How to Grow & Thrive in the Restaurant Business · or five years of luck, or even three years of luck— it doesn’t work like that.” ... If you anticipate a big lunch business

How to Grow & Thrive in the Restaurant Business

H O W T O G R O W & T H R I V E I N T H E R E S T A U R A N T B U S I N E S S

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART 1: OPENING STAGECreate the Message

Tell Your Story

Use Outside Resources

Measure Your Success

On Reviews and Reviewers

PART 2: MIDDLE STAGEStay in the Flow


Is It Time To Change?

When Business Slows Down

Is It Time to Expand?

Respond to What Guests Want

PART 3: ONGOING SUCCESS AND LONG-TERM SUSTAINABILITYStay Motivated: A Mature Restaurant’s Evolution

Marketing at this Stage

Follow the Competition or Stay the Course?

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What makes a restaurant thrive? What makes it last? And how can you set

yourself up for the kind of success you see and hear about from others? It’s

easy to say, “They got lucky,” or “That restaurant ended up in the right place

at the right time,” but sustained success and growth are more than a lucky

draw. Instead, maintaining, nurturing, and building your restaurant busi-

ness require careful and deliberate planning and execution at all stages of

development, from generating opening buzz to understanding when (and

how) to make a change to deciding you’re ready to expand.

You have to optimize across marketing, hospitality, and operations. You

have to create the best team, a team that understands your vision and

adapts to new challenges. You have to understand your location and mes-

sage and how those translate to your customers. You have to work hard,

taking advantage of every opportunity, strategizing, and setting yourself up

for “luck.” And you have to apply all of these elements in a smart way over

your restaurant’s lifespan.

In this guide, successful chefs, restaurateurs, and experts share actionable

wisdom, warnings, and insights into everything that goes into building and

running a successful restaurant business. Use it to learn from their knowl-

edge and experience as you plan for the future of your restaurant business—

whether it’s your first year or your 30th.

KRISTEN HAWLEY

“You can’t have 20 years of luck, or 10 years of luck,

or five years of luck, or even three years of luck— it doesn’t work like that.”

—ERIC RIPERT

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Part 1: Opening StageThe earliest stage of your restaurant’s life—the

period directly before its opening, the opening

itself, and the first months of service—hold a lot

of potential. You’ve already made large decisions

about operations, systems, concept, location,

decor, menu, and staff—now comes maximizing

all of those elements for success.

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Make Sense of Where You AreYOUR LOCATION, MENU, CLIENTELE, DECOR, AND STAFF ALL SET THE TONE FOR YOUR RESTAURANT’S BRAND AND BUSINESS MODEL.

Before any sort of PR or marketing, fundamental business decisions shape a restau-rant’s landscape and reality. Location decisions, menu decisions, layout decisions, and staffing decisions all inform your restaurant’s messaging.

CONCEPT “What’s the role that this particular restaurant that you’re opening will play within the ecosystem of where you are and what you want people to experience when you get there?” asks Bill Chait, the restaurateur behind L.A.’s Bestia, Republique, Sotto, Otium, and more. “A restaurant that’s a planned destination, that’s got some attributes that are drawing people in, is different than a restaurant that’s in the middle of a busy mall that’s serving a captive market.”

If you’re a neighborhood restaurant, you’re not relying on a world-famous chef to draw people in. Instead, you should focus on the needs of your particular restaurant. A neighborhood restaurant should be accessible by its neighbors several times per month. A restaurant in the middle of a commercial district should focus on the speed at which you can serve and the ability to have food for someone who works in an office all day. Each is different from many standpoints, from menu to operations.

For restaurants with one location, this is an acutely focused process. For restaurant groups, the process can look more formal and is replicated with each opening, adjusting to the specific location and vision of each restaurant.

“With so many elements to consider in the lead-up to a restaurant opening, we typically start by documenting a clear vision, which serves as a map throughout the process. We use this vision to help us make all of our decisions, including what strategies fit with a particular restaurant’s opening promotional plan,” says Andrew Oliver of Oliver & Bonacini, which has 14 restaurants in the Toronto area.

Create the Message

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LOCATION Keep in mind general industry trends, too. “When you’re dealing with relatively high-end restaurants,” says Chait, “the nature of dining has become more casual. The idea that dining is formal is, generally speaking, a thing of the past. Even a restaurant with an $80 check average like Republique in Los Angeles has a casual environment. It might have fine-dining mentality in terms of how it approaches the food, but the environ-ment is still very casual and feels like you can go there and get a quick bowl of pasta and wine or you can go spend two and a half hours for dinner.”

