Sheena’s Restaurant

Sheena’s Restaurant

The Edgware property was bought on the 09/12/1993. On Jan1994, Sobhag started the office on 2^nd Floor and The Thursday Club. The restaurant started on 15/07/1994 and closed in 10/04/1995.

Before the restaurant began, we firstly got planning permission to extend the existing property to improve/extend the restaurant layout. Since we had no experience in running a restaurant, we had to think outside the box to make the restaurant unique from all the existing competitors. We carried out market research to identify the different types of dishes served and their costs charged by the competitors e.g. We went to the local Italian restaurant to find out the cost of a lasagne dish. We additionally observed the restaurants décor and presentation and collected the menus from various companies on the way out.

Sobhag Shah contacted Suresh (the builder) to find a suitable Manager to manage/start the restaurant. Suresh thought Saroj would be the ideal person hence he contacted Saroj who was in India during the time. Saroj was pleased to be a Manager so she travelled back from India and a meeting was arranged in a coffee shop. They decided to make an international vegetarian restaurant to incorporate different cuisines within one restaurant. At that time Sobhag was Vegetarian as well. During the meeting, they strategized a good food menu also discussed methods of how the food would be presented to the customers. Sobhag wanted to name the restaurant Sheena restaurant, being his daughter’s name, but after several discussions, the name needed a little extra hence, they decided to add ‘‘s’ to make it Sheena’s restaurant. This is because most of the colleagues that worked at the restaurant had an initial of ‘s’. Sobhag, Suresh and Saroj.

Sobhag was introduced to a gentleman called (Chatralia) who had been designing restaurants. He suggested installing a coffee machine called Gajia. We used Gajia to make expresso and cappuccino which was served in hot cups. To design the restaurant, we had to practically strategies the ideal décor suitable for our restaurants that would look elegant but at the same time easy to clean. Suresh was the main individual responsible for building the restaurant. They called specialist individuals to make the décor such as a gentleman from Finchley to do Greek painting around the archives work called rage rolling. The walls were painted with 2 different colours lime green at the top and saffron at the bottom. The ceiling was painted black. The toilets were designed with tiles which was not commonly done during that time. They had new and expensive technologies installed within the restaurant such as upstanding fridges and steamed oven which we managed to fit in a small kitchen.

To cook international vegetarian food, they had to find an ideal chef who would be comfortable to cooking several international cuisine dishes. They advertised the job vacancy in a local newspaper and a food magazine. They found a Romanian chef called John. He previously worked on a cruise ship for 10 years and had served royalty on the ship. He wanted to settle down and had vast experience in the field. John was told to cook some dishes during the interview, and he was finding it difficult to cook vegetarian dishes and required training. We put him on payroll 3 months prior to the opening of the restaurants to try and cook the dishes. He used to make paella, which was rice served with meat, we suggested serving cabbage with the rice which we found on a recipe book. The portion sizes made was too large for one customer hence we made it into a sharer dish and the customers were happy with the portion sizes. After several attempts and cooking different dishes, we choose the best-cooked dishes that were acceptable to our palette rather than the client’s palette and put it on the menu. We bought several crockeries to present the different cuisines such as side dishes, condiment sets, oval-shaped plates and various sized white vases. All the crockeries were branded with Sheena’s logo. It was one of the best crockeries during that time and all the food was served in hot plates.

Additionally, we recruited several members of staff to serve the clients. The staff working at the restaurant were affluent and efficiently dressed. They had their own initials notebooks to write the clients orders. Some of the staff who helped were: Mala, Ravi who helped at the bar, Tony, Raju Patel. Initially, we called all our friends and family members at the restaurant in small groups to train the staff on how to serve and maintain customers satisfactory. We tried one day for the staff members to kneel down to the level of the customer and take the order like the Japanese however it was not appreciated. We also organised one day where the restaurant was open to all to get good feedback. This was carried out for a period of 3 weeks and we got an opportunity to trial the menu before it was printed.

The restaurant could sit on average 40 people at one time. Hence on the weekend, it could be 3 sittings of 40 people which would be 120 people in one evening. With time, the restaurant became popular and it started getting very busy. To try and meet the demand, we had to make a decision to allocate a slot of 1.5 hours for each table. During that era, the Indian community were unhappy with this decision and felt the restaurant was being unkind.

The restaurant served a famous carrot cake. During that time, carrot cake was unknown to the general public hence it was one of the specialities. The restaurant also served alcoholic drinks in the form of cocktails which was well present in a unique glass. One of the hot-selling drinks made was the chilly beer which was a Mexican recipe (beer served with green chillies). One of Sobhag’s favourite dishes was stuffed garlic mushroom. It was tasty as each mushroom was deep fried in pure vegetarian crispy dry oil fresh before serving the customers, the breadcrumbs were homemade, and nothing was fried in the same oil twice. When he tried to make the same dish at home, it would never taste the same due to the quantity and variation in temperature.

At the restaurant, for the starter they served:

1. Croquettes
2. Cheese balls
3. Stuffed potatoes
4. Stuffed jalapeno made with 3 different flavours, cream and chives, potato stuffing and mozzarella stuffing. They initially bought the starters from great brothers ready to fry but they then decided to make at the restaurant.
5. Vegetable balls which was made from grated carrots and courgettes mixed with cheese (paneer) rolled into balls and shallow fried.
6. We were the 1^st restaurant to make stuffed aubergines. The aubergines were firstly smoked then stuffed with soya mince and topped with 3 different types of grated cheese and finally grilled. The stuffed aubergine was served with quinoa salad. In 1994, Quinoa was a difficult ingredient to find making the dish exclusive.
7. Cabbage roll was served either with a clear soup or dried.

Hygiene and quality were very important in our restaurant to make sure no customer felt ill due to the food served. We made sure all the food was freshly made and served. There was one incidence where glass broke in the Restaurant and for the safety of the customers, we threw away all the food as the glass shards could have gone into the food, replaced with freshly made.