April was busy with settling down caravan cafe work routine, starting from organisation of regular fresh supplies to learning visitors peak times. I had opportunity to go to many different suppliers with Salvatore or other team members and help to choose right supplies.
Al Chiosco is mainly focusing on local products, typical for region grown or produced by other social cooperatives or bio farms. Couple of them here:
- http://www.salemipina.com/the-land/;
- http://www.agrestis.eu/;
- http://www.arcolaio.org/en/.
It is very interesting to meet people who make specific products, for example cheese or tomato salsa, or olive oil and to learn all the story behind the process of making. I can say that now eating pizza I can identify which cheese is produced industrially, which comes from a small farm. So do customers of Al Chiosco feel the difference in quality and gets the message of supporting local small business. Probably that would be my personal lesson of a month.
Also this month was a lot of experiments with menu which involved tasting and trying new dishes, and I greatly enjoyed to participate in this as well. In addition, Im starting to learn Italian eating habits and times, which is initial to know in restaurant business also interesting from cultural point of view. More on my individual tasks, was work with herbal garden. We visited local herb nursery and selected all plants, it is very nice place (http://www.gliaromi.it/) with interesting varieties of Mediterranean herbs, I also got great advises from them and finally planted little herb garden.
At the moment Im in charge of maintenance and I have to say it is never ending process of learning, especially due to the fact that weather is changing every day. It is definitely invaluable experience and great joy. The only bad news this month is that snakes started to wake up after winter sleep and Im no big friend with them. 🙂
In next weeks Salvatore is going to prepare mid-term financial report of his business so Im willing to learn more about financial side of the business.
Arūnė Karklinytė