Technology has changed the way diners discover and interact with restaurants, right down to determining a desirable vs. non-desirable location. Years ago, it was important to be on “Main and Main,” a busy intersection or high-traffic area where lots of foot or car traffic meant lots of visibility. For a fast-casual chain concept, that’s likely still an appealing location. But according to Chait, “Casual dining businesses don’t want to be on that corner because the environment is not conducive to relaxing and feeling like you’re in a cool, alternative space.”

Chait opened Los Angeles hotspot Bestia on a dead-end street in an area that’s almost totally hidden from view. Car GPS systems and apps like Google Maps and Waze have made this possible, and the restaurant’s location became a defining feature for the space itself, which unfolds as diners walk up a set of stairs, around a corner into an outdoor seating area, and then around another corner to the host stand.

“These elements have become much more important for marketing, the mood, and the success of a casual restaurant. Even if there is an important neighborhood there, the restaurant becomes a destination as well,” he adds.

The moral of the story: a location on a street with a lot of beautiful trees but not neces-sarily the main thoroughfare might be a better location than being on the busiest street in the area.

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Real Talk“If you have a less-than-desirable space and don’t have interesting environment, you’re battling uphill. You can’t market mood or feeling. There’s no magic pill. If you’re in a strip mall, unless there’s

something very unique, you’re going to eat in a strip mall.”

—BILL CHAIT

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H O W T O R U N A N D G R O W Y O U R R E S T A U R A N T B U S I N E S S

How to Stay on Top of the Industry, in New

York and Beyond —Eric Ripert

Le Bernardin is 30 years old, and according to chef and co-owner Eric Ripert, “We have always kept our soul but at the same time we have evolved and we are still relevant.” How do you stay that way? According to him, by staying actively on top of everything that’s happening. In a city like New York, keeping a finger on the pulse is easier than it is in other, more remote, locations. But there is still plenty you can do to stay on top of the game.

Embrace competition—it makes you better. New York is competitive in a good way. I don’t see negative in competition. In New York, this is everywhere. If your restaurant is somewhere with less competition, this could be more challenging if you don’t know what’s going on around you. Pay attention.

Have an open mind. Be curious. As a chef you are artistic. Your surroundings inspire you and inform you of what to do next. In New York we have constant inspira-tion from different chefs, from different products, from learning different techniques, from seeing different restaurants doing things different ways. We evolve without knowing we evolve.

Travel, especially if you aren’t in a major city. In New York, this inspiration is a natural process and it’s simple. In New York, you step out of your restaurant and you walk a block and you find something new.

Read industry publications. We receive publications like Bon Appetit and Food & Wine and Saveur, and we read the food section of the New York Times and others. We keep ourselves informed through all the different media—websites and some televi-sion shows, too.

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Set Operations Up for SuccessCUSTOMIZE YOUR FLOOR MANAGEMENT TOOLS TO REFLECT YOUR RESTAU-RANT’S UNIQUE FLOW—DECIDE WHEN YOU WANT RESERVATIONS, WHAT YOU EXPECT TURN TIMES TO BE, AND WHEN YOU’LL ACCEPT LARGE PARTIES.

When your restaurant first opens—especially if you’re a first-time restaurateur—you’ll need to make some initial assumptions about your operations. What do you expect your traffic patterns to be, based on concept and location?

If you anticipate a big lunch business you may have shorter turn times, as business guests hurry back to the office. If you’re primarily a late-night destination, maybe you won’t serve weekday lunch and can save on food and labor cost there. Are you accept-ing reservations and running a waitlist at the same time?

All of these business decisions affect your operations. They affect how you staff your restaurants and how you set up your floor to accommodate guests. When you’re first getting started, draw your floor plan. What tables do you have? Where are they? How big are they? Create your initial settings based on when you want to accept online reserva-tions and when you think guests will be in the neighborhood, just stopping by.

The floor management tools on OpenTable’s Guest Center product can be customized to your individual restaurant, so you can set up the platform to reflect your floor plan exactly. You can also balance reservations, waitlist, and walk ins and manage your flow according to your unique traffic patterns.

