CREATING TEAMS. “We do all of our hiring at the lower levels from the interns who work in our restaurants,” explained Rick. “We get to know them that way, and if the relationship works out, after they finish culinary school, they come to work for us.” Tom added, “One of the most important things is to check your ego at the door. The second you think you can’t teach people to be as passionate and committed as you are, and teach them how you want them to cook, you’ll never grow.” He said most of their managers are home-grown talent, starting as servers. “The DNA is there, they understand hospitality. I preach that the welcome, the service is as important as the back of the house.” Barbara said, “I develop teams and hold them accountable for running the restaurants – the P&Ls, food and liquor costs are all on their shoulders. I’m always there to fix a problem; when something isn’t working, we tweak it. One of the best things I ever did was get to the point where I could hire an HR manager. This fall, we’re having our first strategic planning retreat.”

CHANGING COURSE. “What I’ve changed in the last two years is that I’m looking for hotel partnerships. My partner and I have been learning that if it’s tough to get money to open a restaurant and the hotel industry needs to partner with restaurant operators like ourselves, why not look for those partnerships?” asked José. “The risk is a lot less – they get a concept, you get a hotel. I have a great partnership with SLS hotels.” Tom said that going outside New York City with Craft, a high-end concept, even into mid-sized cities, has been tough. “In Atlanta and Dallas, we have become a special-occasion restaurant, so we may change the concept a little bit, into something less expensive and more like our Craftbar concept, which has actually grown on average 15% over the last two years, even in the down economy.” He added, “The last couple of years have been interesting. You see fine dining changing; the food is fine dining but everything else is relaxed. I don’t think fine dining will ever die, there will be pockets of it, but I think that middle pricing – $20-22 an entree – is what people are looking for. The challenge is to come up with great dishes in that price range and create a great restaurant around it. There’s a real opportunity at that level.”

INVESTING IN YOUR TEAM. “To me, the personal bond is the most powerful tool in human resources,” said José. “When I go to Spain in the summer, I bring two or three cooks and take them to where the real people live, where the genuine flavors are, and give them this other way of learning. I think it is the most precious tool that I can give them.” Rick takes 20 front-of-the-house and 20 back-of-the-house staff to Mexico for four days over July 4th every year. “We take cooking classes, go to markets, eat in restaurants, and then we put it in a cultural context. It gives us the opportunity to instill culture – not only the culture of Mexico, but our personal culture – in our staff in a different way. We always come back and put together menus for the restaurants that reflect the trip.”

ETHAN LOWRY co-founder, Urbanspoon
When you look at the way that people interact with social media, there is a “push” and a “pull” mode. When you want to push something out to your diner, to your consumer, you use tools like Twitter and Facebook, and it’s essentially this fantastic megaphone to reach your fans. Urbanspoon is really part of the pull strategy. When consumers are looking for a restaurant, they are going to use tools like Urbanspoon, Google, and Yelp to help them make their decision. Your own Web site is also a powerful tool for people who are trying to find a place, but you need to make sure you get the basics down right. You’d be shocked at how many restaurants mess up on the simplest things. Make sure your menu is up to date, that it’s online and readable. Make sure that your site, sites like Urbanspoon, and those across the Web are sprinkled with high-quality photos that you’ve taken or that you’ve had a professional take instead of what someone like me has taken in a restaurant with an iPhone.

We’re definitely learning that people still care about the difference between the editorial voice and that of the random stranger. I think a lot of restaurants get nervous that a bad review by Joe Schmo is going to ruin their reputation and make them look like a bad restaurant. That’s not true. At least on Urbanspoon, people click much more often on the critics and then next in the hierarchy, they’re clicking on the bloggers – the semi-professional people who are passionate about writing about food.

We have thousands and thousands of restaurants that post their tweets directly to their Urbanspoon page so they can talk to people at the moment when they are considering going to that restaurant. More than the restaurateurs, consumers themselves are saying they want to have this information available.

NIKI LEONDAKIS chief operating officer, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants
What we do with Twitter – both our brand Twitter account and the one I do personally – is talk to our customers, and not just about this hotel has this kind of a guest room and this restaurant has this kind of a menu. We talk to them about their experiences. We use Twitter to create value for those followers, not just sell to them.

