Shane finally achieves dream
SHANE HARVEY has walked passed the cafe in the KMart Plaza thousands of times. Each time he’s dreamed of opening his own business offering a hospitality experience to locals.
Last Saturday his dream came true with the opening of The Local and Bounce in the Bay Plaza retail centre in Hastings.
“Opening day exceeded all my expectations,” Shane, manager/business owner of the cafe and juice bar, said.
The cafe looks fabulous. It’s light, bright and comfortable.
Most importantly the food looks delicious. Well displayed is a huge variety of inviting fare from donuts to fried rice. The coffee is suburb.
The day I visited the place was humming. While chatting to me Shane was also very focused on customers. When he saw the queue of customers building he excused himself and went and helped his staff.
He said he was so proud of his staff.
“I consider myself lucky to have such amazing staff at startup.
It’s a real quality team.”
Shane said the support he has had from the Kmart staff and other businesses in the Plaza during the refurbishment and opening has been outstanding.
“I got a row of high fives from Kmart staff the day we opened. They are proud that someone they worked with has achieved their dream.”
He has been collecting menus, recipes, creating colour boards and logos for his dream cafe since 1997 and had his eye on setting up a hospitality offering in the Bay Plaza for the past four years, while working as a department manager at Kmart.
Shane, with the support of Hugh Lambie of Bay Plaza, commissioned internationally renowned food and beverage developer Graham Wilkinson to design the recipes and menus for both.
Graham, who is based in Diary Flat, travels Australia and New Zealand helping to set up food and beverage sites. He has been involved with designing cafes, bars and eateries in international airports, malls like Pacific Fair on Australia’s Gold Coast. His brief was to create something that lifted the standard of the overall plaza shopping experience.
He has been in business for 22 years and says the reason the industry is called hospitality is because that’s what people want.
“They want a friendly, warming environment to enjoy good fresh food. It’s critical in this industry that what you offer your customer is consistently good — that’s the key to everything really — consistency.”
He says he is thrilled with the result.
“It’s vibrant, soft and sophisticated without being pretentious. There’s a nice vibe to the place. There are lots of nice soft furnishing so the noise level is excellent.
“He’s got a great sense of humour, he’s caring and respectful and a hard worker who loves his customers.”