bit in government fees as well, and basically says to the person trying to create something posative in the country "Not Welcome".

The Myth of Money

One of my favorite posts this year was The Fictions Which Bind Us written back in April of this year. In it I discussed how essentially we play a lot of games of make believe within our lives and yield power to some rather absurd things that do not in fact exist in any true form. In that post I mentioned that the two leading contenders in this were countries & governments along with our financial systems. The last post was on governments and countries and this one will be on the financials- why our misunderstanding of what money is and where it comes from has allowed us to make it a completely fictional system that has created two classes of people on this planet- those who work for "money" and those who can create it.

Occupy Wall Street Protester 

To most of us it seems perfectly normal that pieces of paper, or increasingly plastic cards and computer digits somewhere in a bank computer, are money. For all of our lives this has been the case, and so we never really think about it too much. But what is money? Like all human inventions it came about as a matter of convenience. Farmer A had lots of barley and trader B had brought salt from over the mountains and both needed what the other had. Initially there could be direct trade of X amount of salt to Y amount of barley. This bartering system is still alive and well in large parts of the world where subsistence farming takes place, and to a lesser extent forms a portion of the underground economy in developed nations. But what if the salt trader didn't want barley? Maybe he wanted to bring back silk. so the barley farmer goes to trade for silk, and then gets silk to trade for salt. To avoid the hassle of intermediate trading a commodity took the place as the intermediary store of value, it was something that would be easy to carry, non-perishable, rare enough that it had value in small quantities but common enough that people all over had access to it, and ideally would be recyclable. Independently around the earth most societies moved to using precious metals such as gold, silver, and copper as this form of intermediate barter good- and thus the first "money" of human culture came about.

Endless Rain, Goats in Taxis, Possible Visas, and Opening Dates

This blog has been quiet, but only because my life has not been at all. There was a time when I had half of just about any day to sit and write as I wished, that time has long passed. Finding time where I'm not exhausted to sit and write anything that someone might want to read- or that I could even go back and decipher, has been lacking. Also though I can only write about my adventures in opening a restaurant so many times before it becomes a little monotonous, and essentially that's what every day is. Some days it's chasing down visas and paperwork, other days it's opening bank accounts, transferring money from overseas, other days it's working on the menu or testing out recipes with friends over lunch or dinner. So here in this post I'll give the rundown of what has been going on in Kathmandu.

The Big Wet- It's been raining like crazy! Every day since I've been back from the US seems like it has had at least one rain storm. By this time last year the rain had really subsided and I remember while I was up in the Everest region the monsoon broke. No luck this year, as we head into October and the high Hindu holiday season kicks off it's still raining, and not just a little. Last Monday it rained literally all day, and it poured the night before, something that tends to be somewhat uncommon here. At the market yesterday we had to move the tables around as rain leaked through the tarps. Forecasters are saying that the monsoon should break this week, we'll see.

Goats in Taxis- Wednesday marked the kick off of the multi-week holiday event  of Dashain, a time when many people travel to their villages, get together with family and apparently eat lots of goats. This week goats started arriving in the capital as people prepare for the large family feasts. While not in full swing yet, there will come a point where goats occupy every other corner in town as they are sold off for dinner. Last year I saw goats being transported in the backs of taxis, on mopeds, bus rooftops, and walked on leashes like a dog. Last time I never seemed to have my camera when my favorite goat sightings occurred, this year I will at least have the camera on my phone and hope to get at least a few good goat shots. Nothing makes me laugh as much as goats in taxis- it really strikes me funny.

Business Visa- This will at some point have to be its own post, as this has been one of the longest and potentially frustrating things I have ever done. I say potentially, because to expect too much out of any process including lawyers ad bureaucrats is to set yourself up for disappointment, especially here, so I advise to always expect delay, absurd rules, endless signatures and plenty of visa extensions. I've been working on this since I got back, and apparently despite the fact that the department that approves names already gave us the go ahead, and the fact that we already opened bank accounts and have a company stamp and letterhead with that name, the Department of Industry had decided that they didn't think it made sense that we were a restaurant and a bar- because apparently you can really only be one or the other. Despite the slight absurdity of this position it has held us up for the last few weeks, and apparently just the other day it was approved. So with this last hurdle cleared my passport and company stamp have been sent out to get the business visa that I set out initially to get back in early May. So finally after five months, some 200 or so signatures, opening 2 bank accounts, some two dozen plus passport sized photos, half a dozen thumb prints, countless visits to the department of immigration and industry, and plenty of money in legal fees and visa extensions I may actually be getting my visa. I'm not actually holding it in my hand yet though, so I'll hold off on declaring victory.

Brian's Grill House Will Open, Someday- The great news is that I have a lot of people asking me when the restaurant will be opening, a lot of people seem genuinely excited about it, and that's really encouraging. We are moving forward, the building has electrical and plumbing going in now, word arrived that my elevator is actually on its way and won't be delayed as long as initially feared, and we are about ready to go ahead with interiors. That all said, I have no idea when we will actually open. In Nepal things get done when they get done, and coordination of contractors and timing is not this countries strong point. Currently we are looking to  a general opening some time in December, with our earliest possible ready date being some time in November, where we might have friends and family as we work out systems and train the staff. But who knows, maybe things come together quickly, maybe I'm writing something similar come February. At this point I'm really itching to get going, and will feel a lot better once the space is in place and ready to go.

Earthquake!

Any student of history knows that Kathmandu gets a major earthquake every 100 to 125 years or so. Every student of engineering (or possibly even the casual observer) knows that most buildings in this city will come down when this happens. So inevitably in the not so distant future Kathmandu will be flattened, this isn't a matter of if, but a matter of when. In the world there are two locations that are listed as potential catastrophic disasters with a major earthquake hits, and Kathmandu is one of them.

Music at the Grill House: My Current top 50

So I started to think about what kind of music we will be playing at the restaurant today. Music sets a certain tone for a place, and as much as decor it can add or subtract from the experience of dining. So the questions you have to ask are; What do you want the music to say about the place? How does it affect the dining experience? What music is your target crowd comfortable with, and what are they not comfortable with? Lastly this is a place I have to spend a lot of time, what type of music can I stand to listen to day in and day out?

So the first thing to consider is what we want the music to say about the restaurant, and how does it add to the atmosphere we are trying to create? We are a Grill House with an American theme, or at least a very western theme. If I want to speak to western music than I have several options; rock, country, blues, pop, etc. It rules out hindi pop and the like which you hear on the streets of Kathmandu. I want it to feel like that when you get out of the elevator and step through the door you've stepped out of Nepal and into a western country. The fact that it's a grill house, in my mind rules out pop and dance tracks as well. It's not a club, and it's not for teeny boppers- a grill house asserts a certain amount of testosterone and masculinity something pop and R&B lack.

This brings us to rock, country and blues. I'm passing on country due to my unfamiliarity with the genre as well as the lack of it's appeal to the world at large outside the US. The tricky thing with western rock is that it can be loud abrasive and can often contain explicit content which in my opinion would distract more than add to the atmosphere of the restaurant. While I don't want elevator music, I want it to be heard, I just don't want it to distract, and thus the selection of which songs to play should try and avoid anything too caustic with overdrawn guitar solos, odd noises and inappropriate language. To show the sheer diversity of this genre though I really would like to try and grab singles that span through the the last 40 years or so covering everything from acoustic to electronica to fusion.

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.