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Local businesses, especially in the fast food industry, are increasingly finding themselves pitted against franchises of larger and more experienced competitors; competitors backed by years of research, business experience and advertising and marketing dollars.
With the Pepperpot Canteen series we hope to put the spotlight [back] on our local food industry. A perhaps symbolic anecdote on the genesis of this column centres around the fate of Susie’s Roti and Curry Shop on Vlissengen Road, a five-minute walk from the K.F.C., Pizza Hut and Popeye’s outlets. This establishment was to be the first subject of Pepperpot Canteen. On first meeting the proprietor, I enquired about business. She asked with a wry face, “What business?” The second time I approached her to actually do the article she politely informed me that she was closing up shop at the end of July.
Name: M & M Snackette
Location: Peters Hall, East Bank Demerara (Opposite Harbour Bridge)
House Specialty: Cane-juice and Egg-ball
Mahendra “Joe” Mookram seems to be the human parallel of his family’s business; clean and presentable without being showy. Joe speaks in an accent that wavers somewhere between Trinidadian and Guyanese. For the interview, Joe led us to the back of the main ‘building’, a converted 40-foot container, to another smaller container, the main office of M & M Snackette.
According to Joe, M & M (or Mookram and Mookram) started some 20 years ago as “a four by four stand”. He recalls that the original ‘cane-juice and egg-ball business’ consisted of his mother selling from the small stand, which sported a small storage compartment and an attached mill. The first month they broke even, he said, and the next month they made a profit and the month after that, as well. With a third month of profit, Joe says that he put his long deferred academic career back in motion, all with the hope of enhancing the family business.
He concedes that the business has “grown since then.” Today, M & M Snackette has developed into a vibrant business that employs more than 40 people, with four “branches”; the main one at Peter’s Hall, a smaller mobile unit at Eccles, and two other branches within Pritipaul Singh Investments, one at the fish section and one at the shrimp section. And plans are underway to have another mobile unit out soon. And it’s not just cane-juice and egg-balls anymore - M & M snackette sells anything from M & Ms to Chinese food to the Trinidadian delicacy, ‘doubles’. However, egg-ball and cane-juice remains an M & M trademark; according to Joe, it is his business that put egg-balls on the map.
And what is his recipe for success? Joe works 12 to 14 hours a day, with only one Sunday off in every month. He usually leaves home at 03:45 in the morning to pick up his cooks, dropping them off at around 04:45 am and by 06:30 am every morning, the business has to be open. He recalls being taken to task by regular customers for opening at 07:00 a.m.
According to Joe, “You gotta set a standard and maintain it.” This is the sort of idealism that saw him holding the same price for his egg-ball and cane-juice for eight years, against the backdrop of Guyana’s skyrocketing inflation. “I don’t want to exploit my customers,” he says.
Perhaps another illustration of that idealism is his attitude to employees. He sees M & M as a stepping-stone for the majority of young people who pass through his business. He doesn’t mind that many use the training received at M & M to land jobs at more popular eating-places. He says almost nonchalantly, “I know we don’t pay the best of salaries but I’m pretty sure we don’t pay the worst…” The staff at M & M is, in a country where many businesses are ‘colour-coded’, conspicuously diverse. And everyone seems quite in tune with Joe’s “30-second service” rule; you don’t have to wait long before a pleasant face beams at you requesting your order.
Asked about his competition from large multinationals, Joe says that he has competition from 16 competitors including little roadside snackettes and “Mr. K.F.C”. “But I’m not worried about Mr. K.F.C that much…I’ve learnt from looking at the big guys.” He says that he’s been trying for the past four years to make the business more competitive. His strategies include attacking Georgetown and the University of Guyana with mobile units; going into the chicken and chip business; and expanding his delivery services to include more businesses (he recently signed contracts with DDL and New GPC) on the East Bank and by Christmas, to homes within a specific area on the East Bank. And in the long run, he’s confident that his egg-ball and cane-juice can tackle the Caribbean market, beginning with neighbouring Trinidad and Tobago.
