By Ebele Orakpo
Anybody can prepare a meal but very few people know how to prepare good meals to enable the body get the best out of it because man does not live to eat but eats to live.

Mr. Dominic Udoette

To get the best out of your meals, you need the right combination and quantity and this is the area Mr. Dominic Udoette, the  Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of JID Catering Services based in Lagos, holds sway. He is not just a caterer, but also a consultant in the field of catering. A man of many parts, The Dom, as he is fondly called by friends, said he loves the catering business so much as it is God’s gift to him and there is no other business he would have been doing aside catering. He spoke with Vanguard recently in Lagos. Excerpts:

After his secondary school education in Calabar, Cross River State, Mr. Dominic Udoette went to St John’s Training Centre, a catering school in Calabar to study catering and hotel management. Said he: “After graduating from the training centre, I received some practical training from some white men who came to Nigeria to train us for six months. From there, I gained employment with Bella Gardens Residential Hotel in Lagos. Thereafter, I went into fast food business, going from one hotel to another to work on part-time basis. I worked with Belgium Embassy on part-time also.”

As the saying goes, practice makes perfect, the more Mr Udoette worked, the more experience he garnered and so with time, he established a consultancy firm to cater to those who want to go into catering business like restaurants, fast food joints etc. “We are five consultants in our team, each a specialist in his field.

For instance, if someone wants to go into fast food business and comes to us, you know, we have different professionals – engineers, caterers, cooks, bakers, auditors etc. So what we do is that when a client tells us exactly what he wants, we go ahead to put up the place for them, recruit and train the staff, test-run the equipment to ensure that everything is in order and at the end of two or three weeks, we hand over to the management. We ensure the staff are able to function properly.”

Mr. Udoette is not just into consultancy services, he is into every aspect of catering, from indoor to outdoor catering services, training would-be professional caterers, and many other services. “I am into outdoor catering which supplies banks and offices. Our restaurant renders indoor catering services; people come in and eat,” he noted.

On how much it cost him to set up his own outfit, he said: “It was a gradual process. You know, I came from a very humble background with no assistance from anywhere. I started my own restaurant in a shop. I rented the shop from the little savings I made while doing part-time jobs.

I started with indoor catering and after a long while, I started getting together my outdoor catering equipment. You know outdoor catering equipment are quite expensive. When I started my own restaurant, I spent between N90,000 and N120,000 to rent the place and put it in order. After a while, I was able to gather about N200,000 which I used in buying some of my outdoor catering equipment and from time to time, I add to the collection. Any time I’m paid for a job, I use the money to buy one item for my business so that I would be able to remember that particular job, that this is what I made out of it. So gradually, I was able to get to the level where I am now.”

On his plan for the business, Udoette who noted that he has been in the business for about 25 years, said: “My plan is to have a very big apartment in which I can run my fast food joint, African, Continental, and Chinese restaurants. Then there is what I call home-cooking restaurant whereby people could come in and say ‘oh, we can’t cook in the house right now and we need home-made food.’ We will cook whatever they want for about 5 or 10 people and give them with the pot, just like cooking it in the house.”

The Dom who believes in the age-long saying that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, says he plans to set up a place for newly married ladies or about-to-wed young ladies. These days, most of our young girls don’t know how to cook so I’m trying to put up this programme whereby our young girls who are about to wed would be coached for about two or three weeks and we teach them how to cook, how to handle their homes, how to serve their husbands and all that. I believe there is still room for that but funding is our major constraint now.

I also train people to become professionals in our catering school – Divinity Catering School. There is also our home service training for married people who are well to do and want us to come to their homes to train them. For instance, there are women who love to cook different kinds of dishes.

People are tired of the normal rice, garri, yam, potatoes etc, they want something different, healthy foods.  I don’t usually wait to learn from people. I create my unique recipes which I give to people who want a change in their diet. This training costs between N80,000 and N100,000, depending on what the client wants.”

He listed the transport system and lack of space as the major challenges facing the business. “The transport system is our number one challenge. Number two is space. The cost of renting a shop here is quite high. By the time you think of getting two shops together or a flat to convert to a business space, it runs into millions of naira and you know when you talk about food, you need a spacious and clean environment. That is the biggest challenge I am facing because if I can beat the space challenge, I believe I would be able to establish a lot of catering outfits thereby creating employment for more people. As for light, it is affecting everybody.

We cannot wait for light to go on with our business; if government can meet the challenges of the transport system and space, that will go a long way. We can always fall back on the generator that we are used to until the Federal Government does something about the light.”

Mr. Udoette stated that the business which had afforded him some rare opportunities like meeting governors, top government functionaries and foreign diplomats in the course of his duty, is profitable if one knows where to buy the raw materials, buys in bulk and knows how to cost the food.