Sankranthi Habbadoota 2010... (1)

Sankranthi habbaoota : The Authentic Karnataka Food Festival for Makara sankranthi @ Hallimane

Date : 13th & 14th Jan 2010

Hallimane , following its tradition of celebrating festivals had organised the sixth traditional Sankranthi Habbadoota...Habbadoota .. or the festival food @ hallimane is a variety of food starting from the kosambri,palyas to a variety of rice, rasama sambar and some traditional sweets like holige halwas made from naturally available items (i.e without using artifitial flavour enhancers) served on a plantain leaf in a festive ambience and by waiters who are dressed for the occasions.... That is Habbadoota... a festive treat in one statement....prob add to that lots of crowd and some good music..

Preparations for habbadoota typically start abt 3 weeks before the festival....starts of with deciding the dates of the festival and the habbabdoota is served on 2 days.. one day before the festival and on the day of the festival...With the best of my knowledge... indian festival follow the lunar calendar and hence are not on the same day every year....

Next comes the planning of the menu... which mostly contains more than 30 Items and we try to make sure we add a few items which are very new and different.

We also want to make sure people are reminded abt the event happening and since it is a unique event tht is happening in the city , it creates a lot of interest and a lot of our media friends help us in creating the same with the people of bangalore...

With every festival, we are trying to create more seats to accomodate almost all people who come to hallimane without having to dissappoint people the festival day. So we try to make the best use of the available space and things are accordingly planned. Since we have this limitation in space thotugh it is a lot sufficient for a huge crowd and in order to reach a lot of audiences on different parts of the city. We also have a take away option for habbadoota...

Take aways ....In the initial few habbadootas, we dint have this option n a lot of old people who cudnt make it to hallimane posted a few request for take aways.. Taking these requests a little seriously, we started this plan of take aways... Demand for Take Aways was good but only after the first time did we realise that it is not an easy task to do it coz of a lot of constraints... Packing 30 + Items required a lot of packing material, labour and making sure every item was available in the meal pack ... even difficult.By the days and adding experience on to this.... now we have meal tray sealer with a meal tray of 8 pouches where we are now sure we get most of the items in these kind of boxes which makes it easy for the people to handle while packing as well as removing and eating them later ...
We have also wanted to make this a little convenient for those who would have to travel from a distance to collect this take away by adding more distribution points in the city where takeaways will be delivered to those who had booked it either at Hallimane or Ganesh Darshan or we also ahd the option of Online booking @ www.hallimane..com... This time , we had take aways points in Indiranagar,Jayanagar ,Malleshwaram & Vijayanagar....

A lot of press notes are released to all our meadia friends to cover our event and to create awareness abt this and we have been very thankfull to all of them for having done it everytime and we have also been trying some SMS and e-mail Marketing...

A couple of days before the habbadoota, everyones really charged up doing almost all action required to do... procurement of vegetables and coconut from kundapur because the vegetables that are grown in this part is very tasty... procurement of packing materials... co-ordinating with the media... answering all the queries of the customers who call to find out details...cleaning of the restaurant... decorating it with flowers ,leaves etc...packing of ellu bella ...duty raosted changed ... extra tables and chairs hired...required utensils procured ... guests ,friends , family and media invited...Hallimane is decked up and set for the festival...