Confessions of a frujchaholic

I’ve been a really bad blogger these couple of weeks.I haven’t been updating as much as I’d like, I’m behind on my blog readings (and my RSS feeds look a right mess) and I’ve even been missing in action in the twittersphere too.

Yes, I feel very guilty indeed.

I could offer some excuses as to why I’ve been a neglectful blogger – school work, deadlines etc. But excuses rarely help remove the trangression, so I shan’t.

Another thing I realised is that I’ve seemed to have lost my voice in this blog. Because I keep on focusing on my content and for some reason what usually starts off as a short post usually evolves into a General Paper essay, my personality (or whatever personality that I could claim to possess) has been drowned out.

So today I shall write about something that’s close to my heart.

This is the story of frujch.

It started off in February 2006 as the dream of 4 girls: to open a fruit juice stall near the school gym. In the beginning, it was just an idea in our heads. I mean, what did we know about running a business?

But we won the tender, and suddenly we had a company to call our own. We called it Frujch (an homage to our original intention to set up a fruit juice stall) and decided to include alcohol in the menu. As a result, Frujch became known as the first bar on a university campus. After 4 months of operations, one of our partners left and it became a 3 woman operation (L-R: Sherms, Nab, Shal)

We started introducing some light food like bagels, waffles and salads, hired employees to help us run the bar (we call them frujchaholics) and organised events like acoustic performances and even a beer pong championships. But we weren’t entirely satisfied with what Frujch was, and wanted to expand it even further. This is what we did:

1) Revamp the place

This:

Became this:

2) Expand our menu

So the 3 of us are the worst ever specimens of girls-who-can-cook, so we did the next best thing! (no, not order take-out and pass it off as our own): we asked for expert help.

This is Malcolm (our fourth partner, source of sanity and part-time Voice of Reason):

For anyone who has been to Frujch, this is THE guy to thank for all the yummy sandwiches and salads. (Below: Port O’Bello Melt) And don’t be fooled by his gentle demeanor, this guy runs a very tight ship and wants to be the next Gordon Ramsey.

3) Held signature events

One of which is Beer Pong Championships which we hold every school term. For those who aren’t familiar with it, here’s a video we made. We just had one last week which we called the Last Beer Pong Championships since the 4 of us are graduating real soon. It was also real nice because most of the people that came were regulars (although perhaps they were lured by the prospect of the free beer we promised), and as the pictures below show, they are as crazy as the people that run the place:

I guess I wrote this post to try and figure out how I’m feeling as the end draws closer. In 3 weeks’ time, Frujch will be closed and not long after that we’ll be handing it over to a new management team, who may or may not carry on the Frujch name and business. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about letting Frujch go, and yes, it makes me sad. We’ve really put everything we had into this and along the way forsaken school and social life and family for it. Customers have become fans (“I can’t live without my Chocomint Milkshake every day) and friends.We’ve had good times, bad times and stressful-Oh-my-God-I-dropped-the-sandwich-and-the-customer-looks-really-angry times.
It’ll definitely be hard to let go.