Time seems to pass by so quickly. It is already 18 months since we shifted to Koh Samui and took over the Viking Bar business.
When we started, both of us knew nothing about cocktails and alcoholic drinks. For me, it was a true experience in a new world all together - both in the business and also in the country. In all my life, I have hardly ever entered a bar/pub in Malaysia and my career was concentrated on software computing. Suddenly there I was venturing in the business of a pub in a new land.
Looking back, the experiences have been motivating and exciting. For the past 18 months, I have met so many different people from all walks of life and many different countries. It is particulary satisfying to see the same customers again after a few months or a year.
For our first Christmas and New Year, we served free food and had lucky draws for our customers. I still recall the difficult moments I faced with the menu for both the events. Since we have no kitchen in the pub, we had to provide food that is just easy to reheat with the microwave. We decided to offer the Swedish meatballs and pastries. To my horror, there was no pastry on sale at all on this island. Hence, I had to make all my pastries - from flaky pastry to the normal short crust pastry - from scratch. It was a hard task - trying to make 18 pastries for one event. Struggling with the water cuts and electrical cuts that was constant in this island, I ended up baking for about 30 hours without sleep just before Christmas. However, the result of seeing the happy faces on the customers truly makes up for the lack of sleep. This year, we will offer the same free dinner cum supper to all customers of Viking Bar for Christmas and New Year.
Today, Viking Bar is open from 1pm till 2am. We have also extended our menu to include coffee (expresso, cappuccino, latte), ice cream, shakes and popcorn. We are able to do so mainly because of the support of our customers.
We also have an extensive selection of Swedish and Norwegian music. Our customers are able to choose from our list and hear their favourite songs. Of course, there are times when we are overwhelmed with requests. In times like that, we play at least one song from each customer before rotating back to another choice of the same customer.
You can visit our website, www.vikingbar.net for more information about our pub. We have a good selection of photos of our customers since March 2005. Feel free to download any of the pictures.
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3 comments:
Hey Judy - any pix of you at the VIking Bar, or better still enjoying the sun & sand? What an adventure...and lots of hard work.
Winter approaching here in UK - cold and dark. Am envious of that warmth and light.
Hi Fiona
Yes, there are pictures of us in our website - it is under the photo gallery section.
Hi Judy, this is the first time I get in to a bloggy thing, not sure whether this message will get thru...what is HTML tag??what is a blogger account? all this alien language.
ok we are all envious of you and what you do- anything that is not about shuffling papers and speedreading and meeting deadlines by the hour
how many mugs of beer can u take in one go?
how well can you throw a dart?
BTW speaking know of any shop in KL that sells good dartboard, me looking for one here, but don't know where to find... if you know tell me than I ask someone at KL to find, then ask her to bring down to Sgp...
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