It’s 2010, the holiday season is over, and I’m glad! Don’t get me wrong, I kind of like the holidays…. using up all my patience putting up lights on the tree, overeating, mandatory time with the family, missing folks back home and shopping (I hate shopping!). The highlights of this holiday season for me were:
- Suresh’s joke about the ’Punjabi Santa’ (like Santa, he has a beard, is tall and plump, and say Hoy Hoy Hoy)
- Going to Winter Wonderland in Tilden Park in Berkeley with the kids
- Dancing to Country, Salsa and Hip Hop at the Kasa Staff Holiday Party
But I couldn’t relax, as in the midst of all this, K2 (aka Kasa Marina) launched and Tim and Mer had their third baby (aka V3). This should have been a time of only serious hard work for us, and whilst all of us at Kasa put that work in, it had to be so stop and start because of the holidays. We literally had to force ourselves not to think or do any work on Xmas day and spend it with our families, and try to understand that the government and rest of the country were going slower because of the holidays.
So I’m glad that life is back to normality and we can just steam ahead with work now, as we have a lot more ahead of us. The pressure is on high, not only because we have a bigger space and higher rent at K2. We opened around December 19, and these first few weeks have been pretty steady but not that many people in the Marina know that we exist yet and we need customers flooding in.
Whilst it’s exhilarating and satisfying to have a successful restaurant or to get some wonderful press, margins in our business are slim so we have to be super successful to make it all add up, and that pressure extends all the way through to our staff. Our staff need their hours maxed out (or else we lose them) to make rent, support families here and back home, put themselves through school or, like our Line Cook Extraordinaire Gomez who is about to have his first baby, just survive in SF. The emotional pressure of being successful is intense as our families, staff, vendors and on and on rely on us. More customers means more hours for our staff, which means more tips (which is vital to their livelihood) and ultimately more raises.
So instead of waiting around for the Punjabi Santa to deliver a bushel of money, we’ve come up with our own Kasa Plan of Action:
- Continue to keep the food as excellent as humanly possible
- Continue to train our staff to provide warm, wonderful service, even if on occasion you have to deal with a not-so-pleasant customer
- Community outreach and education in the Marina — introduce ourselves and turn people on to delicious, homestyle Indian food
- Connect with all of our customers as much as possible…like through this blog :)
I’m confident that with a little more time and work, we will all reap the rewards of our hard work, all whilst consistently giving our endless love to Kasa Castro. In the meanwhile, we thank you all for your continued support and hope that you’ll pass the word to your friends.
Love, Anamika
Hi. Interesting post. Probably a good thing for people to understand better some of the challenges faced by restaurant owners.
Wanted to provide some feedback on your Castro operation and did not see a comment vehicle elsewhere on the site so I am commenting here.
Love your food. Always tasty, well-spiced and fresh and very reasonably priced. We recommend you to anyone that will listen. There is one aspect of your operation that could be stronger and that is delivery. Every time we make an order we get a story about how the delivery guy didn’t show up or how busy you are and how delivery will take a long time and not so subtle cues to forego delivery and come pick up ourselves. As parents with a very young child this is not usually practical and as a restaurant who’s website description is “Indian Food Delivery” you should be doing better in this area. I’ve never run a food delivery operation so I’m certain there are challenges I am not aware of, but many other restaurants in the area have figured out how to make this work. I hope you will too.
when do we get a couple of your recipes? living far from the SF area we can’t visit- but would love to cook up some of your famous dishes!
Hi Anamika,
I ‘ve been there many times since you opened K2 at Marina. Food is very nice homely Indian food compared to the other Indian restaurants. I always recommend Kasa to my friends whenever I get a chance. I didn’t get a chance to see you till now. Tonight only I got a chance to meet you. Its good that you are opening late night on weekends because lot of people in fillmore during the weekend nights. I recommend you to put some flash light showing the sign Kasa or Open so that People can see from faraway that its open Otherwise it looks like its closed. All the Best and thanks for opening this place close to the place where I live.
Hi Chandran
Thank you for the compliments to the food. We aim to serve homestyle food, so it is always nice to hear when people appreciate this.
Thank you so much for the recommendation on the lights for the Kasa sign too. We are in the process of working this out and having some technical difficulties with it. Soon enough though, and hopefully we will figure it out. We are also working on getting tables and chairs outside too.
Thanks and see you in store one of these days
Anamika
Hi,
I went to Kasa in Marina yesterday. I really like the food especially it feels like home made and I just read your blog about having the restaurant in expensive marina area. Here are some marketing tips may be useful for your business especially for the first 6 months .
1. Print some discount coupon on back of the Marina Safeway Receipt like the other businesses are doing.
2. Print your advertisement in Paper Napkins and give it to nearby bars so that it drive customers after the drink from the bars.
3. Free T-shirt with Kasa Logo and info for the customers who order more than 50$ or 75$ so that the name Kasa will spread wherever the customer wears the T-shirt .
4. Have some visiting cards with Kasa info along with Menu in the front so that the customers will carry the visting cards in their wallet and that reminds to visit more often.
Good Luck
Ganesh