Farangdemic: How we weathered the shit storm!

It's late January 2020, and the team and I are heading for a week's culinary tour in Bangkok. Well, that's what we called it, but in reality, it was a holiday where we ate loads of amazing food and drank plenty of beer. I'll write about our Bangkok experience separately as it was brilliant and there's so much to share.

Whilst there, staying a stone's throw from Khaosan Road, we started hearing the name 'Coronavirus' popping up in 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 return flight when we saw what was unfolding in Wuhan - scenes that can only be described as the makings of a horror film: empty streets, officials in hazmat suits. I'd read that 800 flights daily flew into Bangkok direct from Wuhan; many of those passengers would have been walking past us during the previous days, not wearing masks like in the olden days. With this realisation, and the fact I was now halfway back to London, flying over Kuala Lumpur on a plane that most probably had someone with coronavirus aboard (perhaps even ourselves), the penny dropped, and suddenly, a very real feeling of dread came over me.

Throughout my life, I'd read about near misses with diseases - swine flu, SARS, influenza - but it had always felt so distant. Watching the news as this slowly crept closer to our little corner of London was unsettling, but ever since that January flight, I'd had a feeling it was heading our way.

This pandemic forced us all to adapt and evolve to stay afloat. The hospitality industry especially has taken a serious kicking over the last few years, but we've kept pushing. Our story, which I've predictably labelled 'Farangdemic', starts right at the beginning.

By early March 2020, Farang had been particularly busy, so I'd managed to do the usual thing and forget about the news, focusing instead on service. After five years of grafting at the restaurant, things were looking up - we were busy as anything, booked out for months in advance, fully staffed with a brilliant team, and we'd just spent savings on a new refurb, ready for service 2020!

Little did we know that 2020 had something else in store for us. It would explode into one of the biggest uncontrollable 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, frankly, who cares - it happened, right? It was sometime in early March when we turned on the news to find the public being urged not to eat in restaurants. For someone 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 was devastating news.

So we could open for diners, but diners weren't allowed to come in? Something was off here! Our months of bookings quickly dissipated into nothing, and we were suddenly left with 25 staff members in a very expensive empty building, with no income plan. We went from hero to zero in a matter of hours.

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

This false sense of success didn't last long, as hospitality took another blow when all restaurants were asked to close. To pay the bills, I had to run takeaway 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 preparing and packaging 500 curries until 3 am.

With this reality, we couldn't viably keep 25 staff members employed. With no diners legally allowed into the restaurant, all our front-of-house staff were essentially forced into redundancy. The pool of difficulties we were swimming in just got that bit deeper. 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 worth of staff. I made the tough decision to make our part-time workers redundant whilst planning to keep all our full-timers, who solely relied on their employment with us.

As with any challenging situation, the only way out is to tackle it 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 takeaway in restaurants, I saw an opportunity to keep us all busy and keep our pocket of North London fed with proper Thai food. The team, now eight staff members strong, turned our 77-seater restaurant into a Thai grocery shop - something I would have deemed impossible a month prior whilst serving our fully booked dining room. We packaged up our entire menu, plus all our ingredients, condiments, sauces, and meal kits. We literally made everything we do ready to be picked up and taken home. The speed at which we turned our operation around was quite fascinating; within months, we had transformed a restaurant into a shop. Albeit something we didn't want or plan to do, its success showed that our hard work and ingenuity had paid off.

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

The last few years will certainly be remembered in the history books as an absolute cluster of terribleness. However, amidst all the madness, we aren't a sob story - we worked ourselves to the bone, swallowed our pride, put our food in takeaway boxes, replaced tables with shelves, and did what we had to do to survive! In the end, we came out on top. Fair enough, we may have been through the wringer, but it's not a bad place to be after what has happened.