I have a fairly poor understanding of economics, (let alone any metrics on a global scale, my general philosophy is "Let's Robin Hood these muthafuckas") but it's hard not to realize that times are tough. Even though we've been busier than ever, more mouths in seats than we've ever fed, the money coming in is not as it once was. People may be going out more, escaping the headache of their dwindling investment options, but they're spending less. No more splurging on that bottle of wine because "fuck it, I make grown-up money" or ordering lobster just because you want to increase your percentage of getting laid by 15% (I view all sexual encounters in probabilities). You gotta pinch pennies where you can because the bottom of the well seems near.
The irony of it is is that our prices have gone up. You'd think our best hope of staying afloat would be to acknowledge the economic climate and lower prices, but every time gas prices inch up that invariably affects the cost of food. Food cost used to be steadily hammered in at around 35% with a decent amount of leeway when it comes to waste. No longer. The margin is now razor-thin and every wasted scrap, every botched filet mignon sent back too well-done is a big hit. So if Michelle Bachmann can really bring gas to $2 to a gallon, I'll convert to her Church of Crazy and suck whichever pederast priest's dick needs sucking. But until then I'll rely on what logical capacities I have and try to predict the direction of restaurants, and how they play in to the future of peoples' interests.
There was once a world where tuxedoed maitre'd's barred the door at the country's best restaurants with their shitty attitudes as crossed spears. It was said the dining room of Andre Soltner was ruled with an iron gauntlet covered in velvet. If they liked you, then they'd probably wipe your ass for you, but otherwise yeah, leave, s'il vous plait. People said "fuck you" a whole lot. You had to know someone to get in, a reservation was a Shroud of Turin; a whole lot of bullshit, but rare and coveted nonetheless. There were simply different classes of people, and you were either welcomed nobility or discarded plebeian filth. What did these restaurants care? They were packed to the gills with whales, every table booked solid for six months, fat cats dropping $10,000 on bottles of wine they had zero understanding of, and just as much on escorts who'd ride their burgeoning waistlines like a circle pony. It was the best of times for many, and restaurants enjoyed unprecedented success and freedom from any stress of worry. Culinary development didn't necessarily stagnate, but the environment was not nearly as competitive as it is now. People were happy, there was money, they all grew complacent.
Some would credit Alain Ducasse as being the harbinger of doom. His fall from the Tower of Isengard would mark the end of days for the decadence the restaurant world had enjoyed, and like Rome, it would burn.
It was the opening of ADNY. Not that I was even aware of what a brunoise was at this point, but it is well-documented in the annals of culinary history. It was seen as the biggest douchebag move to ever grace the New York dining world. The king of French restaurants was so kind as to dip his toe in the American swimming pool, and he was going to be opening an end-all, be-all grand dining room right in the heart of America's biggest city. Reservations would be nigh impossible to come by, only those who knew Ducasse from Monaco or Paris would really have a shot at a table and be given the honor to spend $500-600 a person for just the food. And mediocre food at that, dressed up in so much pretentiousness as to be unpalatable. Diners would have the opportunity to select their drinking water from a cart that showcased dozens of bottled sparklings and flats, probably tapped from the tit of the Swiss Alps themselves. Herbs were snipped over dishes tableside by waiters donning fresh, white cotton gloves. And finally, to sign the check, the diner was presented with a vast assortment of Montblanc fountain pens to choose from.
Yes, the French really know how to take douchebaggery to the next plane of existence.
It can't really be said conclusively, but Bourdain has branded Ducasse as the "villain." The villain who nearly ruined it for everyone and shut down any hopes of fine dining ever surviving in New York again. The public shitshow that was ADNY had convinced New Yorkers, proud in their own right, that they didn't need French chefs in tall toques to tell them how to eat. They didn't want foreigners pissing in their wine and asking them to praise the vintage. The pomposity nearly sunk the gilded boat.
As we now know, fine dining continued to succeed. It was more the tanking of the economy that was the catalyst for a massive shift in dining attitude and environment. It was just perhaps the flag of Ducasse that flew on the mast, as the ship began to go under.
