The Final Countdown...

Krimo's countdown has started. We will cease trading on 31st October 2014.
Twenty nine and ½ years have flown by but I remember just about everything about those times. 
The first evening, 4th May 1985 when Karen, family and friends were still painting and decorating at 6.30pm when we had bookings for 7.30pm. 
I was in the kitchen putting the final touches to the food. 
The first guests began arriving. I showed Karen how to take an order from the first two tables then headed back to the kitchen to get on with the cooking. I did not raise my head until around 10.30pm. 
The entire family helped out. Alison was serving food. Her future husband, Dave pulled pints. Lisa and Leslie babysat Adam who was only 3 years old then. We fed and watered THIRTY PEOPLE. It had felt like the five thousand.

I counted our takings for that night. £347! This was more than the restaurant I had just left to open mine, took in an entire week! 
As I did for the next few months, once the kitchen was cleaned down, I drove the staff home in my rickety old Fiat.  
By the time I came back home, our flat above the restaurant, Karen was fast asleep on the settee, a glass of white barely touched still in her hand.
Half and hour later, one well-deserved glass of red down me, having wound down,I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. 

Then I wake up one day and nearly thirty years have gone. 
Alison and Dave got married at the restaurant at Seaton. Their first child, Evie (19) has worked at Krimo's since 2010. Alex (14) often loved helping slice carrots in the kitchen.

Lisa whose speciality in the early days was making desserts confessed that every night she had worked, she rewarded herself at the end of the shift with a huge banana split laced with Crème de Menthe.

Leslie joined the army to become a chef and married a chef, Jen at the new Krimo's on the Marina. He now runs his own successful cleaning business.

Adam first worked at Krimo's then McDonald, back to Krimo's, helped me open Casa del Mar, ran it for 3 years and then opened his own Flix Movie Café in Church Square.
He and Hayley, Krimo's manager for a few years, got married and the latest addition to the family, Isaac came along over two years ago.

And the rest is History.