How We Got Here

I think it's important to recognize the cultural component of the dining revolution. There is a powerful social undercurrent running abreast a literal culinary movement, and understanding both is going to be important to succeeding in today's industry.

But let's backtrack, start from the beginning. Where did the idea of the restaurant come from? And how did we get from there to an army of obnoxious "foodies" flooding the blogosphere (like this asshole) with their insignificant observations?

Shortly (read a few thousand years) after man discovered that fire + sharp sticks + dumber animals = meat, and that "MEAT!" was a much better pick up line than "Hey, do you come to this primitive rock structure often?" and then that lead to boning, and that man later drew the conclusion that women kind of dig dudes who can cook, and then a few million guys get in to this industry for the wrong reason, and then ...

Shit, derailed. Restart.

Okay after all the shit about the fire, not after the nerds learning to cook to increase their sex appeal (Honestly, who does that? ...), we had professional cooks. As you can imagine, the first professional cooks were hired by royalty and nobility. What peasant, who was following his cows around so that he could burn their poop to keep warm at night, was going to actually pay someone to cook? And anyway you can't smoke a rack of ribs with cow poop, you need some fackin' hardwood, bietch.

So in a time where the divide between the rich and poor was wider and more impassable than it is today, a lucky few serfs were pulled into the royal house for their ability to make a mean stew, or their ability to take a good royal bum running. Maybe both.

A royal cook has some serious pressure and job stress. One little upset stomach, one botched banquet and off with his head! But there are some job benefits as well. Nigh-infinite budget and inventory. Royalty don't need to worry about no profit/loss statements, food waste, or menu budget. They can eat whatever the hell they want in whatever quantity they want, and luxury is expected at every step of the way. So professional cooking in the Middle Ages is predictably ridiculous.

Sauces were often vats of valuable meat cuts, aromatics and herbs reduced down to a fraction of their original volume. A powerfully, powerfully flavored sauce was the end product, with enough gelatin and body to set at room temp, and enough spice to hide the ubiquitous scent of past-due meat.

Entrees were equally ridiculous in ingredients. Imagine a meat pie with a turducken inside. Except this meat pie was the size of a dinner table. And it contained upwards of twenty animals, ranging in size from a goat to an ortolan (a little bird that was kept in a cage with a cloth over it so that the artificial darkness caused it to feed constantly, eventually making it a diabetic, morbidly obese morsel of deliciousness ... oh by the way, it's illegal to sell now).

See, you don't need a lot of imagination when you have a bank account that rivals God (Take notes, Brian Cashman. You have the easiest job in baseball). One surprisingly efficient idea from professional medieval cookery was the "trencher." You didn't use plates back in those days you used a stale round of bread that served as a dinner plate. It had about as much flavor and texture as a dinner plate also. The trencher was eventually discarded to the dogs or servants but not after soaking up some fat and sauce, so a decent scrap all around.

And then The French Revolution happened.

The French Revolution (at least what Les Miserables, the musical, taught me) saw the upheaval of the aristocracy. Generally, people thought they, the rich, sucked a lot and it was time to tell them to kindly fuck off. And then once they were gone, we suddenly had tons of unemployed cooks whose only marketable skills related to food. There were a few restaurants in existence, but those also only served the elite. What was an out-of-work cook to do?

Well, creating a more egalitarian restaurant and using sharp business practices to make a profit whilst remaining competitive seemed to be the only option. Necessity is the mother of invention. Modern kitchen techniques have much to thank for this period of innovation. All of a sudden professional cooking wasn't about having an endless inventory from which you could not out-do yourself with luxury. It was now an exercise in efficiency, taking one animal and stretching it through 5-6 uses, using every scrap some way or another. Because if you can get that extra dish out of a pig, or an extra soup out of your vegetable scraps, that could mean the difference between profit, and loss.