Suddenly, i-bankers were without the means to drop obscene amounts of cash willy-nilly. I think it was less to do with an actual scarcity of resources, and more to do with not looking like a huge asshole. As everyone else suffers, you're eating caviar harvested from a centenarian Beluga sturgeon off a spoon carved from dodo bone. That's a quick way to sink a PR campaign. People shied from going out, sealed up their bank accounts, and started cooking at home. And they were doing it with pleasure as Food Network personalities suddenly made "good" cooking at home more accessible. And even when they did go out, as I mentioned before, the spending was not what it once was. People actually looked at menu prices, chefs couldn't use chateaubriand steaks and lobster to convince you any more. They couldn't overwhelm you with luxury. And thus the proud began to fall.
White tablecloth restaurants went down like buffalo; in horrid, nigh-irresponsible numbers. I know, I was a part of one such death. There simply wasn't enough liquidity to float the boat. So where once there were velvet ropes clipped sternly to brass bars, now restaurants adopted a firm policy of open arms. Reservation books cleared, the blank pages probably collectively shaving off thousands of years off America's restaurateurs and their longevity. People really had to think long and hard about how to pull in the customers, they wouldn't just come anymore (like buffalo). And it wasn't just high-end, fine dining but regular, everyday joints too. The weekday special was now a norm, rather than a quirky personality trait. But even that wouldn't keep the doors open for long. I know, I was part of one of those untimely deaths as well.
The attitude shift was to "yes, yes, yes." A trite way to describe a floor manager is that their job is to "always say yes." The customer is always right, still a broken adage, but now an empowered one in that frankly, there was desperation in our eyes. We would do anything to make you happy, and if you were so kind as to drive up to the door we wouldn't say no. We need you, don't leave me, baby, I don't know how to live without you! I miss the blush of your cheeks, the smell of your hair drafting on a windowed breeze, the curve of your hips, your...
Err, what, um...
We were put on our knees and ready to receive. It was time to start sucking for gold. And this was what I had learned to do. My formative training took place in a period of desperation. I started working at my mom's restaurant just as we had closed our other joint. We were in dire straits. I was a waiter at a failing sushi restaurant, and a cook at a slowly-dying Evanston landmark. I knew the importance of holding on to customers and making sure every experience was right. A repeat customer was greedily clung to and cherished.
But after a year in the trenches of Pearl, things have changed a bit.
It's not my misanthropy emerging again, damning the human race for all its failures in treating the service industry respectfully. I promise. It's just that, there really are times you have to say "no," and it's taken me quite a bit of time to learn that.
Listen, it's not that I don't want to give you what you want, it's just a simple equation. Does your worth outweigh the value of fucking over somebody else? In a small-town restaurant situation this is often what it comes down to. It's first come, first serve and we have a limited capacity to give 10 square miles worth of people their Chinese food. If you think about it, we have three woks, six burners and two ovens we keep firing at all times. You can have as many cooks as you want, but with a kitchen that small there's nothing you can do. There are limits and it would be wise on the part of any restaurateur to realize that. Smarter men would've realized long ago what the capacities of such a kitchen were, and how quickly they could be reached.
I fear Sunday. Sunday is where I learned that there are limits. I respect the nature of the beast that is Sunday, just as the Starks know that winter is coming, I will often wake up with my hangover to realize that Sunday is coming, once again. See, on Friday, Saturday, people stretch out their dining. Some want to get in early and just go home to do whatever it is the hell old people do. Others want to make a night of it, go out with friends, start dinner at 8:30, drink the night away and just have a good time. Things are spread out, we do 250 covers but it's over the course of 3 hours. It's very doable.
Sunday is a whole 'nother thing. People come in hard between 5:30 and 6:30 and there are a ton of takeout orders. It's a family day, you bring your kids, you bring big groups, you don't want to stay out late you've got work or school in the morning. And just as many people don't want to go out, they stay home, order take-out and just get ready for the next work week. And it all happens just as the sun starts to set.
