46 | December 2014 | restaurant | bighospitality.co.uk theworlds50best.com | restaurant | December 2014 | 47

RounDtable

What is the future restaurant operation, what

are the pain points and how

can existing and emerging

technology help? Restaurant

assembled a crack team of top front-of-

house managers, ops directors and

restaurateurs to thrash out these

conundrums and more

How will you be running your business in 2015? that was the question that Restaurant and opentable put to a highly experienced team of operators

at a roundtable discussion last month at les Deux Salons.

the group, which included people from high-end restaurant groups from across the sector, including Daniel Greenock, restaurant manager at Marcus at the berkeley; Dave Strauss, operations director at Goodman; byron lang, guest services director at Gordon Ramsay Group; and Frances Dore, director of sales and marketing at Caprice Holdings; had a lively discussion about the burning issues of the day. these included the constant battle to attract staff in front of house and management roles, the opportunities and challenges that emerging technology brings to running a restaurant and their predictions on how future innovations and trends, such as advanced bookings, will impact on their businesses in 2015 and beyond.

The staffing challenge

Glen Harris: We get a lot of customer complaints about the fact that waiting staff can’t speak english. It’s something that is always used as a reason for not having a good experience.

Paulo de Tarso: More people are going to university and don’t want to go into the restaurant industry where they work extremely hard hours and don’t get paid a lot. If you are front of house, salaries are not good enough. It is up to us to enure that they are getting paid more.

MD: In the provinces, we struggle with service charge – some people just won’t have it.

WS: I’m not sure it is a monetary thing. there will always be someone paying better. Someone gives a better staff room, less hours, better uniform, more money – the package is always better somewhere else. If we go down the route of worrying about what we pay them then we’re all screwed.

Overcoming staffing issues

Daniel Greenock: I spent time at eleven Madison Park [in new York], and every year they get a busload of kids from the Culinary Institute of america who are just dying to get through the door. In america, if you’re a food runner you’re getting paid $60,000 a year, and you get to the point where, as the captain of your station, you’re earning more than your manager above you because they don’t get a share of the tips.

Matt Ford: We have the Gaucho academy for front of house – we haven’t touched back of house yet. Putting that in place has been fantastic. In Piccadilly, the team has been in place for three years – but we don’t charge service unless it’s of tables of nine or more. Yes there’s the money element, but if they are good at their job they will be rewarded by the customer anyway.

Sebastian Fogg: Can we not all start shouting about the fact that we all pay the minimum wage, and have a tronc system as well. We should club together and create an unofficial fraternity of restaurateurs who promise not to poach staff off each other and who refer to each other. We’re all individual companies – the most important thing is to look after ourselves, but a bit more reaching out could help.

Managing customer expectations

WS: every time you walk into McDonald’s you know what you’re going to get. they manage expectations all over the world. We’re all not of that level, but we need to do the same. We link les Deux Salons with our others, arbutus and Wild Honey, but it’s a completely different offer. It’s about managing expectations.

BL: Sometimes people’s expectations are not

suitable for the restaurant they are in. We see people and we know we are going to really struggle to get it right for that person.

Adrian Valeriano: there are many different ways you can beat expectations. there’s an example of one restaurant that discovered on twitter that one of the booked in diners was sick. at the end of the meal they gave the party some takeaway chicken soup for the poorly person. It wasn’t costly but it’s one of those little touches that count and that make service great.

MF: lots of Michelin-starred restaurants are now accessible because they offer lunch deals, which open up doors to a different demographic. Sometimes you are attracting people with different expectations, who go to l’atelier de Joël Robuchon and get three courses for £30 and then go to a brasserie and expect the same service. but at Robuchon, it’s better.

MD: It’s not about better service, just different forms of service. at the end of the day good service is having a server who is well informed, serves food in a reasonable amount of time and is always in view so a customer can get what they need. the problem is there’s not enough core people that are good at this, so we have to employ others too.

BL: the trick is to ensure that every table gets some interaction with core people – interaction which is more memorable or personal.

In four and five-star reviews, food is not

really mentioned at all - it’s all about service

Frances Dore: What puts customers off? For me it’s anyone that stands in front of a system and says yes or no, anyone that doesn’t have the ability to allow walk-ins, anyone who can’t say how long a table is going to be, and anyone that doesn’t have anywhere to sit people while they are waiting for a table drives me over the edge. Your best servers are on the floor when really they should be at the desk, because that’s your first impression.

