Cafe Luwak Blog

I really wanted to get the rest of my kitchen finished before we expanded our buffet, but I also want to be sure to be open when the Farmers Market opens tomorrow. I have talked to neighbors and setup backup plans if we run out of cooler space, and we have everything set to start doing our buffet one Saturday and Sunday. So if you are in town tomorrow visiting the farmers market, be sure to stop by and try out our new buffet. Our Saturday is just like our Sunday and runs from 8:00 am - 1:00 pm and is $8.50 / adult and $5.50 / child 12 & under. The buffet includes coffee or a fountain drink, and tomorrow and Sunday we will be serving the Kenyan AA as our specialty coffee of the week.

For over four years I have had the chairs in our dining room that I bought from the previous business. I have never liked these chairs and thought it was a really bad idea to have fabric covered chairs in a restaurant especially when you serve ice cream. Unfortunately there have been so many other priorities, I have never solved the issue of replacing the chairs. A couple of months ago I saw a review of my place online that described the seating as quirky dorm room furniture. I really agreed with article and started looking in earnest for some new chairs. My first thought was that I might find some used chairs, but couldn’t find enough of the same kind to fill the cafe, and I didn’t want to have a whole bunch of different types.

Last week a vendor sent me a sample chair to checkout, and all the customers who have tried it have just loved it. It looks really cool and it is comfortable too. These are brand new chairs, and this model costs a little more than I want to spend, but they are a perfect fit for our restaurant. I am not sure if I am going to be able to pull it off, but the goal is to get all the chairs replaced before mother’s day.

I talked to the staff about doing a Sunday buffet on Easter, but we decided to move it to Saturday instead. I have a lot repairs to do on the floors now that are remodeling is almost done, and this is the only day we are normally closed between now and Thanksgiving. So Saturday April 11th, we will be doing a breakfast buffet. If you haven't been to our buffet yet, bring the family down and give us a try.

As a special treat, we will be bringing in a Jamaican High Mountain coffee. This is one of my favorite coffee, and it has a similar taste to the blue mountain at about half the price. Even at half the cost, the high mountain is one of the more expensive coffee's around.

All my vendors keep telling me that if we aren’t losing business, we are doing well. In January and February our sales were less than 5% above last years, and our costs keep going up. Even with a little growth we are loosing in the end. One way to resolve the cost issue is to raise prices, but if your prices are too high, then your sales go down too. The other option is to increase volume. That has been our goal for the past four years, I guess you could call it out mission statement: Serve high quality food at a reasonable price and make a profit through volume by being the best in town. I have been talking about doing breakfast for a long time now, and one thing or another keeps delaying my kitchen project. In March I decided that we had to start delivering on our promise, so I came up with the idea to do a breakfast buffet. I figured we had enough storage to handle one day a week, so we put it all together, and started doing the buffet. Within three weeks out Sunday buffet doubled in size. We are also going through almost twice as much corned beef. People seem to love our corned beef hash as much as they do our Rueben’s. By the end of March we had increased sales by almost 20% and brought our quarterly growth to 10%.

After four years of trying different things, it has been really nice to see something pay off. We should have our new walk-ins installed anytime, then we will be doing a buffet Saturday and Sunday, and breakfast to order during the week. It has been a long time coming, but we are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It is a good feeling especially after a long winter.

 

I was a little disappointed by the turnout of the coffee tour, but I spent so much time putting the event together that I didn’t get around to promoting it till pretty late. Even so, we did raise over two hundred dollars for the Bike Ypsi Make a Wish WAM Team, and everybody who did show up thought it was really cool. We set the coffee displays up in the back area of the restaurant where we do our breakfast buffet, and it looked really sharp. Coffee Express, our coffee vendor, loaned us some very nice coffee dispensers and helped us with the descriptions of each coffee. I was printing posters in the morning and we got them mounted minutes before the event was supposed to start.

The coffee choices really worked out well too. I think the overall favorite was the Hawaiian Kauai Peaberry. For some people having 5 different coffees was a little too much and by the time they got to the fifth, they said their taste buds had trouble telling the difference anymore. There were definitely some people like me who loved tasting the different regions over and over. We will work on refining this event, and we will definitely do it again.

