271 secret ingredients
New venture for former owner of Dubbo favourite, the Yum Yum Bar
AFTER decades in the food business, Russell Peet decided a few months was a long enough break from the frantic world of takeaway and he’s set to get back in the fast-food game.
He started work at the Yum Yum Bar at Orana Mall as a 10-year-old, helping out his mum Annabel who opened the shop on the very first day Orana Mall began trading.
He purchased the business in 2000 and ran it with his sister until they closed the doors at the end of June.
“We were in the mall at the Yum Yum Bar for 40 years, my mum was there for 40 years, my sister and I had been working there for 30 years, and we finally moved out of there, so now we’re going to do similar things but on a smaller scale where we can do our own times and our own thing,” Mr Peet told Dubbo Photo News.
He’s busy renovating 271 Darling Street in South Dubbo as a hole-in-the-wall style takeaway – aptly, the name of the new business is simply ‘271’.
“Just a small coffee/takeaway shop, burgers, some schnitzels, bacon and egg rolls, good coffee, that sort of thing.”
He said he’s learnt plenty of lessons from the Coronavirus pandemic, a global economic and social dislocation, which he says has shown that you need to be prepared for social distancing restrictions to help survive in small businesses such as independent food
outlets.
He says the narrow shopfront boasts a sliding bi-fold window which makes it easy to serve clients without them having to enter the shop.
“We were going to put the window in so we could fold it back to
serve anyway, but if something like that happens again we can shut the front door and serve from the window,” he said.
“Hopefully when things get back to normal, or whatever normal is, we’ll have some stools at the bench and some chairs and a couple of tables out the front and it’ll be mostly takeaway.”
He’s never worked from a quiet residential neighbourhood before and believes the atmosphere will be a significant shift from the super-busy mall.
“We just needed a change and I needed to work where I could see sunlight,” Mr Peet laughed.
“That was the whole idea, to spend some more time with the family and the kids.
“The mall’s been fantastic for us for a lot of years but it’s seven days a week, you’ve got no say into when you open and when you close; down here we can be flexible and do our own thing, we can make our own times, I can have a long weekend off – at Christmas I’ll just shut for a week, so be it.”
He’s not a tradie, “far from it”, but he’s been busy organising the shop refurbishment and fit-out and helping out where he can, such as painting, and he says he’s been blown away by the way old customers have sniffed out the food that’s yet to be cooked.
“Obviously our old customers have come and found us already. ‘Oh, this is where you’re going to be,’ they say, but even just being here through the day, doing all this stuff with all the tradesmen, people have been pulling up and asking what’s going to be here,” he said.
He was also surprised at the response back in June when Yum Yum Bar shut its doors and Dubbo Photo News’ Jen Cowley covered that story.
“It was good, it was surprising, but it was humbling but my mum had been there since the mall opened in 1979 and we’d been working there as kids for 30 years on and off, while we were still at school but the response was surprising.”