PdT: We never say no to anyone.

Justin Ellis: It’s one of the things that we are having to manage at the moment. our is a restaurant in a hotel, not a stand-alone restaurant, so we try to appeal to the local residents as well as having space for the hotel guests. Hotel guests do not book in restaurants within the hotel, they just walk down and expect a table. We’re having to utilise our reservation system and keep tables back. It’s quite challenging but it’s working at the moment.

Tapping into the information age

AV: We are passionate about giving restaurants more information, especially that which relates to diner feedback. We collect lots of their experiences and correlate that, so for a four-star and five-star review, we see what words are used versus one and two-star reviews. In four and five-star reviews, food is not really mentioned at all – it’s all about service and whether what they expected was delivered on. Conversely, a one and two-star review has mentions of food items and ingredients.

DG: When someone walks into a restaurant, on a very basic level, they still don’t understand the tools we have and how advanced a system such as opentable is. they expect a smile and that people know how they like their lamb cooked

Byron Lang: the media has glamourised the kitchen and chefs. In our group, people want to be a chef rather than work front of house. the head chef gets a lot of recognition and respect.

Will Smith: It’s quite difficult to define what we do front of house. My friends ask what I do. I tell them I’m a restaurant manager, and they ask ‘do you cook?’. It’s clear what a chef does, they cook and create, but our role is more vague than that. Its hard for people to focus on that.

PdT: In my kitchen everyone wants to be the next Daniel boulud.

Dave Strauss: It’s a very uK-particular problem. the restaurant business is being driven by celebrity chefs, everyone’s got this idea that the chef is the only job in a restaurant. I used to work in the States when everyone wanted to be a bartender – those were the guys that made the most money. no one wanted to go in the kitchen. now we’re stuck with the problem that no one wants to work front of house.

PdT: It’s a monetary problem. In the uS they keep their tips – 20% is a bad tip in america.

Marcello Distefano: You can’t get the uK consumer tipping 25%, unfortunately. It’s never going to happen.

GH: When [terrence] Conran introduced service charge in his restaurants I thought: ‘What? You’re putting that on the bill?’ but now it’s accepted.

Attention to detail: Paulo de Tarso (l) and Byron Lang

Time for tea: operators take a break from discussions

In association with

TH

E C

as

T

WiLL SmiTh, co-owner, Arbutus Restaurant Group

PAuLo de TARSo, senior maitre d’,

Bar Boulud

FRAnceS doRe, director of sales and marketing,

caprice holdings

dAnieL GReenock, restaurant manager,

marcus at The Berkeley

ByRon LAnG, guest services

director, Gordon Ramsay Group

mARceLLo diSTeFAno,

managing director, San carlo

mATT FoRd, marketing director,

Gaucho

dAve STRAuSS, operations director,

Goodman Group

SeBASTiAn FoGG, operations

director, hix Restaurants

JuSTin eLLiS, director of food and beverage,

café Royal

Ludovic SoLmi, general manager,

clos maggoire

mARTin RenShAW, general

manager, Social eating house

GLen hARRiS, general manager,

Tom’s kitchen, chelsea

STeFAn chomkA, editor, Restaurant

magazine

meLindA monAco,

senior restaurant marketing manager,

openTable

LeeLA SRinivASAn,

vice-president of restaurant

marketing, openTable

AdRiAn vALeRiAno,

vice-president of international sales,

openTable

Table plans

Images/ Pete Jones

48 | December 2014 | restaurant | bighospitality.co.uk theworlds50best.com | restaurant | December 2014 | 49

Strap RounDtable

but they don’t understand that we’ve got a database of what they do and don’t like. You can store and access a lot of information about customers very easily.

MF: Having that technology at your fingertips is amazing. We do something called ‘seven days of gin’ and target people who had a specific gin in our restaurants with a gin masterclass. Instead of approaching 200,000 people we went to 1,000 people and filled it four times over. Guest profiling works.

GH: Yes, but all this information is ultimately making managers’ jobs a lot harder. It’s not just about being on the floor and shutting the doors at the end of the night, you go home and you’re on your emails, in your inbox in your days off.