It was also a lot of fun hanging out with Forrest, Tom, and Trey. There were a number of people from the local Bike Ypsi group that came out to support their fellow riders and discuss the community rides that are going to be happening this summer. If you are into cycling and looking for people to ride with, this is a wonderful group. You can find out more about them at http://www.bikeypsi.org.

If you weren’t able to make it to the event, but would still like to sponsor one of the riders, you can click the links below to get to each of their pages:
Forrest Karnopp – http://www.wishmich.org/forrest
Tom Lennon – http://www.wishmich.org/tacotom
Trey Allen – http://www.wishmich.org/treymotion

 

We had our first breakfast buffet yesterday morning, and I have to admit I was a little nervous about our first day. This is a new venture for us, so I didn't publicize it much. I mentioned it in my last newsletter almost as a foot note so no one would see it. My biggest fear was that we would have a full house and look like we had no idea what we were doing.

Even without any advertising we had over 30 customers for the buffet, and everything went off without a hitch. The space worked and everything looked and tasted wonderful. We did a typical American style breakfast buffet with scrambled eggs, mini omelets, hash browns, corned beef hash, bacon, sausage, pancakes, French toast, muffins, yogurt and granola, and a fruit tray. As usual our corned beef was the winner of the day with just about everyone commenting on the corned beef hash. We are still working on finishing our kitchen, and once we get things done our goal is to expand the buffet to Saturday and Sunday, and we will have to order breakfast during the week.

One of the unique things with our breakfast is that every week we will be serving an additional specialty coffee with breakfast. We will still have our standard Mocha Java house blend, French Roast, and Decaf, but we will also be bringing in new coffees that will be served on the weekend. For the first buffet, we brought in a Kenyan AA coffee and included it as part of the buffet price.

Besides opening earlier and having breakfast, one of the other things we did differently was having table service. This is something that we have been planning to start doing with our breakfast and hopefully moving into our lunch services. I think that by going to table service we can increase our efficiency and free up the bottleneck at the register. During the buffet it worked really well, and Forrest did a great job of manning the buffet holding lids for customers and keeping the cook informed of food levels. We are still in our learning stages, but so far this looks like it is going to be a great addition to the business.

Our breakfast buffet runs every Sunday from 8:00am - 1:00 pm, and the cost is $8.50 for adults and $5.50 for children 12 & under.

I always get nervous when it comes to events especially when they involve other businesses. When I agreed to head up the Chili Challenge this year, I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to put in the time necessary to do it the way people expect. In the end everything went really well. The only problem that we encountered was that people started running out of chili. SOS ended up with $1149 toward their charity, and Ypsilanti residence got the chance to try some of the best chili around.

I really enjoyed the event, but not for the reason you would probably expect. When the event started everyone came to Café Luwak to purchase their bags and get their chili. After leaving my place people would disperse and to the next vendor of their choice. For us, the first hour was crazy busy, and my winter staff was not ready for a rush like that. Forrest and I jumped in and started running plates of chili from the back of the house to the front. That is what I really enjoy is when my son and I are just cranking and working together. We make jokes and taunt each other as we pass one another going back and forth from the kitchen. Then when we were in the back, we would joke around with Gertha, our main cook, while she was keeping us stocked up on chili. We served almost 400 cups of chili in two hours and it was pretty much just Forrest and I.

I don’t get out in the front of the house as much these days. There is always paperwork and orders to complete, so when an event like this happens, it is really enjoyable to work side by side with my son and put all the college students to shame. This is just a warm up for ice cream season where we have lines going all night long.

I have had this idea for a while where customers would come in and purchase a ticket at the front of the restaurant then go from station to station trying different coffees from around the world. At each station would be a display that describes each coffee and things like that. The problem is that this really needs to be a charity benefit. There really isn't a way to make money doing this. Well it so happens that this year Forrest is going to ride in the Make a Wish Foundation WAM 300 bike ride. The ride is a 300 mile ride from Traverse City to Chelsea over three days. Forrest is really excited about riding in this ride, but there is a fund raising requirement, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try out my coffee tour idea. Forrest will by riding with other riders from the Bike Ypsi group, so we are doing this benefit for the bike Ypsi riders.

So come down to the cafe on March 21st from 3-6pm and pay $10 (all proceeds go to Make A Wish), and try coffees from 5 regions around the world and support a really great charity.

