Farangdemic: How we weathered the shit storm!

So it’s late January 2020 and me and the team are all going for a week’s culinary tour in Bangkok. Well that’s what we said but in reality it was a holiday where we ate a load of amazing food and drunk a lot of beer. I’ll write about our Bangkok experience separately as it was awesome and there is loads to talk about.

When we were there, staying a stones throw away from khaosan road, we started to hear the name ‘Coronavirus’ popping up in the papers and news feeds. With a cautious eye on our phones we didn’t think much of it, “we’re on holiday right. Another beer please!”

it was only on the plane on our return when we saw what was going on in Wuhan, scenes that can only be described as the makings of a horror film, empty streets, officials in hazmat suits. I read somewhere that 800 flights a day come into Bangkok direct from Wuhan, many of those passengers would have been walking past us for the last few days, not wearing masks like in the olden days. With this realisation and the fact I was now half way back home to London, flying over kuala lumpur, on a plane that most probably had someone with coronavirus on board, perhaps even ourselves, the penny dropped and all of a sudden a very real feeling of dread came over me.

For my whole life I’ve read about near misses with diseases; swine flue, SARS, influenza, but it’s always felt so far away. Watching the news as this slowly spread closer and closer to our little corner of London was not fun, but ever since that plane journey back in January I had a feeling it was on its way.

This pandemic has forced us all to adapt and evolve to keep afloat. The hospitality industry especially has had a pretty serious toe punt to the balls over the last few years but we will keep on pushing. Our story, predictably labelled by myself, ‘Farangdemic’ starts right at the very beginning.

So it’s now early March 2020 and Farang has been particularly busy so I’ve managed to do the usual thing and forget all about the news and focus on the business of service. After 5 years of grafting at the restaurant things were starting to look up, we’re busy as fuck, booked out for months in advance, fully staffed with a wicked team and we have just spend some savings on a new refurb- ready for service 2020!

little did we know that 2020 had something else in store for us. It was going to blow up into one of the biggest uncontrollable shit storms in human history, with hospitality right at the forefront.

it’s all a blur now so I’m not looking at exact dates because who cares it happened right. It was some point in early March where we turn on the news to find the public being urged, not to eat out in restaurants. For a man running a restaurant that employs himself, his sister in law, his mum, 24 others and funds a business that supports himself and his brother, this is bad news.

So we can open for diners, but diners are not allowed to come in? Something is off here! Our months of bookings very quickly dissipated into nothing and we were left all of a sudden with 25 staff member’s in a very expensive empty building, with no plan of an income. We went from hero to zero in a matter of hours.

we very quickly flipped our operation and focused on serving our food, to the same quality in take away form. After a very strange staff meeting I suggested that as our income has been swiped from us overnight we have two choices. We can either close up shop and wait for it to blow over, or go for take away and split any money we make amongst the staff evenly. In true hospitality spirit we went for gold and turned Farang into a take away joint. For 1 week the phone went mental and we had take-away flying out of the locked front door, 1 every 5 minutes. We all made some money and the business was still running so we were happy.

This false sense of success did not last long, as hospitality took another blow, with all restaurants being asked to close. In order to pay the bills I had to open up take away from inside a locked restaurant on my own. My mum took pre-orders from her living room round the corner, whilst I cooked into the night, sometimes cooking and packaging 500 curries until 3am.

With this in mind we could not viably keep 25 staff members at work, with no diners legally aloud into the restaurant, all of our front of house staff were essentially forced to redundancy.
The pool of shit we were swimming around in just got that little bit thicker. I had to make some serious decisions for our survival, I kept everyone furloughed for as long as I could whilst devising a plan, but unfortunately without a restaurant, we couldn’t sustain a restaurant’s amount of staff. I made the tough decision to make our part-time workers redundant and made plans to keep all of our full timers, who solely rely on their employment with me in work.

As with any pool of shit, the only way out is to clean it up, one piece at a time. (I’m not sure why I used this analogy throughout this article but it’s written now so deal with it 😂)

From this, the Farang Larder was born, our restaurant, to go. With the government allowing retail to stay open alongside take-away in restaurants I saw an opportunity to keep us all busy and keep our pocket of North London fed with proper Thai food. Me and the team of now 8 staff members turned our 77 seater restaurant into a Thai grocery shop, something that I would have deemed impossible a month prior whilst serving our fully booked dining room. We packaged up our entire menu, plus all of our ingredients, condiments, sauces, meal kits. We literally made everything we do ready to be picked up and taken home. The speed in which we turned our operation around was quite fascinating within months we had turned a restaurant into a shop. Albeit something we didn’t want or plan to do, it’s success showed that our hard work and ingenuity had paid off.

Now skipping a few years ahead to the present, the carnage of the shit storm is still here but we are definitely making progress, in fact in some ways we are evolving and making improvements. The Farang larder has been so popular that we have kept half the restaurant set up as a shop. In the other half, we now have 30 seats and focus on keeping customers here for longer, giving a more personal experience. We cook for hundreds of people every week in their living rooms via the Dishpatch, we sell our curry paste and sauces all across the country at Payst, we look after each other more and respect work/life balance more.

The last few years will certainly be remembered in the history books as an absolute cluster fuck of terribleness. However at least in all the madness we are not a sob story, we worked ourselves to the bone, swallowed our pride and put our food in take-away boxes, replaced tables for shelves and did what we had to do to survive! In the end we came out on top, fair enough we may have been covered in shit, but it’s not a bad place to be after what has happened.