Ideas & Opportunities

Bussing the outdoor tables at the restaurant Little Asia at the Piazza at Taguig City’s McKinley Hill, nodding hello to a friend, and engaging in small talk to its patrons is the restaurant owner himself, Charlemagne Lim.

The restaurant is at par with those created by top restaurateurs who have had years of experience, and not by someone who miserably failed in his first venture into the food and beverage industry. Yes, Lim did fail but that was one moment that changed his life and gave birth to Little Asia.

In early 2000, when the economy was starting to recover from the 1997-1998 financial crisis, Lim thought that it was an opportune time for him to enter the food and beverage market by selling imported liquor.

And so he opened CCL Liquor Outlet. A neophyte in retail, Lim chose a location at the basement of a building. Blame it on bad Feng Shui, bad location, or his youth (being only 24 years old then), the store closed down by early 2001. Lim did not only lose his investments, he also lost his self-esteem.

It was a blow that got Lim depressed. “In the last few days of [the liquor store’s operations], I would tell friends and customers who would visit that I was opening a restaurant that’s why I was closing. I did not want them to think na nalulugi, pero lugi talaga.”

With the store closing just a few months past, Lim stood up and brushed the dust off his clothes and decided to redeem himself. “When I decided to start business again, I decided to do it right this time,” he says.

Learning curve
In April 2001, Lim hired a chef whom he asked to create several dishes, which he and his family would taste and critique. For the next eight months, the dishes were tweaked, corrected, revised until Lim was satisfied with how they tasted. Armed with an arsenal of original and tested dishes, in December 2001, Lim opened the first outlet of Little Asia on Tomas Morato Avenue in Quezon City.

Each day after opening day for the Quezon City restaurant, Lim would open the restaurant, check the supplies, the cutlery, and the plates, attend to guests, train the wait staff, and close the restaurant.

It took two months before the first branch “stabilized” and its operations achieved a certain routine and a semblance of normalcy. But for Lim, those two months were the most crucial months of his life as a restaurateur, as they taught him everything he had to learn about running a restaurant—outside the kitchen.

“As the owner, you have to be very hands-on with the business. You have to check and know everything,” he says. At present, Little Asia has three outlets—in Quezon City, Taguig and San Juan. “Running a restaurant is more than having delicious meals. It’s a given that you have to have delicious dishes, but there is so much more to learn aside from that,” Lim says.

After a decade of being in the business, Lim still busses tables, serve customers, and helps in the kitchen. But he is now also able to sit back and plan the growth of his restaurants