The phones don't stop ringing; they want to know if they can get a table, they want to pick up some food, they want food delivered. There are only two phone lines so you know it's bad when someone shows up and they're like "I've been trying to get through for like 45 minutes and decided to just come over." Well, fuck, I understand there's a slight chance our lines were down but in all reality it's because the phones haven't stopped ringing since 5 PM. It means we're really fucking busy. Forty, fifty to-go orders in an hour, over a hundred people seated, fuck ... we're in over our heads.
I've had some awful nights of service and they almost always involve Sunday and a party. Someone booked half our party room, leaving me short our two biggest tables and two four-tops and whenever they have a course coming up for 25 people, the kitchen grinds to a fucking halt. There's no way to fix that, there's simply no way to cook 25 dishes without using the kitchen's full capacities. And stopping everything for ten minutes creates a ripple effect of disaster. Tables are waiting an extra 10 minutes for food, take-out and delivery orders as well, but the front staff aren't quick enough to realize the timing is off, and still tell people their take-out will be ready in 30 minutes anyway. Then we realize we're in the weeds and we start telling people an hour and a half just to pick up Chinese food. They still want to come. VIPs show up unannounced as they often do, and you just have to take them, you can't tell them no, and then fucking mayhem ensues.
I didn't want to tell people "no." What if because I don't give them what they want they'll talk shit about us and never come back? Every customer is valuable they could spread their unsatisfied opinions throughout the island. What if they go to our competition? People come in here all the time telling us how much better we are than X, and Y and Z. What if people go to other places and do the same about us? What if because this one time we fucked up they're never coming back? Angry customers love to tell everyone about a terrible experience, negative PR is like slowly seeping poison. Oh great, we lost this customer, we're done for, it's over, all this negativity is going to reach critical mass and it's all my fault, thus begins the slow descent in to failure.
The inner dialogue is not unlike that of a middle-aged mother wondering if her philandering husband is about to stick his fork in to fresher meat and ruin everything.
We need the business, right? But it wasn't that I was being greedy trying to max out our profits either. I'm well aware that profits are useless if people have a bad experience. It's just that disaster strikes so quickly you don't even have a moment to realize you're on the top of the hill, just a sneeze away from careening in to a fucking mess.
The first problems are the dine-in customers. Reservations are carefully planned out to see that diners seated at 5:30 are going to be up, the table is turned and set for the people coming at 7:00. Inevitably, people show up late, their food takes longer, all of a sudden their whole dinner is pushed back a half hour. This completely fucks up 7:00 PM appointments.
The second problem is the take-out. Usually a take-out order takes about 20 minutes from when the order goes in to be out in a bag for you to take home. We've told people as long as 2 hours to pick up, and yet they still want to come, it amazes me. But you can imagine how fucking pissed off someone is going to be when they come 2 hours later and it still isn't ready. Every time I've had my head chewed off and had someone's veins threatening to burst as they yelled me down, it's been this type of situation. I get it, we fucked you, but if you give me a second I'll try to make it better. This is when you start handing out freebies and 20% discounts on the next time. This is the kind of situation you want to avoid at all costs.
We're trying to do too many things at once, but if we don't, we're not going to make money. You can't tell a 25 count party at $55 a person "no," that's stupid. That's a lot of free advertising to be had, and a lot of money to be made. You can't tell VIPs that for some reason never make a fucking reservation "no." They're way too valuable and you can't afford to lose their money or their endorsement. And you want to do as much business as possible, but at some point you draw the line and hopefully it's well before the quality begins to suffer.