DS: It’s just tripadvisor that we are constantly on.

GH: ultimately tripadvisor is pushing us to give better service.

DG: It is also a problem. With some customers you know there’s something wrong but it’s hard to find out how to make their experience better. the customer would much rather not say anything, go home and then go on twitter or tripadvisor and complain.

AV: being able to see trends and understand your set of results in the context of your neighbourhood can be very useful, which is what opentable can provide. there’s no shortage of data out there and we hope to distil it to make it easier to understand at a glance. People want one piece of info that they’re going to take in and there’s lot of scope to make that info simpler.

JE: You can look at the busy trends from last year and be prepared that you will most likely be busy again. You can also look to see which months were quieter and look to run a promotion then.

AV: at the end of the day, technology has to be simple. It’s about having something as simple as possible. Pen and paper is inefficient but simple to use, so we are trying to replicate that simplicity within our system.

WS: the data you have on people can be a useful tool, but at the end of the day, the bread and butter of what we do is eye-to-eye contact and hospitality. the data will always help a bit.

MD: the best front-of-house managers are the ones who naturally store that information.

Payment apps and emerging technology

WS: You don’t go to a restaurant if you want to just go in eat the food and not interact with anyone.

Leela Srinivasan: When it comes to paying, people don’t love that chip and pin dance, or trying to get the attention of the waiter. to me, [these apps] don’t need to take away from hospitality.

WS: It will though, as you are asking people to dispense with that final ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’.

SF: lots of people don’t want to order online and do want interaction. but we are going to be paying by a phone in the future. Sometimes you are in a hurry and just want to pay and go.

AV: It’s important to take a step back and think about it from what a diner wants. You look at things like uber and Pay with opentable that we’ve launched in the uS, and plan to launch in the uK, and it isn’t about replacing hospitality, it’s about solving that pain point. When we survey diners, it is clear that paying is a major pain point – such as having to wait for the staff to come back with the PDQ machine. Pay with opentable looks to solve that by not getting diners to download an app but integrate it into the diner experience.

BL: So guests will be able to get their own bill without getting a waiter?

AV: they will see their bill, which links with the ePoS system. there is no fee charged to restaurants. the plan is to make it a seamless experience for diners.

WS: I’m surprised so many guests say struggling to pay the bill is a bug bear. but if you can make it easier for people to pay then I see

the benefit. For me, having constant access to the bill might put people off buying another bottle of wine.

GH: the convenience of paying always makes people spend more.

DS: We are using iPads for ordering at our new restaurant (Rex & Mariano in Soho) For some food it works. I went to barrafina the other day and I had the chef taking my order, but the fact is that I would be just as happy using an iPad because it’s that kind of food. We are going to cut four or five waiters off the floor and so we become cheaper than the competition and that drives sales. I don’t like tech but there are some parts of our business that can be speeded up.

FD: the option to pay and go will come in, but I doubt iPad ordering will fly in the long run.

DS: the problem with technology is that you do cut people out, but when it goes wrong, you suddenly need more skill than you had in the first place. We can close a restaurant when we have problems with extraction but we can’t afford to close five times a year because the payment app didn’t work.

Ticketing and advanced payments

FD: ticketing is horrible.

JE: Pre-paying for your meal is going to have an impact on improving the experience in 2015.

WS: It works for certain restaurants, those that have huge demand and can’t afford no-shows.

DS: We pinpoint good and bad customers and forget about the 90% who fall in the middle. We know everyone who spends a lot and everyone who causes trouble. When I used to work the front door, there were some customers who were going to get a table and some who weren’t and you had to turn them away. a great maitre d’ sets the speed for the restaurant.

FD: It will be a very sad day when advanced selling starts in london.

MF: the person or group who does it first will be very ballsy. It will only take one and everyone else will follow.

WS: no, it won’t. For the Fat Duck maybe – if its full all the time, I can understand it.

DS: there are people in london who can get any table in any restaurant whenever they want. You don’t turn them down, they are going to spend £5,000, which is the difference between a good night and a bad night. People have always been paying for tables at restaurants.

A big thank you to Will Smith and the team at Les Deux Salons for being the perfect hosts.

in depth: Gaucho’s matt Ford and Leela Srinvasan of openTable

We know everyone who spends a lot of money

and everyone who causes trouble