Tandoori Sep/Oct 2014 | Page 30

vers s Mo ker Sha & news pany g com ri caterin o essful ks to Tando cc u , tal f the s ctor o Huseinmiya g dire arketin rs, Shamim m ive s and e sale rant Five R Th stau and re What made you want to become the sales and marketing director of Five rivers catering company, and subsequently its restaurant offshoot? I’d studied business and marketing at university and one of my dreams had always been to have my own restaurant. So when the opportunity came up to join Five Rivers, it seemed like the perfect culmination of various things I wanted to achieve. In any case, I’ve always been very passionate about food. As a catering operation, the company started in 2004 in the West Midlands, with you joining in 2007 just as you were fi nishing university. Then its fi ne dining restaurant, the £1.1m Five rivers A la Carte, opened just over a year ago in Walsall. Did you feel you were thrown in at the deep end? It wasn’t the work ethic that bothered me because I’d been working from a very young age, but more so that I was entering an industry that I knew almost nothing about. Then again, that was an exciting prospect. The one aspect that I came up against were the long hours. Doing a 13 hour day was a bit of an eyeopener for me! How do you fi nd working for both the catering end of the company and its restaurant? On the catering front, my diary gets really full-up between the months of June and August because that’s the prime summer season, particularly for weddings and various other events. We have a massive team of people to oversee, with just the chefs numbering up to 18. We’re contracted and approved to cater for the Hilton and Marriott hotel groups as well as a host of prestigious venues such as Blenheim Palace. The work is very fl uid and you are having to build a whole event to fi t into the brief of your client, and putting it together very quickly. The 30 T A N D O O R I // September/October 2014 030_TM_Jun_Jul14_Movers & Shakers.indd 30 restaurant is very much an extension of our catering business, operating like a showcase for our client