To Steve in 2003,
Even though it was bloody early this morning, needless to say it was tremendous hearing from you after so long! My apologies if I sounded mostly asleep, which I was, and also I had no nicotine in my hand! Take care of yourself, my ol’ friend; we still have a long standing drink engagement together to have yet, so no more heart attacks please! Marg always reckons that I push it, but you seemed to be continually on the go and pushing the hours and the effort!  This letter I shall probably place on the web as a letter from the past once I leave here, – probably joining my memoirs which also cannot be published while so many of the participants are still kicking around!

After Goa, what happened? Well, the boss of Goa was a typical Indian, in which he wanted to operate a hotel, didn’t make a business plan and didn’t give directions, didn’t give any sort of training to a old cooker like me, and then want to have a five star deluxe property. It was plenty of wasted money with plenty of wasted time and a typical Indian way of doing things. Keep the contractors waiting on tender hooks for their money, jump in with projects that aren’t important, swap and change projects around so no one company will ever finish a job and then wonder why it is all not coming together. It was a lovely property though with great potential and could have rivaled a boutique style hotel anywhere, but with a great location to boot, but we were never going to see eye to eye and we parted company about June 2000. We spent some time in a beach house with a leaky tiled roof through the monsoon, found a home for the dog we had, which really cracked us up a bit and then went back to New Zealand before joining the Leela Kempinski Hotel in Mumbai (Bombay) as Chef. A good hotel this one with a double system of management, one with the General Manager who was a great guy and one with the owner who was a 80 year old hotelier who was fast approaching senility! Some staff worked for you, and most worked against you, but for the owner! Money was extremely tight here as a new property was being built in Bangalore, which has now been completed (and looks tremendous, a very prestigious hotel) but in the meantime, it became difficult to operate the Italian restaurant with no Italian ingredients, supplies not arriving due to two or three years lack of payment and a general apathy to do anything at all to our property while Bangalore was being built. After September 11^th towers attack, we were let go and very glad we were to get out of there with all monies due! The Chef before me resigned in playing the General Manager against the owner, in which case the owner did not back him then, but then spent the rest of the coming year trying to get rid of me and bringing back the old chef back once the General Manager had left! Talk about politics and crap! Like I said, glad to be out of there, but made some good friends and we enjoyed our time there overall.

Spent December and January in New Zealand before coming back to Chennai for the Park Hotel, which was another hotel opening. Christmas in NZ in 2001 was the first Christmas spent with family since 1972, so good to be able to have Christmas lunch and celebrations with them after such a long time. Probably will not happen again as this is usually our busy time as you know and I still do not get back to NZ that often, even though for two years in a row I had a trip back! Next one will be in two years time maybe! Anyway, Chennai and a company that stated it wanted to be five star, also Indian owned, with some good ideas, but also does not know how to arrive at the product. Normally I would not look at a property like this, as it is not really in the deluxe category, but the concept for the restaurant was excellent and I was assured a free hand, which it has turned out to be. Young staff who have been with me since pre-opening, a good concentration on training and setting standards and a great deal of hands on cooking with a lot of pan cooking produced a very talked about restaurant. The service side was dismal, with an EAM F&B who decided that being EAM meant everything could be run from his office and directions and training was being kicked up the arse or fired when things went wrong. But we created a stir in the food scene, even for a Provencal city like Chennai and have been very favourably compared to restaurants in London, New York etc. No idle boast here, my kitchen boys have been great and could now work in any restaurant anywhere, with good discipline and standards setting and no acceptance of anything less than the best. Must admit it is the only place where they do not bother me for food costs, I even do not receive the monthly report, as I always complain that it carries only the executive meals report and not comparison figures of stores and kitchens, no breakup of figures and not much information I can actually use to control costs. In fact, it is the only hotel I know of where the daily food cost can be low, but the monthly figure will show an increase! In the meantime, I use the best products that I can get hold of here, have a large fan club of Italians with the pasta and other Italian food, my Lebanese guests with their babganoush and hummus,, the British with their mash potatoes and mushy peas, the Yanks with their beef burgers and now we are doing some very unusual things with the Indian items, so am getting quite a good name there as well! This is where the salad comes into play, as not many people will touch salads in India where they run the risk of stomach problems, so if you have a name for serving good “safe” salads, then you have to work hard to keep it.

