Fake it 'til you make it

I was pretty excited Tuesday night because I was finally going to eat at Sabai Thai Eatery, a restaurant I had been interested in checking out since it opened about a year ago. I'm a huge fan of experimenting with new restaurants and although Winnipeg has a lot of restaurants I take the bus, so my dining parameters are on the smaller side. Sabai is on Corydon Ave., a short walk from my house, so I had pretty big expectations for the place as I was hoping for a new favourite restaurant that would be close to home. However, while the food was good, I couldn't help but notice that it shows Sabai is a new restaurant. In this blog my aim is to provide readers with a review of the restaurant and to offer tips on how to inexpensively better your new restaurant.

Overall Sabai's food and service is quite good. The menu is very affordable with items averaging nine to ten dollars apiece. One of the best parts about Sabai’s cheaper menu is that the mark-up on wine is not high at all. A bottle of wine there averages between $20-30, always a bonus.

Also, the food was nicely presented on the plate; for example one of the dishes we ordered was the Chiang Mai noodles which is a yellow curry noodle dish, it looked like a volcano. The noodles were twirled in the bowl so that there was a peak at the top and then it had bean sprouts shooting out of the peak with long crunchy noodles lying horizontally across the bowl as if they were chopsticks. It was fun and classy but my mouth was still watering.

The décor of the restaurant; however, is still noticeably in the works –when you go to the washroom anyway. The washroom is stuffed with cleaning products and yet it still doesn't look clean. For example, the white tiles’ grout appears to be molding or is at least very old. However, out in the main part of the restaurant it looks quite polished. Sabai has a nice deep red, green, and brown colour scheme. The lights are dimly lit creating a relaxed atmosphere. The music is not too loud and sounds quite natural. It has nice large booth seats that are soft and comfortable making you want to stay longer and enjoy. And finally, the tables are nice and far apart so you can have private conversations without having to worry about what your neighbor’s next to you think about your nasty divorce.

Nevertheless, Sabair has some obvious flaws. My suspicions led me to believe that most of the flaws are simply to due to how expensive it is to get a business up and running when you still have a pretty small fan base. Therefore I will take some time to offer my advice (I feel I have some credentials since I grew up creating and running a restaurant with my parents) on how a new establishment can fake their lack of funds in order to seem as though they’ve put millions of dollars into their establishment.

One of the first dead give aways that your restaurant is on a budget is the amount of salt that goes into your food. Salt may be an easy and affordable way to add flavor into your food, but people are able to tell. Salt is almost acidic and spicy on the tip of your tongue if there is too much and often there is so much salt that the food becomes over flavored. Avoid resorting to over salting. The case was especially noticeable at Sabai. My assumption is that they struggle with keeping flavor in their food because they are using specialty ingredients. If you’re using specialty ingredients try and cut your expenses somewhere else. Don’t sacrifice your food, buy the top quality ingredients. After all, people are coming to your restaurant for good food. Period.

(Note: The Globe and Mail featured a series of salt reports this summer on how much salt we actually consume. The amount consumed in one dish at a restaurant is appalling. But instead of just reporting the shocking facts of our over-consumption of salt, they showed examples of what some restaurants do to avoid adding salt to their food. I felt their advice was especially helpful and would recommend you check out the link to the article. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/special-reports/hard-to-shake/dont-pass-the-salt/article1194031/

Second, people eat with their eyes before they eat with their mouths. Put some effort into your presentation. Food presentation is inexpensive so be creative with the arrangement of your food.

Third, relaxing décor is critical. People don’t want to come back to a restaurant if it is crowded, uncomfortable, or dirty. Unfortunately, however, nice décor is one of the most expensive things to establish. So it may not always be possible to finish decorating completely before you open. Therefore I suggest doing the following: invest in comfortable dining chairs, don’t cram too many tables into the room, and invest in paint and plants. Fresh paint feels clean and new. And plants breathe life into the place.

Fourth, your staff’s knowledge,servers especially, is important. The servers are the face of the company to the guests, so they need to be experts on the menu. They need to have tried most of the dishes. Remember, your business is new so word of mouth has not spread around yet as to what is good at your restaurant. The server needs to be able to offer advice. At Sabai the server couldn't tell me which dish, out of the two I had questioned, to recommend. I was debating between a Pad Thai and the Chiang Mai Noodles, two different dishes as one was curry and the other not, the only advice the server gave was that they were two totally different dishes so she wasn’t sure which one to recommend. Well no kidding they are different hunny, why would your chef put two of the same dishes on the menu? The correct way to approach my question would have been to more thoroughly describe how each dish tastes, after all taste is what I was ultimately debating about. Her approach, unfortunately made it seem as though she had never tried either dish even though she insisted she had.

Also, if you are going to have wine on your menu, be sure your servers know how to present it properly! Wine presentation is one of the easiest ways to make your restaurant appear classy. A classy restaurant brings in classy guests which in turn creates a classy reputation. Here is a link to a site that offers great wine serving tips. http://www.thatsthespirit.com/en/wine/howto_serve.asp.

So there you have it, some advice on how to better your restaurant on a budget. I hope this will help anyone who is in such a situation. And in terms of my final impressions of Sabai Thai Eatery: I would go back. I could tell the effort was there, some areas just need some tweaking. And like I said, despite the mild saltiness of the food, it was pretty great Thai food. The service was friendly. And it was a very comfortable environment to sit in. I would not give it three out of five stars.