One of the greatest values of social media is as an opportunity to do some intense customer listening – gathering information about what our customers are saying about us. What are we doing really well? What are we doing not so well? If you compile statistically what people are saying, you can’t dispute the fact that, maybe, you need to rethink some things. This is an amazing tool for customer listening and then improving your operation. We use Google alerts, but beyond that TweetDeck or through our Twitter account to search our brand name and our brand name in conjunction with certain adjectives to pick up what people are saying about us. If anybody is tweeting about a bad experience, I can go in and do service recovery – it can be an opportunity to surprise and delight them. Sometimes, when we’re out there searching, we pick up that someone is going to celebrate a special occasion at one of our restaurants, for example. We have the opportunity to make it really special, and they don’t even know. Or someone tweets that they can’t sleep because there’s noise outside their hotel window. I can jump on that and get the hotel to give them a different guest room. So, we can not only add value to that customer by either turning around or enhancing their experience; we’re also reinforcing the reputation of the brand to all the people watching that publicly. If you are going to have a team of people, however large or small, speaking on your business’s behalf they have to be trained in how you talk to your customers – what kind of language, what kind of tone you want to be using to represent your brand.

While it may just take a couple of minutes to compose a tweet, you really want a comprehensive social media strategy for your business, and that’s a time commitment. Be aware that you have to have your content – your posts, your updates – fresh. And if you’re not able to dedicate the time, have outdated content, and you’re not being responsive with customers or fans talking to you, it’s worse to be on social media than not.

For us there have been some revenue-generation opportunities, but that’s not really the reason we do it. If you try to calculate an ROI just on revenue, it’s not there. But customer relationships, customer listening, the opportunity to position your brand in the marketplace, the cost of not being present when your competitors are – those are all things we look at. If you look at pure revenue generation, no.

CHRIS COSENTINO executive chef and co-owner, Incanto and Boccalone
I think Twitter has become a very interesting media platform. People can instantly connect with you as a business, with you as a chef, with you as a company. I’ll put up a dish, and people can see immediately whether or not they want to come in for dinner tonight. Then they ask me “How did you make that? Where do the clams come from?” There can also be a direct response from media. It’s breaking down a barrier that I think for many, many years was there. There was a wall in the kitchen, and chefs were behind the wall and nobody could really get to them.

We do a thing at the restaurant called Old Man on a Station. When I work the station, we get busier, and they only order from my station. I will not take help from my crew and I want to show my team that I can still cook, that I am still part of the team – it just builds so much fun in the kitchen. I can literally get feedback on Twitter from people in the dining room: ”I see you,” “You’re not that old,” and “You’re still teaching the kids what to do.” I’ll get 25-30 a day sometimes when I’m working a station.

We never offer deals at Incanto, ever – we feel it cheapens the brand of the restaurant. But we notice that when I use Twitter, we can see the instant reaction to our Old Man on a Station game. Say we had 60 reservations and we do 140, and they’re all ordering from the station that I’m cooking at… then obviously there’s a direct correlation to the tweet I put out about the station I’m working. When we had our annual Head to Tail dinner, we had ten open seats at the bar. We weren’t taking any more reservations, so I tweeted it out, and we had 20 people standing at the front door within five minutes, wanting to sit in those seats.

Chefs follow local farmers and suppliers to see what’s available, and other restaurants as a taste barometer. You can also use Twitter to find dairy prices, fish shortages, what’s going on with hiring. I’ve hired two cooks off Twitter. I link my Twitter to Facebook; I have a Facebook fan page and a Facebook personal page. It’s really amazing how you can feed everything through one and basically you’re hitting your friends, your customers, and you’re hitting your staff. I’ve made it mandatory with my dining room staff to follow me on Facebook or Twitter because I change the menu everyday. So as I put up new dishes, they are getting updates on the food, even when they’re off. The next day, when they walk in they aren’t behind the eight ball.

You can’t ramble on; learn to be smart, abbreviate using @ and & symbols. I try to send photos with tweets – 140 characters and a photo goes a long way to reach a lot of people who really care to know.

The most important thing I’ve learned since doing social media is to just be yourself and be honest. I think that people gravitate to that.

