When I first stepped into this adventure, my biggest fear, concern, worry, was cocktails. It was an unknown for me and also quite daunting because I needed to get it right, the bar's reputation depended on it. So I watched a million YouTube videos and bought a bunch of books, I highly recommend "Liquid Intelligence" by David Arnold, it literally has everything that you need to know about cocktails. For example, did you know that you only need to shake a cocktail for between 8 and 12 seconds? When you shake a cocktail you are cooling it, adding air to the liquid, mixing it and also diluting it with the melting ice and by 12 seconds you have achieved all of that so there is no further gain.
I had a million other worries about cocktails. Which ones should I offer? What recipe should I use? Have you any idea how many different ways there are to make a Porn Star Martini or a Pina Colada? It's mind boggling and I had a mountain to climb.
But that's no what I wanted to talk about, I am here to talk about food. Now if I thought that cocktails were a big worry, food was even more challenging. Once more I (IT guy) had a whole new challenge that manifested itself in a number of different ways.
First of all, I had reduced the size of the kitchen in order to increase the size of the bar so I had very limited space. Whatever I was going to offer had to be done with a minimum of equipment and with very high efficiency. So what do we offer?
Platters? Tapas? Order from Gabriels? It bounced back and forth with all of the pros and cons of what people would want and what we could realistically offer. In the end we settled on platters.
I spoke to my son Steve about it and his advice was that it had to be a "Banging" platter!!! Hmmmmm, that's helpful. He also offered to get his people to design them for me. Before I went down that road I did my usual thing and asked that nice Mr. Google what was on offer. Guess what? I managed to get some great visual images of "Banging" platters.
So Karen and I bought some ingredients and knocked something up as a trial run.
The first trial was a meat platter that you can see to the right. Mr. Google had advised that you have to balance the colours and the tastes so if you are going to have some tangy pickles then also have some sweet fruits.
Steve had always said that you need to try to get some height on the food as well.
We also built a cheese platter but I can't seem to find a picture of that one.
We invited some friends around to test them and the result was a big thumbs up and with that timeless gesture ...... our platters were conceptualised.
Step forward in time to March 2024 and the bar was stocked, we had been open for 3 months, gin, cocktails and craft beers were being consumed on a daily basis so I needed to get the platter show on the road. First things first, I had already completed my food health and safety course so I bought a big fridge that I could also use as a work top.
I needed some wooden boards, knives, forks. Gabriel had about eight nicely shaped olive wood boards and I added additional boards and bread boards to that. All of these kind of things were easy the next question was ... what am I going to offer.
After much discussion we settled on the traditional Ploughman's Lunch for one or for sharing, a gourmet meat platter, a gourmet cheese platter and a gourmet sharing platter. We also put Stifado and Moussaka on the menu.
The next thing was finding suppliers for the ingredients. For the meat and cheeses it was relatively easy, we tried a bunch of products from Kolios (they do amazing individual pork pies) and then they deliver the meats and cheeses to us on a daily basis. The big headache for me was pickles and bread.
So I went on a pickle hunt and after trying numerous shops I finally found what I wanted at
8.30 in the morning at Alpha Sigma supermarket over near Akrotiri. Tasting pickled onions at 8.30 in the morning turned out to be worth the effort.
Check out the video on the left.
In terms of the bread, the usual Cyprus style bread was not going to be right so we needed another solution. As it turned out the solution was pretty easy. Gabriels baker actually started making some long thick baguette type bread especially for us and it has turned out very well.
So we just needed one more test with some crash test dummies that turned out to be Gabriel, Sophia and a few other people and below you can see the result. A banging gourmet sharing platter for 5. I also added a picture of an individual cheese platter.
At this juncture, I absolutely have to give a big shout out to Louise. It was her second day on the job and she just calmly said, shall I go and make the platter now. I said "Errr, OK." So she did. I don't think that she had ever heard of a "banging" platter but she certainly produced one for the final test run.
And that is the story of how we brought food from a worry, to a concept and then to a reality at More Social. We have been making them for about two weeks now and have had great reviews. Also a special thanks to all of those people who took the time to write the reviews.
That's all for now. See you next time and thanks for reading.
Mal
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