No fettuccine on Finger Lickin’ Bar & Grill menu for nearly two weeks
NASSAU, BAHAMAS — Restaurant owners are reporting a shortage in heavy cream and an increase in prices across selected brands that have impacted the sale of creamed-based dishes such as fettuccine pasta.
In interviews with Eyewitness News yesterday, the owners of Finger Lickin’ Bar & Grill and the Bush Cook in New Providence expressed concerns surrounding the issue, which has started to cut into their bottom line.
Walter Rolle, the owner of Finger Lickin’, said he has had to temporarily discontinue their popular fettuccine pasta dishes from their daily menu due to those challenges.
Rolle explained that the cost of the main item to make the dish, heavy cream, has increased by nearly double its usual price — from six dollars to nearly $12.
He said the restaurant uses a particular brand that is currently not being stocked and the other brands are just too expensive to scale up.
“We had to stop making it for the same reason,” Rolle said.
Rolle revealed that Finger Lickin’ Bar & Grill has not been able to sell its cream-based pasta for nearly two weeks despite it being its “number one seller”.
He said sales have been impacted “pretty badly” with the restaurant having been able to sell 60 to 70 plates per day at $13 and $16 each for chicken or shrimp fettuccine, respectively.
Meanwhile, Corey Small, owner of The Bush Cook, said he has also faced difficulty in recent weeks in finding reasonable heavy cream, noting the item has always been expensive and most times cannot be found on the shelves in food stores.
Small told Eyewitness News that while food distributors in the country have sought to introduce new brands, they have been difficult to adapt to in the restaurant’s recipes and budget.
He noted that some 15 percent in overhead costs goes to heavy cream because it is the foundation of its most popular menu items.
“We have to have it,” he said.
Smalls also bemoaned the overall increase in other grocery items, including produce and chicken wings.
He said where a case of Romain lettuce would cost him $40 to $50 at the beginning of the year, that case now costs him $70 to $80.
As it relates to chicken wings, which is a regular item on local menus, Smalls said prices for the case have skyrocketed to nearly $80 from just under $50.
He said something must be done, especially for small businesses that are trying to operate.
Between supply shortages as a result of lockdowns or border closures in lead export countries and recent bottlenecks in supply due to increased global demand, local industries are burdened with a global supply-chain crisis stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Earlier this month, while addressing a webinar on the COVID-19 supply chain crisis hosted by the Counsellors Group Ltd, Tiffani Evans, director of merchandising, Sysco Bahamas Food Services advised that the company is still experiencing a lot of challenges — including freight, inflation, shipping constraints, trucking, the capacity restraints, labour shortages, and raw material shortages.
Evans said she has never “seen prices this high” in all her years in the industry and attributed the problem to inflation.
Philip G Smith, the d’Albenas Agency’s sales and marketing manager warned that those shipping and supply challenges may persist into 2024.