“I think that the idea of geographic limitations on ‘local’ is taking off after a fashion, but if you get really adamant about a 100-150 mile radius with a company like ours or a scalable company, there is a Catch 22. Our ranchers from Country Natural Beef have said if we forced them into that geographic definition, then we would drive them to non-sustainable practices.” Jeff Harvey

“Those systems that used to support local producers – where you could viably have a guy or a family raising 50-100 head of cattle so that they could take care of a geography within 100 miles – are gone. It’s an interesting notion, but trying to grow all the fruits and vegetables you need in North Dakota from within 100 miles of where you are is a little odd. I think that trade is always going to be part of the equation.” Michel Nischan

“I know GETTING STARTED can sound really daunting. Our company started with a conversation around shared values with people in our organization – our employees, our network of suppliers, and our customers. What we do doesn’t come from closed office discussions – our composting program came from our employees; wind power from energy companies who came in with an idea. So the way you get started is you talk to your network about what you believe in, because when two or more can come together and say they believe in something, then you can spark it.” Jeff Harvey

“I’d say talk to your customers, to farmers. You never know. There are more farmers out there than you realize, more home growers, and more people with stuff that isn’t getting used. That’s what I did first in the Napa Valley – I searched out people who had extra product. And take that product when you can get it, and turn it into something…by canning freezing, preserving. People love conserves, preserves, and chutneys. It adds a lot to your menu, and they are fun to make.” Cindy Pawlcyn

“Our restaurants now recycle 70% of all WASTE. We compost post-consumer waste and all the kitchen food waste; we recycle plastic, cardboard, and all of our cooking grease for biofuel. All my restaurants have much smaller garbage cans; I’ve saved a ton of money. My food costs are a little higher, but I can keep my prices the same, and I’m putting the same amount to the bottom line because I’m offsetting costs. One of the hostesses couldn’t find cocktail napkins one day and so she cut up all of the old menus to use as coasters – we’ve been doing that ever since. What do you need cocktail napkins for?” Cindy Pawlcyn

“I think ‘waste’ is a powerful word and reducing it in any way is the best approach. For example, when we make cheese at Blackberry Farm, there’s always curd. We could easily scoop it out and go on to the next batch of milk, but that curd goes into our kitchens, and we use it on a salad or in different applications. Our butcher shop is the ultimate example of how to reduce waste. You have an animal, which has so much to offer, and you don’t just use the loin and the steaks – we fully utilize the whole animal.” Sam Beall

“We use up all the animal, but it took me a long time to figure out how to get certain parts to sell, like tongue and kidneys. These parts are some of the best part, but try to sell them on a regular basis to people who’ve never eaten them. So, I do a lot of enchiladas, tacos, tostados, etc.; people love anything with avocado on it. Pair parts with something they love, and you can sell it. Meatloaf and noodles work too…won tons – anything in a little package of dough.” Cindy Pawlcyn

“Certainly green – sustainability – is integral to how we do business and is front and center in any new venture we do. In terms of resources, on the corporate level we have someone who is in charge of all green initiatives in our company, and that’s a full-time job.” Joe Bastianich

“It’s not impossible to do what we do, and the PRICE POINTS don’t have to be through the roof. We are selling a burger using sustainable practices at about $5. Our average ticket is about $8.40, which is higher than Burger King, but these days the burger ticket is going up. And 70% of our ingredients are locally sourced.” Jeff Harvey

“We really want to set up a model of how to live a sustainable life and support restaurants and foodservice venues that are sustainable. But it costs money. Farmers’ markets are very expensive; produce is very expensive; proteins are very expensive to grow, to transport. In our business, sustainability has to be built into what we do. We’ll make money doing it – it’s the future of our business – and we do it on the highest level, but it’s the world of $40 entrees. At the end of the day, eating sustainably and living your life this way can be very expensive.” Joe Bastianich

“We don’t like getting on a soapbox and talking about the dangers and the ominous black hole of what’s happening with the conventional food system. We like TELLING THE STORY of how we get our pork from this quirky guy, about the woman who forages our mushrooms who has been doing it for 35 years, etc., or about our beef supplier – this guy who just refused to feed animals anything but grass, and how we changed our whole system to only have steak as special because that way we could buy all of our beef from him – people love hearing about where things come from. If we were talking about how bad concentrated animal-feeding operations are, we might just as well lock the doors of the restaurant. But when one person is having the meatloaf, another a burger, and someone else the steak or pot roast, and it is all from the same animal and we can name the guy it came from – that’s awesome, really cool.” Michel Nischan