It's part of what makes our restaurant such a difficult place to run. It's a multi-headed beast, and people expect a lot of different things from you. Some just want cheap take-out, others want the works, some come for a good time, some come out of habit. You have to cater to those individual needs and prepare for the unpredictable. You simply tell people you aren't taking any more take-out orders right now, I'm sorry. You tell people how long the wait will be, you be honest about it and then there are no hard feelings. I don't know why I freak about it so much, every time I've gone to an Olive Garden those bastards tell me it's like an hour-long wait. That hasn't left me bitter or denouncing the Church of Mediocre Italian Food But OMG UNLIMITED BREADSTICKS. They'll come back. You tell people why their food isn't coming, you nut up and be honest about it, and you make it up to them. Losing the money on a free round of drinks or dessert is well worth someone not telling all their country club homies over a round of golf that you suck. When you take reservations, you say "no" sometimes, you just have to.
It was my aforementioned conditioning, my desperation. I was taught to never turn someone away. But what I really learned this year, is that they will come back, so long as the quality of the experience remains worthwhile.
The Smith's, they waited 45 minutes for their reservation because they're very picky about their table and I couldn't get them the one they wanted. We fucked up, but they were being pretty difficult. Matriarch Smith claimed they would never, ever come back and she cursed me and put a pox on my clan. Guess what, she came back. Many times over. And we just pretended like nothing happened.
Bill got stuck in the parking lot because the valets got screwed by a 40 person party coming all at the same time, traffic was backed up the ass for half a mile. He was furious, said his food got cold, he threw it at my feet and screamed in front of everyone he'd never come back. He came back, I think with a bit of shame.
Mrs. Green ordered a lobster for her party of five but didn't realize it was a large lobster. This is a major failure of common sense as a large lobster is hovering around 3 lbs., more than twice the weight of a small. The waiter assumed she wanted a large because you can't feed five people with a small lobster. It was wrong to assume, but it wasn't completely illogical. She was furious, yelled, demanded a refund, even though she ate the whole damn thing, and claimed she was never coming back, and not only that but she was telling everyone that we were crooks. First of all, who's the crook, you ate something and you didn't want to pay for it. In most places you break it, you buy it, too bad. But we gave it back to her anyway, swallowed our pride and told her forget it, don't come back. Guess what, she came back despite our objections.
My point is, people will come back. Maybe not in the city where the options are limitless, but here, they will come back. I'm not taking this for granted saying our business is endlessly resilient and we can just say "fuck it, you need us more than we need you." No, god no. But you can't panic when someone has a bad experience. You make it up to them, sometimes you reject them and get them the next time. What's most important is that the quality of your product never suffers. As a cook, once you send out a dish that wasn't perfect because you just wanted to get it out, you compromised. From that point on, your whole fucking career is a compromise. No, you do it right. As a waiter, you lie and spurn one customer because they're cheapskates and fucking annoying, you say "whatever, let them go." No, you make it right for them, you don't fuck up and make them right in criticizing your business, you do what is right and let them make the decision based on that. That's integrity; you put your best face out there, and if it wasn't good enough, fine, but at least you can sleep at night knowing you did your best.
We aren't always perfect, far from it. We often have to compromise just to get things out the door and make ends meet. Yeah, this delivery order was sitting way too long but there isn't enough time to get someone back to the restaurant, and back to your house. It just has to go out. Sometimes a fried rice isn't perfect, I know it. I can tell just by looking at it, the soy sauce wasn't evenly blended throughout, the rice is too wet, it won't have a nice texture to it. But it cost $7.95 and we've got 200 people knocking down the door. You just have to do it.
And that's why we are forever mired in the territory of just "pretty good." Sometimes we're great, sometimes we're very mediocre, but we usually hover around pretty good.
What I'm talking about is always, consistently being great. That's what I aspire to, and though I can't do much to change Pearl now, one day I will get my chance to start anew, and do it right from the beginning. And it starts with saying "no" to some things.
I envision a small restaurant. Fifteen to twenty tables, tops. No parties bigger than six. Big parties stammer kitchens, and although great staffs handle it just fine, you gotta start small and refine from there. You can control the quality much better in a small restaurant, the pace isn't as frantic, the variables not so numerous. Sure, the money ain't as great, but what's important is building your brand, making people associate you with a really great fucking dinner. You want to make more money? Grow from there.
