Restaurant man's menu starts with 3 scoops

The Life: Justin Bourke discusses how his day as a food and beverage manager is often spent splitting time between restaurants based on a golf course as well as a museum.

Justin Bourke is the food and beverage manager at Hawksbill and Fanr restaurants. Delores Johnson / The National

Justin Bourke is the food and beverage manager at Hawksbill Restaurant at Saadiyat Beach Golf Club and Fanr restaurant at Manarat Al Saadiyat. He talks about how he keeps the plates spinning at both eateries:

About 6am

I'm usually awake. My staple in the morning, as much as people will cringe when I say this, is I make myself a big cup of instant coffee - with three scoops. That just gets me going.

Breakfast

I don't usually eat until such point in time of the day when I feel hungry, which is usually about 3.30pm.

By 8am

I'm usually here at the office in Hawksbill. During the week you've got a lot of administration jobs - e-mails, phone calls. Weekends I quite like because I get a chance to forget about that. Our busy times are on the weekends [when] we do about 50 per cent of our business. I don't spend as much time as I'd like to in the restaurant. At the heart of every food and beverage guy is someone who likes to be on the floor, talking to guests and the chef about new ideas.

Morning

Some days I can be in two places. One guy the other day [at Hawksbill] said: "Did you enjoy your day off yesterday?" I said: "Well, I was at a meeting at 8 in the morning at Fanr. I left around 7pm." Fanr opened up in December. We're in the process of putting the finishing touches on it. I'm working with the chef to refine menus, getting some extra procedures in place, dealing with suppliers that need to come in and fix [equipment].

Afternoon

I would love my job to be far more structured than it is, but it's so dynamic. We've started some cross-training, where staff from Hawksbill spend some time at Fanr [and vice versa]. We can pick up staff from one restaurant when it's busy, and they can assist at the other facility.

About 7pm

At the end of the night, I usually walk out … just to see how many guests are here. I try to benchmark to when it starts getting dark.

Dinner

I get an opportunity to eat. Over at Fanr, there's a majority of Indian chefs, so I love it when they cook for each other and throw something on for me. Sometimes a curry or traditional dahl. At Hawksbill, I love eating the chef's biryani, and there's a beautiful king fish.

Evening

I've found Classic FM over here. I usually get home right around the time when they have the jazz show on. I love sitting down at the end of my day, with a glass of wine, listening to jazz.

Late evening

I developed a top 100 books of all time list … so I made sure I brought a whole heap of books over with me from Australia. I've read about 10.

About midnight

I'm a hospitality person and always will be. I don't get to bed much before midnight. I normally live on about six hours of sleep.

* Neil Parmar