Stock, the foundation of French culinary technique, was a product of this period. Who could afford to make those ridiculous meat-based sauces of the past? And what can I do with all these animal bones I have left over? What a beautiful little invention stock is. Let me roast these bones, throw in some vegetables, let them simmer away, and then I have the building blocks for thousands of sauces.

The whole concept of the garde-manger station was to collect all the scraps from around the kitchen, and make a dish out of them. Pates, terrines, the application of charcuterie was about maximizing a kitchen's potential. Garde-manger literally means "to keep to eat," and that neatly reflected the importance of the position. It required impeccable technique and precision, and is an essential asset to the brigade, even today.

The restaurant era had begun and is still with us today. The explosion in popularity, and wide spectrum of diversity ranging from your Waffle Houses to The French Laundry, from what Bourdain affectionately calls T.G.I. McFuckwad's to your USHG Shake Shacks, is all a result of some people who were a little upset about being poor in 18th century France. I think restaurants are more integral to society than people give them credit for. We may not be saving the world, or curing cancer, but the restaurant groups that can donate often do. Not just catering charity events but donating monetarily as well. And everybody can appreciate good food and a good restaurant experience. The word, after all, comes from "restaurer," French meaning "to restore." Maybe you had a joint your family went to every Sunday. Maybe you had an extraordinary experience with that girl from a few years ago. Maybe you had a life changing steak. Either way, that's exactly what we're here to do. To restore you, to care for you, to let you kick back and have someone else do the dishes so that you're refreshed and you can go save the world or something. All we ask for in return is a place in your budget, but more importantly a place in your heart.

So there we are, my brief history on restaurants. Now let's talk about what's happening today.

Quite obviously, recessions hurt everyone. But just under the tier of bankers, market runners and brokers who are getting axed first, are the slew of restaurants who suffer from everybody panicking about saving money. Now restaurants really got to freak, the competition for customers is severe and the cash flow is thin. But again, necessity is the mother of invention, and you can start figuring out ways to make your business better until things smooth over (if they do ...). I see recessions as purging fires. All the establishments of mediocrity are going to either be forced to improve or they will be wiped out. Unfortunately some good and great restaurants go down with the fire, I think Va P being one of them. But things will pass, and from the ashes there will be growth.

Now the aforementioned cultural movement is an important part to surviving, and hopefully thriving, in this economy. Food has a very different place in society than it did 50 years ago. Back then it was all about a home cooked meal every day, maybe a family outing to a restaurant every now and then. An anniversary or birthday warranted a night out. Now the appearance of a home-cooked meal is less common. People have thousands of take-out options at their fingertips, and they go out to eat more than ever, even if budgets are tight. Yelp, Grubhub, OpenTable, and the whole gamut of restaurant-related websites have given unprecedented ease and access to this dining community, and a powerful sounding board as well.

So not only are we eating out more, but we're making it a hobby of its own. And as a result people are becoming far more educated about how restaurants work, and what really makes the difference between a good and a great place. There's no more hiding, and messing up with one customer not only deprives you of another loyal patron, but will have your mistakes well publicized to the dining community.

My chef used to describe Yelp.com as a "necessary evil." It was only a matter of time until someone made such a streamlined and powerful site, and it can help you just as much as it hurts you. I think it may give some people a little too much power, but that is just part of the necessary evil. For every customer you've wowed and they gave you warm, honest feedback in return, there are going to be a few who will be jilted by a minor negative experience and vilify you for it. I think the most common problems I've seen are customers complaining about employee attitudes. Adjectives like "surly," "unfriendly," "cold" are thrown around, and it's hard to evaluate that properly and use it as constructive feedback. And then because of one "surly" host, who acts as your first line of defense, a Rube Goldberg machine of disasters is created that could have significant impact on your overall rating. Yelp.com even gives ranking, title and power to the most prolific Yelpers. And whereas restaurants could be neurotically prepared for newspaper critics (and they still are), now any and every customer could have a powerful voice for or against you.