Finally, we asked the 39-year-old entrepreneur if there is some secret egg-ball recipe, akin to Colonel Sanders’ 11 herbs and spices. “I’ve given people the recipe,” he says,” but I think it has to do with the final touch.” What is the final touch? He did tell us but it was strictly off record.
That’s it for this week. Next week, Pepperpot Canteen travels from the East Bank of Demerara to the heart of Georgetown where we’ll focus on the city’s hottest place to eat and be.
Pepperpot Canteen: Jerries
Name: Jerries
Location: Camp Street, Georgetown
House Specialty: Just about anything but we’ll vote for the BBQ
Stripped down to its bare essentials, the physical infrastructure, Jerries is simply a bit of sidewalk and a narrow passageway at the side of a building. Over the past four years, however, these simple things have been transformed into Georgetown’s hippest place to be on virtually every night of the week.
Pepperpot Canteen caught up with the proprietor of Jerries, the man fondly known to most of his patrons as simply “Jerries”, for this week’s feature. For the record, the thing that we should get out of the way is that Jerries is not Jerries; Jerries is in fact Austen Chung, cousin of the real Jerries, Jerry Bacchus. According to Austen “Jerries” Chung, Jerry Bacchus started off delivering pastries by bicycle to banks and other businesses places, like Barclay’s and BWIA, before opening a place at the now closed Black Pussycat in New Market Street. After one other hop, he came to settle on Camp Street in 1995 before he migrated to the USA in 1999. Since then, the business has been in the hands of Chung, a former salesman attached to Colgate-Palmolive, who now owns a craft booth on Hibiscus Plaza and is the current President of the Craft Association. When we asked him how he balances being a craftsman with running a successful restaurant, he laughed and replied, “Some people refer to the craft of cooking…”. He, however, got a bit more ‘sober’ after this and explained what he thinks are the real reasons that Jerries has made it to the top during his tenure as manager.
Chung explained that just before Bacchus migrated, he had stopped putting funds back into the business. After spending almost a decade building the business establishment, he seemed to have lost interest in expanding. When Chung took over the business, it was definitely on the decline.
This is where the salesman in Chung came in. First, he slowly began to re-establish the business’ reputation with both old and new customers by ensuring that they received quality food at the best possible price.
“Our prices are lower than all the places and yet our quality is better than most o’ dem. And I ain boasting about this: when we mek a beef burger, this is why the people come back, ninety-something percent is beef. The other things is just to hold the burger together so it won’t loose up.”
As an extension of this policy perhaps, is Chung’s way of pampering customers to the point that they feel too much at home. He recalls that he only recently had to cease his free phone call policy since the cell phone calls were driving his phone bill to above $30,000 on average every month. Chung can also usually be seen chatting with customers, typically in very casual clothes, or sitting among them having a drink. He says that the “aloof” attitude that some businessmen possess is not his style.
Another factor that he sees as affecting the pace of business is his late opening hours. The late night clientele at Jerries is a mixed bunch which includes doctors on the night shift at the nearby Georgetown hospital, taxi-drivers, security guards, other late shift workers, and people who just want a night out on the town. According to Chung, Jerries is the universal after-event place: people usually come from nightclubs, weddings, different functions, dances or a night on the seawalls to hang out or buy food to take home. Some people never come in, not even to get drinks. According to the proprietor, they just park their cars and ‘lime’ next to the place just to be there.
None of this, however, seems to explain the popularity of the place when it comes to the so-called beautiful people. The typical night at Jerries is usually a display of GTs young and rising crowd, the “who’s who” of Guyana’s Generation Next: media people, lawyers fresh out of Hugh Wooding, fresh-faced doctors, pageant winners, models, young businessmen and others. One of the reasons Chung offered when pressed about this was his karaoke. Jerries, he says, has the best karaoke in the country. He recalled one instance where a tourist was asked on a television programme about the highlights of his trips to Guyana. The tourist mentioned his trip to Kaieteur Falls and karaoke night at Jerries.
The final verdict: if you’re looking for a good place to just chill, a chance to annoy your friends with some discordant crooning, or simply (and this just happens to be our focus here at Pepperpot Canteen) some extremely good food to fill your face with, Jerries is the place to be. There’s just one thing bothering us that we neglected to ask; shouldn’t it be “Jerry’s”?
