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The next month passed quickly. A contractor threw up some paint, built some booths and a bar and put some workbenches into a cramped kitchen, and just like that what had been an under- patronized tea house was christened Luigi's Italian Restaurant.
We bought an old stainless steel eight-burner stove that had two blast furnaces for ovens and seemed heavier than a car; a few refrigerators and furniture and paintings for the dining room, and soon we figured we were ready for opening day.
About a week before we were scheduled to open, we sat around a table in the dining room of the restaurant and tossed out ideas for dishes. Luigi's original idea had been to keep it simple and make the place more of a pub, but with my interest in food I pushed for a more complete menu. Even so, our first menu only consisted of a soup, five salads, six pasta dishes, and a variety of pizzas.
If this whole process seems a little blasé, it was. Russ delivered a clearly printed copy of the menu to be typed on a computer. A couple days later we received a proofing copy strewn with spelling errors. I made the necessary corrections and suggested we have a look at the next copy before printing. Needless to say, this did not happen. A couple days later, Russ brought in a package and removed our menus: one laminated page with the food menu on one side and drinks on the other.... and plenty of spelling errors. I made some exasperated motion with my hands and complained, but Russ looked unperturbed. He waved me off and said, "It's no problem, we can fix them." I was incredulous, but I could see that I had lost this battle. Sure enough the menus soon had the correct spellings pasted on over the bad... and the lamination. Maybe he was right, we were opening the next day and we needed the menus pronto. Who could wait for time-consuming proofreading? He knew all along we just had to get by; I thought we had to do things right. As a consolation, most of the other English language menus in the city had spelling errors also. Luckily for them, the owners and patrons were oblivious in most cases, somehow I think Russ would have preferred not knowing, also.
Opening day came and the promise of free beer--passed primarily by word of mouth--brought a capacity crowd. We prepared a buffet of pasta dishes and salads that was well-received but the beer did not flow as freely as promised. The San Miguel dealer had given us a couple cold boxes to chill the beer as it came to tap, but these poorly designed stainless steel boxes were no friend to a good workout. Hands, outstretched with empty cups, clamored for refills and soon the spigot was spouting a wealth of foam. It seems that the electric motor generates so much heat during high-use that the beer is turned to foam before being chilled. Try explaining that to a sweaty thirsty crowd who by this point would gladly have paid for a frosty beer.
Over the next few months our business steadily increased, but unevenly. Some nights we'd have no more than a few tables while others we'd fill up and run a wait. On those nights we had three people in the kitchen and we just couldn't keep up. Orders would sometimes take 40 minutes and that was with us working at a breakneck pace. Sometimes on weekends these rushes would last three hours in a blazing hot kitchen with hardly a chance to think about a glass of water. We used to walk out of that kitchen dazed and sweaty. We were one hell of a sight. I'd heave myself onto the bar and a pint of beer would be down my throat in less than a couple minutes.
We started off with expatriates making up about 75% of our business. If we were to grow though we knew that had to change. Sure enough by the time I left, our business was probably 60% Chinese. Serving these two crowds turned out to be quite a trick. Many of the locals really had little or no experience with Western style food. Despite the presence of soy sauce in a great deal of their diet, the Taiwanese turned out to be very sensitive to salt. We tried to be careful but we had plenty of dishes sent back for being to salty. Noodles were also a tricky issue. While traditional Italian cooking calls for al dente pasta, the noodle in Chinese cuisine is served relatively soft. Again we erred with the majority--a compromise any Chinese restaurant is familiar with in this country--and cooked the pasta longer than would normally be done in in Italian cuisine. Another amusing detail was the "more is better" style of ordering pizza. We had a full list of toppings for our pizza which catered to local tastes as well as Western. Our toppings included shrimp, squid, ham, salami, and a host of vegetables. We never intended for one pizza to carry that kind of load, but it was not rare for a Taiwanese table to order one of these monsters: a thin crust pizza with 1" 1/2 of toppings. By the way squid isn't bad on pizza. The squid does have to be cooked first though, because of the amount of water released during cooking.
As the months went by we settled into a pretty good business. I worked long hours: 12 hours a day with one day off, but that's not unusual when you start your own business. Our one running skirmish involved our neighbors. We were situated in the bottom floor of an apartment building, and our bustling night life was causing some problems. Not only was noise a problem--we were open until 3am--our electrical needs were taxing the building’s system, and we occasionally plunged the whole structure into darkness when a fuse tripped. The fact that a bunch of crazy foreigners were running around at all hours of the day and night didn't help any, either.
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