“We do events involving our farmers. We might go out with the Nomad mobile kitchen and we’ll do things at Leopold Farms, our berry supplier. Just last week all the Country Natural Beef farmers were working in our restaurants, so you’d see a cowboy with a cowboy hat working the drive-through. We do things like that all the time because our guests want to know where the food comes from, what we can tell them about it. We also train our 1,500 employees through something we call Mission School, which helps teach them the mission of our company, Serve with Love. There’s a whole track on story telling and the importance of that in building relationships with guests. Part of the program is to send them out to the farms, so rather than a script, our employees can tell guests, ‘Let me tell you what I did when I was on the farm.’” Jeff Harvey

“We try to blend real grassroots farming relationships with DISTRIBUTION methods to satisfy our 39 restaurants – whose menus might have some variation based on supply. We’ve got a team in our organization called Supply Chain, which meets with farmers. When we bring in Walla Walla onions, for example, the team goes to the farm, establishes the relationships with the farmers, works with them on the specifications for the product as well as the growing practices. Once that’s all qualified and we’ve negotiated the price, then we walk hand-in-hand to SYSCO and have them distribute for us. We don’t do it that way. It’s a far cry from ordering from the SYSCO catalog. If we did it that way, we couldn’t ensure the quality; we couldn’t tell customers the story about where things come from.” Jeff Harvey

“The BIG CHALLENGE is that the whole green movement runs the risk of being elitist. I think that our responsibility as food professionals is to take the spirit of what we do with sustainability and have it permeate the market, trickle down. All the thought, all the incredible good intentions and intellectual capacity of people who think about food and serving food in this way…how do you take it out of a $90 check average and bring it to people who have $5 to spend on a meal? In New York, tens of thousands of school kids go to school hungry everyday. Forget about sustainable – they are hungry; they lack for food. As long as that exists then what we’re talking about is a very, very heady intellectual kind of thing. That’s the real challenge, and the journey is long, but that’s where we have to keep our heads. It’s our responsibility.” Joe Bastianich

“There’s no question that if we want to buy local and support that type of movement, it’s expensive. We’ve been able to do what we do because we’ve been able to charge $40 for an entrée, but I realized a few years back that if all the white-tablecloth restaurants in the world, which represent a lot of our industry, went 100% farm to table tomorrow, it wouldn’t even create a blip on the radar screen. We have to look at the ways restaurants can help by supporting movements that actually make this type of food more accessible to underserved communities.” Michel Nischan

“We can tell the stories about where our food comes from and we know it’s going to connect with our guests at Blackberry Farm. But if a greater demand isn’t there, I’m not sure. There’s an educational piece – as parents, in schools, we aren’t passing on the knowledge to our children about how to take care of themselves. How do we share what we believe in with mass America when mass America doesn’t know what to do with the ingredients, isn’t creating the demand?” Sam Beall

“As a personal observation, I like what the Hunger Project says when it talks about the key being self-reliance. Rather than some big organization providing food that creates a dependency, what if it’s more about creating self-reliance and community so that people have the tools – the knowledge and skills – to actually feed themselves? We’re all kind of in touch with it, but it certainly isn’t the wave it needs to be. When you dig deeper, you understand how huge the movement of local, small community farms is in this country and that not many people know anything about it.” Jeff Harvey

Last year more than 3,500 restaurants – multi-units and independents alike – participated in the Dine Out. It’s easy to sign up at greatamericandineout.org and select the way in which your restaurant would like to contribute, e.g., a percentage (1-5%) of the week’s sales, a special menu promotion, merchandise sales, create a bounce back coupon or donation card, etc., or customize your contribution. The program is promoted nationally to consumers, and participating restaurants are listed on the Great American Dine Out Web site.

“Being socially conscious is a big part of our culinary community, and it’s critical to ending childhood hunger. That’s why we’re proud to support Share Our Strength year after year. Please join us!”
Michael Symon, chef, Lola Bistro, Cleveland, Ohio.