If you want to donate directly to one of the riders, you can click one of the links below:

Forrest Karnopp: http://www.wishmich.org/forrest
Tom Lennon: https://www.wishmich.org/tacotom
Trey Allen: http://www.wishmich.org/Page.aspx?pid=503&frsid=3210

This should be a weekend to make anyone want to come to Depot Town. First we are going to be having the third anual Depot Town Chili Challenge on Saturday March, 7th from 3-6pm. Come into Cafe Luwak and purchase your tasting kit from one of the friendly SOS volonteers then visit the participating establishments and vote for your favorite chili. All proceeds from this event go to SOS Community Services.

And if that werent enough, we put off our 4th anniversery celebration to coincide with the chili challenge. So while you are at Cafe Luwak tasting our fabulaous chili, you will also have the opportunity to try a cup of the most expensive and unusual coffees in the world, Kopi Luwak. This coffee was featured on Oprah and in the movie the The Bucket List and is the namesake of our cafe. So give it a try and wish us a happy birthday.

If you are in the mood for Musical entertainment this weekend, Cafe Luwak should be one of your first stops. This Friday February, 13th, Bruno Nanni will be playing his fiery ovation acoustic and belting out familiar oldies songs. On Saturday February, 14th bring your valentine down to listen to Milwaukee's own Union Pulse as they stop off in Ypsilanti. Both of these performances are from 7pm - 9pm.

I dont know why I thought doing commercial remodeling would be any different that home remodeling, but I did. I really believed that I was going to be serving a full breakfast by now. Instead I am working with contractors and one minute things dont seem to be moving at all, and the next minute there is a whirlwind of activity. I keep thinking we are two weeks away, but realisticly I am betting it is going to be March before we have everything installed and approved. We are getting close though, and I am working on getting our menu together. I have a line cook who is anxious to start flipping pancakes and eggs. If you have any ideas of things you would like to see on our breakfast menu, send me an email and let me know.

Well the new year has come, and we ended up with sales up just a little over 3% higher for last year. That's not what we were hoping for, but given the economy, I don't think I can complain. We are still working on putting our breakfast menu in place and should have that done really soon, and I think that should really help us this year. With the economy the way it is, this year is going to be a tough one. I think we are in a good position to weather the downturn though. Even though everybody is going to be watching every penny they spend, I think our quality and price are at a point where people will be willing to treat themselves to a great sandwich at a reasonable price. And what better way to lift your spirits than with a beutiful big ice cream cone.

It really seems like the holidays are comming up very quickly this year. There is a noticeable effect from the economy, and it definitely looks like there are less people shopping. I have been keeping an eye on our numbers for the year, and it looks like we are going to come out a little bit above last year, but we arent going to have the growth sperts we have seen over the past few years. We dont do too much retail business, but we have a stock of Padilla Mug Tree's, Coffee by the pound, gift cards, and we can put together custom gift baskets for the coffee conasure on your list.

It has been almost 4 years since we opened our doors, and in that time, we have only closed on major holidays. Last week we started remodeling our kitchen to get ready for our new breakfast menu, so we closed for the three days prior to Thanksgiving. The remodeling in the kitchen is going slower than we hoped, but several of the employees wanted to paint while we were closed. They asked me what I thought about the colors, but I just shrugged and told them to do what they thought was best. When it comes to matching colors, I can barely dress myself in the morning. I would have no idea what would look good in the cafe. I worked on updating the web site, while several people from my staff painted the entire place with colors I can't even pronounse. They did an incredible job. It was one of those things where I had gotten so used to the place the way it was, I didnt realize how badly it needed the paint job.

I had my morning all planned out. I figured the poles would be busy early in the morning and then again at lunch time, so I was certain that if I went to the poles at 10:00 am, I wouldnt have to wait in much of a line. Well I got to the poles at 10:00 as planned, and there was a huge line so I didn't get out of there till 11:30 am, and by the time I got back to the restaurant my staff was ready to kill me. We had a constant rush of people all day long. I guess voting and going out for sandwiches kind of go together. It took me a while to figure out why I didnt realise we were going to be busy, then it hit me, we havent been here for 4 years yet. This is our first experience with a presidential election. Next time we will be ready.