Eight weeks to go and the fun starts

Work this past month has been extremely varied and very busy.

The openings of both John Lewis Southampton and the new customer restaurant at High Wycombe next month have moved closer together. Now, only four days separates them, including a weekend.

Menus are now finalised for both shops, and trials start in earnest next week. This is the fun bit of the job, experimenting with different dishes, with the wonderful assortment of crockery. Less than eight weeks remain and we have a lot to achieve.

John Lewis Southampton has two customer catering operations - a restaurant at the top of the shop seating more than 300 customers, with stunning views over the Solent, and, on the ground floor, a café with 100 seats.

Moving from a 120-seat waitress service restaurant to the new operation is a sizeable task for the catering staff and, as you can imagine, we have had to recruit a number of new caterers to our team - not an easy task in the current market. However, the staff manager and her team, with Adrian, our catering manager, have performed miracles and most positions are now filled.

Earlier in the month, I ventured north to Liverpool to look at one of our earlier restaurant refurbishments and was delighted with the transformation our designers and caterers had achieved.

This was what we call a limited refurbishment but it is amazing what coloured paint, some contemporary furniture and a modern menu can do.

Working more closely with Waitrose, this month I visited a sandwich factory in Melton Mowbray. What a great experience. Expecting to see a mainly automated process, I was in for a surprise. The only automated process I saw, apart from the washing of the fruit and vegetables, was the buttering of the bread. The rest was completed by hand.

I am not going to say too much about the FSA, as a lot has already been said in the columns of this journal, but I did attend for the first time its open board meeting in July. I found it extremely interesting but was very disappointed to see so few caterers there.

I was also amazed that there was only one caterer on the board. My observation, albeit from one meeting, was that we don't seem to be very well represented on either side.

Caroline Mortimer is general manager, catering, for the John Lewis Partnership

Next diary from Caroline Mortimer:7 September