Egg sandwich with homemade mayonnaise and lettuce. Fluctuates in popularity.
In the spirit of managing expectations, I’d like to be clear that the food I’m serving here is not groundbreaking or exciting or even interesting, mostly. The Global Cafe menu is sandwiches, sweets and drinks, but is expanding and changing daily. Each dish on the menu walks the fine line of affordability, popularity, availability and produceability.
Affordability: Food in South Korea is actually quite expensive compared to other Asian countries. I have to balance food costs with menu pricing, which has to be accessible to someone on a student budget as they’re are my biggest customers. Some of the portion sizes are, therefore, miserly.
Popularity: Sandwiches in South Korea are not to my taste. Mostly they’re pre-made, slathered in sweet mayonnaise and microwaved hot. I have not, and will not, try to recreate a Korean sandwich, so I have no idea how each sandwich on my menu is going to suit local tastes until I suddenly run out of them (or alternatively, have to eat egg sandwiches for dinner). The most popular sandwich is chicken with balsamic caramelised onions and lettuce on wholemeal bread.
Space is as a premium. Next time I’ll talk about coffee.
Availability: I’d love to be able to use more vegetables, cheese and cured meats in my sandwiches, and cheese, cream, butter and fruit in my sweets. This would make my life a lot easier, and I would probably enjoy the product a lot more. These things just aren’t available here at the price, quantity or quality I’d like, or they just flat out aren’t available. The joys of trying to make western food on a budget in Korea.
Produceability: It isn’t a word, I know alright! I’m just referring to my ability to produce the food, in regards to my time and the equipment available to me. For instance I have one domestic oven with one rack in it (which is also in full view of the public, pictured above). I have only one under bench fridge. Most of the time there is only one staff member around, me. As much as I’d love to be making the food to order, this is just not always possible. So I have to develop recipes that will keep.
Right now I’m making everything, except bread, from scratch. This includes the toasted muesli and yogurt, which is gaining popularity daily.
So, I sell a lot of sandwiches. I sell a lot of cakes. Now, just to be clear, I am sick to death of sandwiches. I can get no sandwich inspiration, and I don’t ever want to make another sandwich again and I most certainly don’t want to eat any sandwiches. Sweet things on the other hand are a different story.
Banana bread.
I get much more pleasure from making sweets than sandwiches, which is good, because I’m doing a lot of baking. A. Lot. Mini carrot cakes are baked fresh daily, often twice. I make banana bread every day, and I can barely keep up with demand for chocolate brownies. I’m considering adding muffins, sultana oat biscuits and caramel slice to the menu in the next week. These things have been chosen because of they’re easy to produce, keep well and sell wonderfully. I do have a bit of difficulty with ingredients, though.
Ingredients:
Bread. The bread that I’m ordering isn’t up to scratch. Actually I think it’s crap, super processed soft white bread. It is baked locally, but sometimes arrives frozen, baguettes rock hard. The kind of bread I’m using is normal in Korea and is accepted and enjoyed by the majority of my customers. Guess I just have to lower my standards then.
Butter. Pure butter doesn’t seem to exist in Korea. Although Koreans drink a lot of milk and eat a lot of yogurt, they seem to prefer margarine over butter, and the one locally produced butter I’ve found still tastes very fake. I’ve been buying butter imported from New Zealand from a Korean online shop, but they’ve recently decreased the allowable butter allowance to two blocks (~900g) per order. So now I’m making most things, banana bread for instance, with oil and stockpiling the butter to eat with hot cross buns come easter time.
View from my side of the counter.
Cheese. Now, this is embarrassing. There is a toasted ham, cheese and tomato sandwich on the menu (which I’m making with an incredibly poorly produced home sandwich press that broke on it’s first use) in response to customers pleas for grilled sandwiches, cheese and ham. Korean cheese is unfortunately unfortunate. The only affordable cheese I can get delivered is plastic processed individually wrapped cheese slices. A little part of me dies with every slice I unwrap, but this is normal for Korea and the toasted sandwich has quickly risen in popularity.
The counter, the menu, the horrible bright yellow lights behind the counter (the lights that almost induce seizures in my staff).
The actual menu is a flash animation displayed on a big monitor. This may seem strange but it was the perfect solution for two Bachelors of Design Computing. Why? I needed to be able to easily change the menu, I wanted to remove some reliance on knowing English in the ordering process by using pictures and Koreans are nuts for enormous TVs. It seems to be working, though people need to be directed to it, I guess some people it’s just ignorable advertising on first visit. I take pains to make the food look like the pictures everyday, and am heartened when customers can’t look away.
There isn’t much else I can say about the menu but questions are welcomed and I’m always open to ideas!
Next time: I’m not sure this is even coffee I’m drinking. An Australians pain at serving coffee in South Korea.