I arrived here February 2002 and worked on the pre-opening until May 15^th, when we opened. Should have realized then what the place would operate like, when the weekend before opening, no other department head was around, but all had the weekend of! Unknown to me to be this lax in any other hotel opening! No toilets were provided for three months, (we used some shitty and extremely smelly conveniences in the shops next door) at least until into June, the place was half finished, the staff entrances a shambles and full of rubbish and workmen and even today the hotel is not finished! Needless to say, I stopped eating to stop having to use these toilets and would not work on another hotel opening for this company for this very lack of any consideration for staff welfare. I find that all these companies have “we will look after our staff” messages in their Mission statements, and then work completely opposite and do not give a shit for them in reality!

We moved into an apartment in February last year, no transport provided, basic amenities and everything worked out on a domestic package. We actually found it very hard to adjust, plus with the many problems happening at work in the building and lack of professionalism in our support departments and have only just started to settle down this year. Marg spent three months in Glasgow during the hottest part of the year when her Mum had an accident, and even though we stressed the importance of having a telephone to keep in touch with our overseas families, this was not provided (a lot of talk but no action) and we only managed to get one installed ourselves later in the year. It took two weeks for Marg’s family to finally contact her after the telephone numbers here kept changing from pre-opening to temporary to operating numbers and luckily it turned out well in that her Mum recovered. As her father had died a couple of years before and her Mum is now 87, it was time for her to stop living alone and to have an apartment in a retirement village, actually a great place where there is individualism and freedom, but the support community around as well. The house needed to be renovated a bit and rented out and the finances all arranged to cover the costs over the next 10 years or however long! She was definitely kept busy and luckily missed the hottest months here, but I was stuck here, walking in and out of work each day for a total of 42 kilometers a week, in 45 degree Celsius temperatures and polluted, crowded streets which were all dug up for telephone laying. Lost 12 kilograms and now am down to 88, which is about ideal for me, better if I can minus another 3 or so! During this time I was getting home at 1 am, still 32 degrees in the apartment, having to sweep and mop floor, do the washing when I could, find food, clean out the toilets, still get time to walk in and out (1 hour 20 minutes a day) and operate a busy restaurant being there lunch and dinner. Another telling factor for this company was that once Marg came back and we managed to get a part time maid to sweep and mop the floors a couple of times a week, it was then stated that once a week we could have a cleaner from the hotel for this work and didn’t we know this????: Bloody great lot of good it did me then, after the fact!

We decided then that we were not going to spend another summer here in the same conditions and passed this message out to various guests and staff knowing it would reach managements ears! One thing here, with all the work placed into the restaurant and the effort and support by my staff, the guests only comment about how I look after them, what great food and so on, as well as being way above budget on income, so the management definitely did not want to lose me. It was decided to install a new air-conditioner into the apartment (being a foreigner we are not used to this heat etc etc) which has already been a great boon to us and makes a hell of a lot of difference to our living conditions. To make my life easier I bought the Enfield Thunderbird and so cruise around the streets on my mean machine, but otherwise transport is still a problem, but we enjoy it here much more. An automatic washing machine was bout and a few other bits and pieces, so quite comfortable now! But, when it becomes to comfortable, or the chef is getting too big for his boots, it is time to trim a bit, so my staff have been pulled into the General Managers office and told they are not working for an individual but for the hotel (wrong, as most state they will leave when I leave) and for Indians to look after Indians and not everything foreign is great (couldn’t agree more!) How-ever, the inference was strongly given that I do not look after the Indian guests, but only foreigners and therefore I am a racist sort of Chef! How bloody wrong they are as I talk to anybody in the restaurant who will actually talk back to me and as a professional it is impossible to discriminate. The main problem that they cannot understand is that I have highly trained people in the kitchen but a very weak and under trained service side, so instead of bringing them up to higher levels and improving service and methods, it is easier to bring us down to operate at the service level.

