We were crazy enough to get into this restaurant business in the first place, and then held on for dear life as the economy went to hell. After a year and a half of the hardest and most fulfilling work of our lives, we’ve come to the realization that:
1) you have to sell a heck of a lot of $4.50 kati rolls to make a living for two families in San Francisco; and
2) it’s time to spread the gospel for simple, fresh homestyle Indian food to other parts of the City.
So…we’re doubling down and opening our second Kasa location (dubbed K2) in the Marina next month!
The space is at 3115 Fillmore Street (b/t Union & Lombard) and is a little bigger than K1. We’re converting the space from an old furniture store, so the permitting, design and construction process has been intense. (K2 “Coming Soon” sign)
We kept things really really simple at K1 with a handful of dishes and a clean aesthetic so that we could focus on making amazing food from scratch every day, and we plan to keep the Heart of Kasa the same at K2.
Of course, we have some twists that we’re adding this time around, most notably: late night weekend hours (open til 2am Thursday thru Saturdays) and pitchers of beer and Sangria, but mainly we don’t want to mess with a good thing.
So…tell your friends, help us spread the word, and as always let us know your comments and brilliant ideas.
So I’m the third member of the Kasa ownership team, the most invisible because I kept my day job in order to keep the lights on should Kasa stumble and, most painfully, the one who chose the short straw and became Kasa’s Chief Financial Officer.
The best thing about being the Chief Financial Officer is that I get a fancy sounding title. The list of the worst things about being the Chief Financial Officer is much longer and includes:
- Having to enter around 20 fields of data into Quickbooks for each day of sales. Typically the fields of data include numbers that were illegibly scribbled by Tim, Anamika or one of our other great staff during the hustle and bustle of the day. Trust me, it’s exactly as fun as it sounds.
- Having to organize, 3 hole punch and enter all our bills into Quickbooks. That includes our daily deliveries from our produce and meat vendors, twice weekly deliveries of our spices, thrice weekly trips to farmers markets with scribbled (yet again) receipts, payouts to our nightly cleaning service, beer and wine deliveries, dry good deliveries, flower receipts from the vendor down the street and so much more goodness.
- Paying all our bills on-time so our vendors continue to love us. This is…stressful.
- Reconciling all of our accounts each month. Now you might ask…what does it mean to reconcile each account? Great question. It means going back through every single transaction — every bank deposit, every individual expense, etc — and categorizing it, confirming that it’s accounted for in our bank statements and that our ending balances in Quickbooks are the same as they are in our bank statements.
This may not sound like much, but when you factor in the many unexpected laptop crashes, accounts that don’t balance, receipts that have gone missing and so much more wacky fun, one can start to understand why many restauranteurs advised us to outsource the bookkeeping function as quickly as we could. But that would be far too easy (and expensive).
I’d much rather be in the restaurant, rocking a dinner shift and chatting up our customers, but for now, you can find me at home many nights after work, watching Eastbound & Down, engaged in an epic battle with Quickbooks.
If you want to share tips, or want advice on how we set things up financially, or just need moral support as you struggle through restaurant bookkeeping, feel free to hit me up (contact at kasaindian dot com or @kasaindian on twitter).
Suresh
We’re super excited to launch the Kasa blog. We opened in June 2008, and it’s been a dead sprint since around January 2008 to get things running smoothly. We’re now coming up for air and can launch the long planned blog.
Here’s some of the stuff we hope to write about:
- The ups, downs and other crazy stories of running a restaurant
- Spotlighting Tim, Anamika, Merideth and I as well as our rock star staff
- Juggling family life while running a restaurant, particularly for Anamika as a mother and chef and Merideth as the wife of a restaurant operator
- Sharing and discussing some of Anamika’s recipes
- How did we decide to open an Indian restaurant in San Francisco?
- Highlighting special dishes or events
- Getting feedback from all of you
- Whatever else catches our fancy! We love bollywood movies, hip hop and prog rock, food (especially food), taco trucks, montessori and much much more. You never know what we might write about..
Above all else, we hope to use this blog to connect with our customers, friends and anyone else who cares about Kasa or us.
Lots of love,
The Kasa Crew
