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Recipe for Success
Eat & Eat food chain at Gandaria City shopping mall in South Jakarta was named the Best Street Food Eatery Concept at the World Street Food Congress
Eat & Eat food chain at Gandaria City shopping mall in South Jakarta was named the Best Street Food Eatery Concept at the World Street Food Congress. (JP/Jerry Adiguna) (JP/Jerry Adiguna)
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span class="inline inline-none">Eat & Eat food chain at Gandaria City shopping mall in South Jakarta was named the Best Street Food Eatery Concept at the World Street Food Congress. (JP/Jerry Adiguna)
New dining places ' with new players and inspiring concepts ' spring up in Jakarta's many corners and breathe life into the bustling gastronomy scene.
It is her passion for food that led Fathia Syarif, one of the owners of BagelBagel food store and YummThai restaurant, to where she is now.
'The market for food businesses in Jakarta is really fantastic. With new malls you've got a lot of options to eat out, although it also means that we face more competitors,' Fathia says.
Learning that Jakarta's people are getting more gastronomically adventurous, with a group of friends, she has opened several New York-style bagel stores in Jakarta. Later, with some other friends, she started YummThai, a fast casual eatery of Thai food.
Fathia said the main challenge in opening a new line of food business was deciding on the menu and making recipes.
Pairing flavor with local taste has become the main thing in culinary business ' once people find a food stall offering a nice meal with reasonable prices, he or she will frequent the establishment, she said.
Location is another tricky factor, she added, saying that choosing a popular spot can be a solution.
'All of those factors ' good taste, good price ' make customers want to return,' Fathia says.
Price is also one of the key factors that MC and radio announcer Lucy Wiryono and her husband, chef Afit Dwi Purwanto, found out when started their first restaurant, Holycow! Steakhouse by Chef Afit, which serves qualified wagyu steak with affordable prices.
Currently, the couple has also started another restaurant, Loobie Lobsters and Shrimp Diner, which serves affordable lobster and big shrimp dishes.
Lucy said the idea to start the steakhouse first came after Afit, who used to work for one of the country's media companies, tasted wagyu steak in one of Jakarta's malls.
'It surely tasted really good, but the price was overwhelming with around Rp 600,000 (US$65) per plate,' Lucy told her story during the recent Mandiri-Femina's Women Entrepreneur Festival in Jakarta.
The couple, who had fun cooking at home and found out that their extended family members love their wagyu steak, then decided to build up the steakhouse in 2010. Afit even resigned from his work.
'We learned that Jakarta's middle-class people have a really good buying power and some of them really love to eat ' just like us. We saw it as an opportunity to run the food business,' Lucy says.
With strong will and a passion for entertaining people through meals, the couple used their Rp 70 million in savings to start the business.
Holycow! opened for the first time on a side-street stall, in front of someone's car garage where Afit did the grilling of 30 to 50 beefsteaks himself. It was only after several months that they hired help.
After six months in the business, the couple saved up enough to open the steakhouse's first outlet in South Jakarta.
Lucy said limited business capital was among the challenges they faced during early days. Renting
a good place or feeling tempted to beautify the restaurant were not an option then.
'And don't put profit margin too high, say up to 40 percent ' it will be too much,' Lucy advised.
Despite the challenges, Lucy and Afit hold on to good quality and creative concept for their business. The steakhouse is promoting US beef and Australian beef alongside rib-eye and wagyu beef in grade five to seven as well as marble grade nine plus, which has the tenderest texture.
'We're not just selling wagyu steak, we also give our customers knowledge about this kind of meal ' that steak has a very wide dimension,' she says
Significant beef price hikes during Ramadhan poses another challenge to the restaurant, which now has three outlets. Each outlet grills about 400 beefsteaks per day.
'We maintain the price by lowering our profit margin,' says Lucy, without revealing her average profit margin.
Restaurateur Ronald EP Mullers believes that great taste of his Western dishes and pleasant atmosphere are the main keys in maintaining his customers.
'You have to make sure [that you] provide quality, service and cleanliness,' says the owner of Papa Ron's Pizza, Amigos Bar & Cantina and Spanky's Ribs and Martinis.
With 35 years of experience in the business, the man, who was once a franchisee of Pizza Hut chain and other several food establishments, now happily manages the three aforementioned brands under PT Eatertainment Indonesia.
'Restaurant business is a full time job. It's a lot of work, lot of efforts to keep standards and quality,' Mullers says.
Besides Pizza Hut, Mullers was the founder of Green Pub ' a popular Texas-Mexican restaurant in Jakarta in late 1970s, which later transformed into Amigos ' as well as restaurants like Dairy Queen, Jollibee, Ponderosa Steak House, Red Lobster and Pinocchio Italian Restaurant in the 1980s and 1990s.
'It's not easy to survive ' we had to let go a number restaurants in late 1990s. Food business is a tough business, you've got to watch out to keep the quality and have something different with others,' says the 59-year-old American-Indonesian, who was born in Pekanbaru, Riau province.
'Yes, we had more brands, but one each. Now, I have one brand with 30 outlets,' he adds, referring to Papa Ron's.
Mullers handles his four original Papa Ron's outlets mostly in shopping centers around Jakarta, while the remaining are in a form of franchise, which are located nationwide.
His two Jakarta-based Amigos are located in a shopping mall and a trendy hangout area in Kemang in South Jakarta, while the newly run Spanky's is also in Kemang. He also opened Amigos in Bandung of West Java and in South Korea.
He said in terms of business, as long as they make profit, he would not get worried.
'I'd say, the profit margin in food business is between 10 and 20 percent bottom line. You'll survive with that,' Mullers says.
Food is certainly a promising business in town but Secretary-General for the Indonesian Association of Café and Restaurant Stevan Lie warned that apart from business capital, two things ' great concept and passion ' are key to successful and lasting culinary ventures.
'No matter how much money you've got, if you don't have those two important factors, your business will not survive long,' he says.