The Dine Out’s Resource Center online provides free point of purchase materials and customized (posters, customer donation cards, check stuffers, bounce back coupons), templates and guidelines (fact sheets, social media tips, publicity talking points, employee scripts, employee newsletter templates, etc.).

Questions? Please email Jessie Sherrer or call her at (202) 478-6505.

“Fullservice restaurants had a lot more pain; if you were high end, significantly more pain. In 2007, there were roughly $188 billion in fullservice all store sales, and we’re projecting for the end of this year just $184 billion, so it actually shrank. This has never happened. Fast food, on the other hand, did go up from $150 billion to $164 billion. For high-end steakhouses, which had really been depressed, we’re now positive comp for the months of March, April, May, and June, although June was well below May. The high-end steak companies that are more heavily business oriented have shown much greater improvement than the ones that are geared to social and aspirational. Where it’s personal, it’s a little bit different – you’re going to see big dichotomies in behavior.

“We’re coming out of this very slowly, because we’ve had a financial collapse. The way I look at the economy going forward is like the cooking mantra of the pit master of a barbecue, low and slow. The economy is going to be low growth, and jobs – which are really the key to happiness – are going to be very slow in coming back. We’re going to be in for a couple of years where the high end will start recovering because businesses start to spend again. Large businesses really have more cash on their books than they’ve ever had in their history, so there’s plenty of money there. But the small guys don’t, and so you have this dichotomy in the economy.”

JJ Buettgen on BRAND MANAGEMENT
“Brand loyalty is not dead, it’s just a lot harder to earn it because guests expect more. We’re fortunate in that our brands have built loyal followings. As a company, we focus on operations excellence and brand management excellence. No matter how great your marketing programs – whether you are a company with 1,800 locations or a smaller company – at the end of the day, the ability to deliver on your brand’s promise comes down to the level of execution by the employees in the restaurant. We’re a very values-based company committed to hiring the right people and to training and development. Our employees are our lifeblood. It’s our employees who determine whether we meet guest expectations, and who over the long term build loyalty to our brands.”

Dawn Sweeney on COMPETITION FOR THE DINING DOLLAR
”I think a real challenge to our industry is this steady drumbeat that started with Walmart and then Stouffers. You see these ads now about eating at home – instead of going out for breakfast, buy these five products, and you can have a breakfast for 87 cents a day instead of $5 a day. If people who have been going out to eat four times a week start going out three times a week, or people who have been going out once a week go out only once every other week, it could over time impact the industry. There’s nothing that takes the place of going out to eat, there just isn’t, no matter how terrific they try to make putting a pizza in the microwave sound. The experience is not the same, and this feels like a threat to our industry.”

Thomas Keller on MAINTAINING INTEGRITY
“Our restaurants have always operated at a very high level – a level we achieve through the discipline of what we do each day in all of our restaurants – and for this reason, the experience we offer has always been in high demand. Integrity has to do not only with the quality of the experience we give our guests, but also the quality of experience we provide to our team. That has always been very important to me – not only to have a great dining room, but to have a great kitchen and a great office, where people are truly happy to come to work; they’re comfortable in that work environment and they’re going to perform their jobs at the highest levels. We give everyone in all our restaurants the tools they need to execute according to the expectations of myself and our guests. It’s about spending money; it’s about making that dollar commitment to your restaurants. The experience of your team is as important as the experience of your guests.”

–Joe Bastianich, owner/partner, B&B Hospitality Group

“We opened a farmers’ market in our parking lot on Thursdays so we could get everything delivered to us. It was a challenge setting it up and difficult to get all the producers together, especially in a state like Connecticut with so few farmers and so little support for agriculture – but the farmers came, our customers and people from surrounding communities came, and it created a whole new life for our businesses. We did it because we knew it was the right thing, but then it took hold and has been growing ever since. It worked better than we ever expected. The farmers love it, the community loves it, and we couldn’t imagine living without it.” –Michel Nischan, owner/founder, Dressing Room; president/ceo Wholesome Wave Foundation

