italian kitchen design uk
my name is stephen haller and i am thegeneral manager and order of home restaurant in belfast. i obviouslyheard about pop-up restaurants and pop-up shops etc. i think if you're in thisindustry for any amount of time, your end goal is generally you want to ownyour own place. the bank's weren't lending a lot of money i didn't have alot of money, so i thought good way to open something and test it if you want wasto do it as a pop-up, so we decided to do do home as a pop-up in calendar street. we opened the home pop-up for 5,000 pounds, which is for nothing. calendar street had been a restaurant at
one stage so we didn't have to pay forextraction to go in, we didn't have to pay for gas to get plumbed in which wedid here when we became permanent, we worked very closely with a girl calledjill o'neill from, refound. jill totally furnished the whole of home, buteverything that was in it the tables, the chairs, the artwork, all had a price tagon it. so we were in and you a saw a chair and table at the light you could buy it, so wedidn't have to pay for any furniture. so we were really really lucky that it only costus five grand which was phenomenal. you open as a pop-up you don't have a lot of money, soyou don't have money for a big advertising campaign, you can put all theusual stuff ads in papers etc etc. so one
of the first things we did, two or three months even before we opened. we started the whole twitter,facebook thing. so social media was really really really important,especially if you've no money. the two biggest things which i found, werethe biggest drawbacks were, number one, was trying to staff it. trying to convince people to come and work with you, because home wasoriginally gonna be for three months. these people obviously being offered like afull time job, there could be either for, basically as long as they wanted.so staffing was kind of hard, the whole idea of pop up was kind of new, trying toconvince a landlord, into giving you
space for three months, was kind of hard.things went really really well actually shocked us how well it went. so we made the decision then that we would like to go permanent. when you go permanent there's a lot more money to spend, you know in a pop-uprestaurant, you get away with a lot more. your place doesn't have to be as finishedas well, you know all the wee details don't have to be there. one of the good thingswas, when you go permanent getting staff was a lot easier, but the big thing waswas shelling out the money and, signing a contract saying ten years. you have tothink long and hard about that. one of the big changes was, obviously it's amuch bigger restaurant, like calendar
street would would have sat maybe40 people, this place seats 80. so the hardest thing for us was getting round how muchmore visibly we were. you're right on the front of wellington place here. so thefruit fall was so much more than calendar street. the main tips i would give peoplewho want to open a pop-up, would be number one, is location is so soimportant. second thing i would say, would be you need to be very thrifty with your money.people open so many paces and spend so much money on the fit out and thecutlery and the knifes and forks. we purposely held back on that. that's howwe open the restaurant for five thousand pounds, nobody opens a restaurant forfive thousand pounds. so the two things
would be location, and definitely keep an eye onyour money.