Thankfully, there are ways to react to this. Danny Meyer likes to describe media and publicity as a shark. You can't swim across an ocean alone, you'll drown. But you could ride upon the back of a shark to get to the other side alive. The only problem being the shark could destroy you at any given moment, if you're not careful. You can survive a few nips, bites, and even get thrown off, but you have to get back on and make sure the shark doesn't swallow you whole.

I think part of what that means is soldiering on through anything they throw at you, and knowing how to carefully please your customers.

First, know where the threats are and frankly, now they're everywhere. A restaurant is all about consistency and mistakes. You strive to be as consistent as possible in every arena, but you have to be able to handle inevitable mistakes. I don't think you really can exclude and label anyone as "strictly VIP" status anymore. Everybody is equal, everybody is worth winning over. It starts in the kitchen. If you believe in your kitchen and trust that it works hard to deliver a quality product, then things fall in to place from there. Then if a customer doesn't like something, it's more likely to be a kitchen mistake than a difficult customer. So it comes off their bill, no questions asked. If I had more authority at Futami I would do just that. I know all our grilled chicken entrees come out dry when Jorge is in the weeds. He gets pressured and he stops cooking smart, he just tries to beat out the tickets. That means he doesn't rest proteins properly and tries to make up for it by drowning it in sauce. I hate that. That's cooking without integrity. So I see a customer's chicken entree is unfinished, and even though they tell me everything is "fine," I know very well they think the chicken is dry. I want to take it off their bill for them, but I don't call the shots.

Trust in your kitchen, care for your customers, the short-term loss of a $14 chicken entree is worth the long-term gain in faith from your customer.

Secondly, know your clientele. Whether you like it or not, your restaurant is going to reflect your personality. That personality is going to attract a certain crowd. I'm not saying you're going to get a homogeneous blend of customers, but maybe a reoccurring flavor of sorts. You've got to play to their likes and dislikes.

Maybe you have a grand dining room that is going to attract middle-aged people looking for an extravagant experience. Maybe you have a quirky little room that is going to pull a youthful, hipster-tinged, urban crowd. Maybe you have a neutral but classy decor which is going to invite a whole manner of people. Recognizing your environment, and fitting in to either fill a niche or add to the overall culture of your location are paramount to success.

And finally, you need something unique. Almost everything has been done before or is just about to be tried in the restaurant industry. You push too far out of people's comfort zones, and they are confused. If you offer the same thing that everyone else is offering, you'll get lost. When developing a menu, when birthing a restaurant you need to think about what is going to set you apart from everybody else. I think this is especially important during a recession. There are probably 7-10 sushi restaurants in my area, and 4-5 in the immediate Evanston area alone. What is going to make someone choose you over the others? Is it your pricing? Your customer service? Is your product of higher quality than the others? A customer who is pinching pennies isn't going to go out for sushi at every place very often. They're going to choose one place to splurge on here and there. The same goes for any restaurant, and even more so for high-end, 4-star dining establishments. When you offer an 11-course tasting at $135 or whatever, a customer is only going to spend that kind of money so often. Most likely, the next time they're going to try another joint at that price tag just to try something new. What is going to make them choose you not just once, but again and again? You have to keep bringing something new to the table. Diners are too smart nowadays, and have too many choices to be romanced by just one great dish, or one charming manager. You got to keep pushing the envelope.

Somehow this became a summation of my ideas for what it takes to succeed at restaurants. But I think understanding the history is important before moving forward. And nowadays moving forward is the only way to keep afloat, handling a "shark" or not. Both you and the dining public have to keep moving for survival. They have to keep searching for the next new thing, and in doing that we in the industry have to keep providing the next step. Unfortunately, novel ideas don't come from just anywhere. I don't know if I'm a powerfully creative person, but I think a career's worth of accumulating ideas and learning techniques is going to be the only way to getting close.

EP6

PS - Write your Yelp review the day after your dining experience. That way you'll really know how you felt about the place. Either your disappointment or your wonder subsides, either way you're going to be able to give a more fair evaluation.