“The opposite works, too. I always go to the farmers’ markets and I wear chef’s clothes. I’ve got relationships with the good farmers and tell them that I’ll use whatever they have left over. So, instead of driving back to the farm with leftovers, they drop it off, and I split it up among my restaurants.” –Cindy Pawlcyn, chef/owner, Mustard’s Grill, Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen, Go Fish

“When you talk about operating sustainably, you have to recognize that there’s never an endpoint. You are committing to a life practice, a way of doing things. You are continually investing in what’s coming next and thinking about how to create a system that’s going to be supporting us years and years into the future. We imagine ourselves as a 100+-year company – one that actually supplies sustainable food for 100 years beyond any of our lives.”
Jeff Harvey, president/ceo, Burgerville

“You can’t have sustainability without supporting local people – directly sourcing from people within your region. Aside from efficiencies of scale, when you buy locally you are recirculating your dollars within your community, and that’s economically sustainable.”
Michel Nischan, president/ceo Wholesome Wave Foundation and owner/founder, Dressing Room

“We have an urban rooftop garden at XOCO to show people that you can do it. But for us sustainability has to be part of the whole big picture. We focus on it in every aspect of the operation, so it has to affect the way we train and maintain our staff and how we build out the place. Sustainability affects every aspect of the whole business, not just food.”
Rick Bayless, chef/owner Frontera Grill, Topolobampo, XOCO

Carmine Smeraldo, owner, Il Terrazzo Carmine, Seattle, WA, recently converted an area of the restaurant that was dedicated to hosting large groups into a private room. “In the last year, we’ve had a continuous flow of inquiries for business meetings and social parties. The room is designed with old-style glass windows that can open into the restaurant, so that it becomes part of the main dining room when it’s not in use”. . . . “We remodeled our 18-seat private room adjacent to the dining room – adding a modern chandelier and backlit marble tables to give it a different feel from the restaurant, so guests are aware that they’re in a different space,” says Tommy Tollesson, co-owner, Elevation, Aspen, CO. “We reached out to small businesses that have limited budgets, offering different price points depending on the day of the week, and, as a result, have been able to fill the room when it might have otherwise been empty. And, on nights when the room is not sold, we often move a small group of regular diners into it at no extra cost as a way of drawing attention to the space.”

Shaw’s Crab House, Chicago, IL, reports businesses are starting to come back and book more parties, but they are more cost conscious. Steve LaHaie, sr. vp, says now clients want to design their own menus to control costs. “We’re seeing smaller parties, and our smaller rooms for 12-14 and 25-30 are booked all the time. If I was doing a private room now I’d definitely keep it on the small side”. . . .Joe Bastianich, owner/partner, B&B Hospitality Group, New York, NY, co-founded DinePrivate.com, an online private-dining booking service. “The event business is still very old school and thought to have opportunistic pricing,” notes Joe. DinePrivate.com currently hosts New York restaurants only, showing photos of private rooms, menus, pricing, and the ability to book online. “By putting a fair market price on everything upfront, we feel the consumer will be more willing to book.” The site also partners with Giltcity.com/newyork to move inventory for pre-packaged, smaller events. “We’ve posted several seven-course, wine dinners for 12 at Del Posto for $2,000, and they’ve sold out in 20 minutes”. . . .

“Because our private rooms are in the back and not visible, we created a brochure with photos, featuring a new, lower-priced menu, that is available at the front desk. This information is also on our Web site and our guest checks.”
Shelly Jones, special events coordinator, Wildwood, Portland, OR

OPPORTUNITY: Because more and more consumers are listening only to one another, getting them to listen to what you want to tell them about your restaurant – in an ad or through a promotion – is more difficult. Restaurateurs will have to focus much more on being talked about in the right ways. It’s important to know where your consumers and target customers are congregating online and to monitor what they are saying about your restaurant and your competitors. Get a sense of the elements people discuss and find a point of focus – something you want to be known for, that makes your restaurant special – for people to pick up on when they’re in your restaurant. Then, execute in this area consistently and well.

CAUTION: Even without making a concerted effort to build a positive conversation in social media, the fact that there are so many voices potentially talking about your restaurant makes it important to listen. Expectations are set more vividly than when consumers turned only to traditional media to describe the experience. Understanding what’s being said will help deal with customers’ expectations.

Trend Source: Yankelovich/The Futures Company