No take-out. Nope, sorry. Ain't gonna happen, I don't care how well any dish I make will travel, it's just not leaving the restaurant unless it started on a table. Take-out is a great business; no waiters, no tablecloths or stemware, just someone to put it in a bag and someone to pay for the box it comes in. But sorry, just not worth it. Not only is it inevitably going to deteriorate in quality by the time it gets to your door, I'm not hassling my kitchen with a whole 'nother aspect of fuck to worry about.
No parties, no off-premise catering, one menu. Parties are great business too, but catering your whole restaurant to one group of people and putting the rest of the diners on second priority is unacceptable to me. I want egalitarian up in this bitch. You eat off the same menu as everyone else, no off-premise run-arounds, no private banquet menus, I'm sorry you don't want to hold your doctor's meeting here if I don't give you a room and a special drink menu, but I just don't want that business. Of course the best restaurants have two dining rooms, one for regular service and one for banquets. But it just doesn't interest me, even though there's quite literally millions to be made in it. One dining room, one kitchen, one focus.
And finally, the real crazy factor... no reservations. Ideally, I would avoid that system all together. Everybody waits, no special treatment, no need to freak out over who's coming when. If they come, they come. If not, oh well. Reservations are just an incredibly difficult variable. You're always trying to balance space for reservations vs. walk-ins, you're timing the whole restaurant to a group of people that aren't even here yet. I'd love for one day to be free of this bondage, to be servant only to those that are in the room right now. In Long Island, you just can't do it. Old people aren't going to wait for a table they don't know when they'll get, they won't even show up unless they know something's waiting for them. But in the city, I think you can do it and many have proven you can. You have a nice bar, a comfy place for people to wait, and they're more than happy to do so if the experience is worthwhile, if the food is worth waiting for.
My mom would roll her eyes and judge. Impossible she says, you'll never make any money. And that may be true. In handicapping my restaurant's capabilities so, I'm severely limiting my outlets of cash flow. But if it's that versus taming the multi-headed beast every night, trying to balance a billion different kinds of customers at once, then I choose limited. I choose saying no, this is how I'm doing it, and if you don't like it you can go elsewhere. I could do what my mom wants me to do, open up Pearl's across Long Island and laugh all the way to the bank. But as silly and idealistic as it sounds, I didn't do this for the money. I did this for me.
Perhaps I sound like an obnoxious artist. Perhaps my values will sink me, I'll be poor and forgotten. Perhaps I'm just an asshole. But when it comes to food, I strongly believe it's all about taking your time. You shouldn't worry about how to get customers in seats, or how to make money here or there, you should worry first about making food that's worth eating. Then the people will come and then you make sure your service is airtight. I'm not trying to be a jerk, if someone asked me down the line, "Hey, can I rent out your restaurant for a private event" I wouldn't reply with a "FUCK OFF, ASSHOLE I DON'T LIKE PEOPLE PLAYIN' ON MY RESTAURANT!" I'd just say, no, I'm sorry I only do regular dinner service. Nobody calls Doug Sohn an asshole because he's only open from 10:30 AM - 4 PM. That's how he chooses to run his business and there are lines out the door. At some point you have to stop being desperate for peoples' business, for their money and your own money, and just realize that if you're going to be in the restaurant industry ... there are going to be a whole lot of sacrifices. You're going to be spending most of your adult life working. Why not do it the way you want, the way that makes you happy, the way you believe is the most efficient way for you to express yourself and deliver quality food?
If all the personal fulfillment gets me nowhere then so be it. Perhaps I'll be broke, a failed culinary dreamer who jumped on the Food Network bandwagon like all those other assholes. Maybe. But know that I'd rather say "no thank you, I don't want your money, I want you to have a good experience based on the way I know how to deliver it." Maybe I'll never be good enough to run a restaurant like that; special events, banquet room, off-premise catering with lunch prix-fixe and dinner service well in to the night. That's a lot of money if you can ride that hydra. But I'm fine with that, and am choosing to do things slow, play small ball. It's not about pride, it's about integrity and quality, and once I leave here I never want to have to compromise again.
EP6
