Interviewer: What kind of year was 2022 for Suzuya? What kind of year do you want 2023 to be for Suzuya?

Chef Mike: 2022 was kind of a growth year for us. Had some turnover staff and brought in Chef Miyuki. 

So I think we learned a lot more about the business stuff and hiring more people to help out in a lot of different areas of the business, especially we could take yourself out of the daily stuff in the kitchen and kind of focus more on the business and marketing side. So we kind of saw a lot of different sides of the business, and we’re getting involved in more of the different sides of the business this year, which is good. And we’re doing new things with the kitchens and trying to grow the business. 

And for 2023, it’s kind of the same. Just trying to increase and build the business and keep growing. And we’re hoping to start some of the new things we start like shipping, and I guess restart the delivery, like the home delivery to kind of just a few other things we can offer to kind of help grow the business. New plans. So we are actually changing our hours at the cafe. We are closing a little bit earlier for the cafe items, but we’re still going to have the preorder cake pick-ups until 545. Kind of help us handle our staffing more efficiently and control a lot more of our costs,

I guess it makes the business a little bit more efficient and also allows us to offer those other items like the shipping and business hours delivery. So the business hours were going to be 7am to 4pm every day during the week. They can still do pre-order pickups until 5:45 on weekdays, Mon-Fri. That’s part of the efficiency we are trying to get to. So we can have a little bit better use of our staff, so we’re not too spread out and be able to handle the customer orders a little bit better and prepare for the next day.

We’re planning to hire a few more people. Kind of more management side or kind of supervisory side, I guess more experienced people to help run the day-to-day operations in the kitchen. 

Interviewer: Do you have any new plans or a new menu?

Chef Mike: I got to say, new year and next year, it’s kind of tricky. We don’t necessarily have anything planned for the new menu as of right now, but Chef Miyuki is working on Valentine’s menus already. We have more help on that end of getting things going and getting things ready so we’re not making decisions last minute.

We’re also considering bringing back the Mont Blanc full-time. It’s very popular, and we’ve just been doing it for Christmas the past few years. We do have a lot of customers asking us about it, but it’s been a little bit difficult to get it on the everyday menu. But we think we might be able to do that as we get hiring more people that are more experienced. And hopefully, we can get a new kitchen, produce more products, and start doing pretty other small retail outlets around Las Vegas and Henderson area and try and do that stuff. 

Interviewer: Great. That sounds great. So quick question. How is the strawberry jam doing? Are we up and running?

Chef Mike: For the strawberry jam, it sold out really quickly. We ran out of containers before we could really get an idea, but we ordered more, and I think they came on the 24th. We’re planning on selling more of it soon.