Opening Day

Mac and I had decided to open the restaurant for breakfast. We weren’t ready or able to make pizza yet but we could certainly serve our baked goods.  Customers wanted to sit down and enjoy their croissants, muffins and cinnamon buns with butter and jam and perhaps a cup of coffee.  Thanks to Momma Simmons we had tables and chairs ( she paid for them!), I just had to find time to buy everything else, which meant a trip to Kingstown.

By then it was getting close to Christmas and the Friendship Rose was busy hauling people and supplies.  I went to a few stores in Kingstown to see what was available, then purchased glasses, plates, coffee mugs and cutlery. At the grocery store I bought fruit juice, butter and guava jelly, and stocked up on raisins, evaporated milk, sugar and molasses. I also found some pretty bamboo place matts for the tables and some sweet little pots for the jam and sugar.

Back on Bequia Mac had set up the large coffee urn someone had given us when we got married.  We had bought some excellent ground coffee from a ship that had just returned from Venezuela, a real treat as good coffee was hard to come by in the Windward Islands!  I arrived with my purchases and we stood looking at each other for a moment with awe and an element of fright in our eyes.  This was it!  We were going to open tomorrow!

I was too nervous to go home that night.  I rolled my croissant dough, made up my bran muffin mix and greased all my pans.  Sleep was out of the question, I was far too excited.  I started baking the bread at 1:00 A.M. so that I could get it out of the way, I wanted to make sure that the ovens were free for the muffins, cinnamon buns and croissants we would be serving.

With one kitchen assistant and one very untrained waitress we opened.  People poured in throughout the morning and consumed copious quantities of coffee and croissants, shouting compliments to me through the kitchen window as they ate. We ran out of croissants first, then the muffins and cinnamon buns started disappearing at a fast clip.  Soon there wasn’t a crumb to be seen, our first breakfast had been a huge success.

1979 had been quite a year.  The volcano had erupted, the country had achieved independence, Mac and I had  married and now Bequia had a new restaurant.  Wow!