Name: The Guinness Bar
Location: Joseph Pollydore (Hadfield) Street, Georgetown
House Specialty: Fry-fish and plantain
Pepperpot Canteen took a break last week to make way for Jaime Hall’s feature on the Good Samaritans at 58 Miles. This week, we ride back into town to find what a local entertainment promoter has been cooking up recently.
About a month or so ago, the Miss Jamzone Pageant and Beach Party had a large section of the Linden Highway, in the vicinity of Splashmin’s Fun Park. It was, arguably, one of the biggest entertainment events that Splashmin’s has ever seen. About a mile around the resort, a throng of automobiles congested the roadway, making vehicular traffic slow down to a snail’s pace. Most of the waterside area inside the resort was standing room only. It took about half-an-hour to get a box of ‘cook-up rice’. And we aren’t yet talking about the stuff leading up to the event. Tons of press, wildfire word of mouth buzz, the grand prize of a car. It was by any measure, a pretty successful venture. That is, any measure but that of the man behind the show, Troy Mendonca. In an interview with Pepperpot Canteen, Mendonca related how someone ‘messed up’ and the judges for the event had nothing to eat. They didn’t complain but that was on Mendonca’s mind, days after the event, along with a host of other little details he intends to take care of come Miss Jamzone 2004.
Before we get to what this 33-year-old entrepreneur is trying to achieve in the fast food lane, we should go back and trace his steps before he went into his current line of business.
Troy Mendonca began his professional career as an audit clerk at the Linden Mining Enterprise (LINMINE) back in 1989. In 1992, he went to work for Banks DIH where he spent five years in the Audit Department, rising to the level of supervisor. He was then transferred to the Sales Department as the Administrative Manager. During his tenure, he went to the University of Guyana where he obtained a Diploma in Marketing. After a minor spiff with the management at Banks, Mendonca struck out on his own.
With contacts in the beverage industry, a keen business sense and what is undeniably, an imaginative drive and vision, he set up his Guinness Bar and then linked up with the popular sound system, Fusions, to elevate popular entertainment in Guyana. Today, Hits and Jams Entertainment is, arguably, the most recognised name in popular entertainment in the country, with radio shows and one weekly television show helping to promote the group’s upcoming events, like their Car and Bike Show, and the increasingly popular, Miss Jam Zone Pageant.
All along the way, however, Mendonca has cradled hopes for what he refers to as his “baby”, the Guinness Bar. Slowly, the young businessman has been trying to transform what was primarily a drinking bar, to a restaurant. He says that their signature food, fry-fish and plantain, started out originally as just cutters. People began warming up to the taste and soon, they were ordering in larger and larger quantities.
Always with his finger on the pulse of what’s going on around him, Mendonca decided to diversify the range of eatables available at the Guinness Bar. Today, the Guinness Bar cooks creole food, along the line from ‘cook-up’ to curry; the daily lunch specials offered are a variety of tasty, wholesome food. The residents of Hadfield Street and its environs, along with taxi-drivers and minibus crews have typically been his most loyal patrons; and though the Guinness Bar does not possess the pull of one of our recent Canteen pit-stops, Jerries, his customer base is slowly expanding.
Despite, the popularity of the other things on his menu, Mendonca is insistent on pushing his fish and chips. A single well-done colour poster for his fry-fish stands among the numerous Guinness logos, in a corner of the bar, reading:
“Simply Good for You
Specially Marinated
With Locally
Produced Herbs”
In the end, there is one point of interest that seems glaring in the light of Mendonca’s other ventures. With all the publicity means at his control, the huge public interest he usually conjures up for various events, Mendonca remains strangely personal about the Guinness Restaurant cum Bar he has in mind. It is clear that there is some final destination which he has envisioned for his “baby” but it is perhaps a long time that he has to wait until he gets there. In his own words: “The concept I have in terms of a restaurant and bar, when I reach to that level, then I’ll back off.”
In our next Pepperpot Canteen piece, we travel up to New Amsterdam, Berbice, to visit a small canteen that supplies visitors coming off the ferry with some outrageously tasty meals.