Billing for your restaurant in Nagaland
Smoked pork plates, festival-week tables and the office lunch tab, on bills that are easy to find again.
From three bills at one table to the QR that clears a festival queue
The church group's lunch, read out to its treasurer
After the Sunday service a church group takes the long table, and its treasurer pays for everyone from the group's money. The bill lists every plate of pork and rice, so he reads it at the table and keeps it on his phone for the group's accounts, and nobody writes a slip.
Axone pork and the milder plate as two items
Visitors from outside often find axone too strong. Keep the axone pork and a milder pork as two items, and the report shows which the visitors chose in Hornbill week, so next year you cook the right amount of each.
Two butchers, two rates for the same pork
Pork comes from two or three village butchers, and each charges his own rate. Make each a supplier and note on his page each day's kilos and what you paid. You see which butcher costs you less, and what is still owed.
Pigs, cabbage and organic vegetables: districts a Nagaland kitchen hears about
A few districts a kitchen in Nagaland hears about from its customers and its suppliers.
- In Zunheboto almost every village household keeps cattle, pigs or fowl, and 80% of people live from farming and allied work.
- Wokha sells organic vegetables in its local market all year, and it is known for oranges, passion fruit, plums and bananas.
- Phek grows cabbage, tree tomato and persimmon, and makes honey; kiwi is its One District One Product.
A short pork delivery, the festival tables and the lunch regulars who wait for the first
The pork comes short on the morning the tables fill
Pork is the heart of most Naga menus, and its rate has been rising. On the morning of a rush the supplier brings fewer kilos than you asked for, and you learn it when the cook says the pork is finished. The plate you meant to sell all day is off the card by noon, and nobody wrote what was asked and what came.
Festival week: every table full, every bill on a scrap of paper
In the weeks when visitors come up to Kohima, tables fill at once and stay full. Orders are shouted to the kitchen, bills are written on slips, and a visitor who wants to leave quickly stands waiting for change. By night the slips are in two pockets and a drawer and nobody is sure all were counted.
The tour bus that stops without warning
In the Hornbill weeks a tour bus stops without notice and forty people want lunch at once. Plates go out faster than they can be written, some guests pay the guide and some pay you, and by evening nobody can say what the group ate or what is still owed.
Questions Nagaland restaurants ask
Tea is free for the tour guides who bring a group. Can free tea be on the bill?
Yes. Put the tea on the bill as an item at no charge, so the tea count still comes down and the bill shows what the guide was given.
Groups order a whole feast for Sekrenyi or Moatsu. Can I bill a feast by the head?
Yes. Make a feast plate an item with its rate per head. The bill shows the number of heads at that rate, and anything extra goes on as its own line.
A church committee books the hall for a wedding lunch for two hundred. Can I take an advance?
Yes. Put the booking on the committee's page with the advance, and on the day the bill for the plates goes on the same page.
The contractor pays the highway crew once for the whole stretch of road. Can I keep each man's plates apart until then?
Give each man a page, with his plates and their days. When the contractor pays the crew in one lump, you read each page out, and every man knows his share of the lump before it is paid.
Can I see which dish sold most in Hornbill week?
Yes. Every plate is an item and the daily report keeps each day. Open the first ten days of December and read the rows for smoked pork, axone pork and the vegetable plate.
Pork rates and the road to Kohima: what a Nagaland restaurant works with
In February 2024 the Dimapur Municipal Council raised the rate of wholesale pork from Rs 215 to Rs 255 a kilo and dressed pork from Rs 300 to Rs 350. That was the third rise in under a year, and it adds Rs 40 a kilo on one and Rs 50 on the other.
Most visitors to Nagaland pass through Dimapur on the way to Kohima, 75 km away, where the Hornbill Festival is held. The tables that fill in festival week are at the hill end of that road.