First, the Food
Posted by estiator at 15 January, at 12 : 51 PM Print
MANAGING FOR SUCCESS By CONSTANTINE N. KOLITSAS Business Coach
It’s getting harder and harder to operate a restaurant these days. There’s so much coming at us and from all different directions that it’s easy to lose focus on the things that are the most important. And when you’ve been doing it for a very long time, even the obvious can often times be overlooked. For this month’s column, let’s look at what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis and see where we need to apply our energies, resources, and talents.
To be successful, a restaurant needs to hit the mark in a number of critical areas. And here there is nothing new under the sun. At the outset, the location of a restaurant is vitally important, with demographics, foot traffic, accessibility, and ample parking among the factors that come into play. But that’s not an operational metric. That’s something for which very little can be done once you’re up and running. The things that are still in our control are where our efforts need to be directed. And here the most important factors are a restaurant’s value proposition; service and hospitality; ambience; and, of course, the food.
In today’s economy, a restaurant’s value proposition dictates the frequency with which a customer feels that they can dine at your restaurant. It’s a “what’s in your wallet” vs price tag thing. And here, your restaurant’s price points need to reflect the business’s strategy (lower price points bring in volume, higher price points drive margins). Service and hospitality culture are, of course, key to building a repeat clientele (the backbone of any business). Owner and manager visibility and involvement drives this metric. And a staff feeds off the energy of the owner and/or manager. And an eatery’s ambience, which should reflect the restaurant’s genre and menu price points, needs to be a focus, especially when dining dollars consume the lion’s share of an individual’s entertainment spends. On a daily basis, a good operator will be cognizant of things that can impact the ambience: clutter, cleanliness, clear windows; room temperature, lighting; and more. But of all the key metrics, the most important is the food (as an old Greek once told me: “They can’t eat the chandeliers”).
When we consider your restaurant’s food, there are areas where we need to focus from a day-to-day operational perspective. The menu is the menu; that’s been determined at this point. There can be tweaks, but the general theme of your menu is not where we want to apply our energies today. Instead, we want to focus on quality.
Food quality can easily fall apart at the execution level. Today the challenge of staffing your line and your prep team is rife with potholes.
Food quality begins with purchasing. When you source quality ingredients, you’ve got a head start on producing quality food. Staying true to your standards is critical, and was the focus of a recent Managing for Success column (go back through your past issues in case you missed it!).
But quality can easily fall apart at the execution level. Today the challenge of staffing your line and your prep team is rife with potholes. Veteran line and prep cooks are hard to come by and expensive when you do. Either as a labor cost strategy or out of necessity, you likely have some novice cooks on your team that have little understanding of the business. They are typically immigrants with limited education, experience, or worldliness. They may work hard (or not, that’s a debatable point these days), but they are very often robots in the sense that they don’t have “food intelligence” but, rather, go through the motions as they’ve been taught. It’s important to understand this and to continually monitor them so that as they get comfortable, they don’t forget key steps, or even how to approach each item that they prepare.
And to find root causes of quality degradation that results from improper prep or poor execution on the line, it’s important to understand human behavior. It’s natural for human beings to search for short cuts and to rely on muscle memory. And those behaviors are often at the crux of the problem here. The longer someone is making a recipe, the less likely they are to look at the book and rely on memory. Soon, memory mixes with personal preferences, and this is not necessarily intentional but, rather, a natural phenomenon. Someone who doesn’t like cumin will cut the amount of cumin that a recipe may call for, because their sub- conscious steers them in that direction. Someone who likes pepper may tend to lean heavy on the pepper. It’s not their fault; it’s nature. But a good manager needs to stay on top of the recipes, tasting through dishes and looking for telltale signs (customer complaints, product mix fluctuations, etc.); a good manager needs to be aware of the food that’s going to the table. After all, it is about the food, first and foremost.
Constantine Kolitsas is the president of CNK Consulting, a restaurant consultant and coaching business. He can be reached at 203-947-6234 or at ckolitsas@gmail.com.