We had a great product here, innovative and totally different, but now the standards have been taken out of my hands and allowed to be set by one of the weakest members of the team here. Bloody shame! Needless to say, I have reminded myself that it is not actually my restaurant and not my name on the door, so I am pulling back a bit and letting the “Indians look after the Indians” and spending more time with Marg at home! My nightly sleep was just over five hours, so it is good to be able to get a few more winks and actually time at home in the evenings. The downside is that I do the split shift less, so do not get away for swimming as much as I would like to in the afternoons. I started swimming again after getting the bike and also playing squash (easier now that I am mobile and not so buggered out anymore) and have nearly lost my paunch as well, so feeling quite healthy, even though I still smoke! Marg has had trouble as I said with a bout of severe bronchitis and ended up in hospital for five days with all sorts of tests done, but a part from a bit of emphysema in her lungs, is now fine and clear again. She has cut down smoking and only has three or four a day when I happen to be home, and will try and get her to stop completely in a couple of weeks, once the stronger urges have settled a bit! Otherwise, we are both just kicking along, have two kittens that we look after, along with four local cats that we feed a couple of times a day and get them operated on when we can catch them. Two have been sterilized now and two more to go, but we also have to wait for each group of kittens to start feeding themselves, before they are sent away to the Blue Cross to find homes for and the mothers then get operated on! We will keep these two kittens, as after Goa, Marg in particular has stated that never again to take on pets and then have to find homes for them when we leave. So, what is the prognosis for the future and our leaving? While not actually looking hard, I am still being approached occasionally for various positions, one in Dubai and Kuwait and another in New Delhi and another again in Pakistan, but none are paying all that well and the conditions are no better than here, so we have stayed and just keep our ears open for good offers! But, I must admit that I am getting tired of this work and feel it is time to look at something that will take us through the next 20 years or so. We do not feel that we would fit in or enjoy living in New Zealand or Australia anymore, although personally I think that I could give Perth a good shot. We enjoy the freedom that these countries offer us as guest workers and may not put up with the increasing restrictions being placed on individuals back in Oz or NZ.  Plus for the freedom, negative for the hassles and bureaucracy that we have to put up with here most times, but what the hell, cannot have everything can you? Into Sri Lanka later in the year, hopefully May, where we will look around for business opportunities and se what we can buy into. Apparently, if you buy a business and employ local staff, then the residential permit is automatically given. Let’s see, as we also need to check out if money can be transferred out if needed, can we own 100 percent of a business and what other rules and regulations are there that may concern us. Trouble is, there are still areas of the hotel opening up and the dates keep getting postponed, so it is difficult to make any hard and fast travel arrangements! (Maybe you should look at moving to Sri Lanka as well and get into partnership with us!) We have not taken many other trips since being here. A few days in Pondicherry which is about 2.5 hours south of Chennai and a trip to Mamallapuram, a temple town about 1 hour south has been it, but we would like to see a little more of the state while we are here, time permitting. These trips are on the website under the travel pages, plus talked about in the monthly letters posted there.

Have I talked enough for you and caught you upon all the happenings? You can probably tell that I do not have a drinking or chatting friend here, although Marg and I talk between us, it is not quite the same as letting off a bit of steam over a beer or two is it? Maybe another reason why it is time to settle down a bit and I would really like to unpack those bloody cases stored in New Zealand one day. The Rover is still there and going well and all the family in New Zealand is going great, although my mother’s husband visits China for three or four months every year and is now stuck there with this SARS thing!!! As you said, lost at cricket, lost at sailing and I am sure the All-Blacks will do no better this year either – just proves my point that all the men have left New Zealand and only the women and children are left!!!! (and a few sheep of course). I do not think that I have lost my sense of humour, – it just gets harder to find and probably more sarcastic as time goes by. Did lose my pony tail the other day, it was getting a bit annoying, and the hair is now short, short, short, but bloody easy to comb (I had to look that word up in the dictionary as it was so long since I had used it, or the comb for that matter!)

Take care mate and until next time……