Opening obstacles
Both Ani and Toussaint acknowledge that they faced their fair share of challenges during the opening of La Petite Maison. Firstly, for Ani, the produce available to him initially was just not up to scratch.
There were some items he wouldn’t even touch, let alone eat. With the quality of the food absolutely critical to the restaurant’s success, finding and funding the right supplies was an all-encompassing job at the outset.
“You should have seen me, I had less hair then than I have now,” laughs Ani. “Luckily I made some good contacts when I worked in London, basically there’s a consolidator who delivers loads of palettes here so he did my shopping for me — it cost me an arm and a leg.
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He gets it, packs it, ships it here, I pay three times as much as I would for the local market. The produce the local market was giving me was rubbish; I wouldn’t accept it.”
Daily calls to suppliers improved the situation and Ani succeeded in bringing new sources to the Dubai market; he now gets his burrata direct from Bari in Italy for example and has introduced fine foods supplier Oakleaf European — which provides fresh produce from Paris’ famous Rungis Food Market — to Dubai.
The produce required for Ani’s recipes may now be available, but the restaurant’s food costs are “very high”, he says.
“Nothing’s local. Everything’s got airmiles on it. It’s not cost-effective, it’s not environmentally-friendly, but we’re in the middle of a desert. Getting all the ingredients together has been a painstaking process, but now we’ve done it we have to go to the next step,” says Ani.
The ‘next step’ isn’t cost reduction, however, rather ensuring quality is maintained.
“We’re here for the long duration, we’ve got competition left, right and centre, but at the end of the day we keep to what we do,” asserts Ani. “A lot of people have told me about restaurants that open for three months and then start going down, changing personnel and it impacts on the food; if I’m here it won’t change because I believe in what I cook — if I didn’t believe in it I wouldn’t do it.
“We’re not perfect, we’re not going to satisfy everybody; my main aim is to satisfy 99% of the people. There’s no way I can do 100% — if I do close to that I’m happy and that’s what we try to achieve,” he says.
While Ani was struggling in the kitchen to find the necessary ingredients, front of house Toussaint had his own challenges — from explaining the sharing concept of La Petite Maison, to enforcing the two-hour table policy, to ensuring the service matched the quality of the food.
“We had difficulty at the beginning with people saying ‘the service is not as good as the food’,” recalls Toussaint.
“We did a lot of volume at the beginning, we wanted to see if the restaurant could cope, and now because we know we can do well, we’ve increased the number of people working in the restaurant from 65 to 85; everyone wants to deliver a better service constantly. The hardest thing in a restaurant is to be consistent and that’s what we want to be, and always improving — if you think you’re the best, it doesn’t work.”
When it comes to the menu, which recommends that plates are for sharing and that dishes will come to the table as and when they are ready, Toussaint explains that this enables guests to spend what they want.
“You can come here and spend a lot of money or you can come here and not spend any money, it’s up to you,” says Toussaint.
“For lunch you can have a Salad Nicoise and one dessert to share, for AED 150 (US $40) per person. Or you can come and have starter, main course, dessert and spend AED 400 ($108). That’s why our concept is to share,” he says, adding that menu engineering is very important at La Petite Maison.
Ani explains: “We haven’t got a lunch menu, everyone said ‘you have to do a lunch menu to get everyone in’, but I said ‘no, there is one menu’. I refuse to do a lunch menu because I don’t believe in cheapening what we do. If you want an AED 110 ($30) menu you can do it, but to do that you go to the fridge, brush out all the rubbish and use that — there’s no way [I would do that] .
“What you do is you engineer your menu to be able to satisfy everybody’s whim. It’s up to the individual,” says Ani, who prides himself on using the same ingredients for lunch as for dinner.
The sharing concept, which originates from Nice, also contributes to the convivial atmosphere at La Petite Maison.
“The French love to enjoy their private time with their family and friends; that’s what we try to create here. If you look at someone’s plate and think ‘that looks nice’, here it looks nice and you can taste it. You share. If they’re not sharing they don’t like each other!” says Ani.
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