Define special areas, such as bar and lounge seating, if you suspect the flow may be different in those spaces. The Guest Center inventory system can create combinations of tables that can be pushed together and will assign tables based on availability—the operator doesn’t even have to think about it. Next, define your shifts. Between which hours are you serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner? You can set capacity and pacing inside each shift if you know a lunch turn will be a half-hour shorter than a dinner one.

“We want restaurateurs to say, ‘This tool has created time for me to do what I love,’” says Jon Morin, OpenTable’s Guest Center Product Manager. Morin’s team uses knowledge from years of customer engagement to replicate the mind of a very savvy restaurateur. The product should facilitate the best possible version of the human interaction that happens throughout the dining experience.

Consider when you’ll welcome large parties and when you probably won’t be able to accommodate them, and set up your system accordingly. Pay attention to how guests book and how long your turns are during at different days and times in the first few months after opening so you can continue to tweak and optimize these settings.

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Build Your Reputation, Build Your Service StaffBEYOND VISION AND MESSAGING, YOUR STAFF IS THE FRONT LINE OF YOUR RESTAURANT’S IMAGE IN THE EYES OF THE PUBLIC. A TRAINED, INFORMED STAFF IS AN ELEMENT OF THE RESTAURANT PRODUCT AND SHOULD BE TREATED AS SUCH.

“A good restaurant has three parts,” says Chait. “The location and the way the whole stage feels; the food and menu and how it’s positioned price-point-wise; and, the staff that supports those two things things. If you get two out of three right and you blow the third one, you go out of business. You might be able to succeed with two of the three if the staff makes you succeed.”

Dan Simons, co-owner of Founding Farmers in Washington, D.C., knew his staff would be an integral part of the restaurant’s initial success. Along with his partners, Simons opened a completely new restaurant concept—one where farmers are the owners. “We had a vision for the restaurant, but it’s not like we could hire someone with Founding Farmers experience because it was a totally new invention.”

According to him, the magic isn’t the idea—and that can be a tough pill to swallow for someone who’s spent a lot of time and energy nurturing a brilliant concept. “Having the idea is the easy part. The hard part is that you need talent on a high enough level to bring those ideas to life. Everyone has the steepest possible learning curve because it’s brand new.”

Chait agrees. “Staff and people are as much a part of the product that makes a restau-rant successful as the food,” he says.

SET THE RIGHT EXPECTATIONS WITH YOUR STAFF Obviously, people bring experiences of where they’ve worked before to any job; that’s why they’re valuable members of a service team. Experience is important, but so is immersion in your specific idea, especially if it’s a new or complicated concept. Simons has advice for this too: “Start from scratch. As a new restaurant or first of brand, you have to encourage your team to take their experiences and opinions, put them in a shoebox, and slide it under the bed.” Learn the new brand first, he continues. Later, staff can apply experience and opinion. This makes a new concept like a brand new birth instead of a collage of disparate experiences.

CONNECT ALL THE DOTS Messaging and training don’t work in a vacuum. Instead, the process is fluid and involves lots of people. Make sure these processes work in tandem. This is where in-house marketing and communications teams (or specialists) become important.

“In all openings, our in-house marketing and communications team is instrumental in everything from designing the restaurant’s logo, menus, and cocktail napkins to build-ing the restaurant’s online presence, including its website, blog, and social streams,” says Andrew Oliver.

If you’re a lean operation and don’t have internal marketing and communications, you as the restaurant’s visionary and, essentially, product lead are responsible for the above. While these might seem like nuanced decisions, they’re vital to early success and are absolutely worth the time they take to establish properly.

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Tell Your Story

Early Marketing GoalsA MIX OF WEBSITE, SOCIAL MEDIA, PR, AND IN-RESTAURANT STORYTELLING ENFORCE YOUR BRAND. BE CREATIVE—AND GET IN FRONT OF AS MANY POTENTIAL DINERS AS POSSIBLE.

SET THE TONE Every project is different and should be treated differently, even within a larger restau-rant group. Obviously, a lot of elements go into a launch or opening. A formula is good, but whether this is your first restaurant or your 10th, the formula needs to be flexible.

Andrew Oliver explains step one: Document a clear vision to serve as a map throughout the process. Use this vision to aid decision making, including what strategies fit with your restaurant’s opening promotional plan. In his case, no two launch plans have been the same to date.

“We have, for example, taken a quiet approach with minimal media outreach to create intrigue and maintain the concept’s authenticity in one case, while other restaurants have been aggressively advertised. It is important every detail—in and out of the restaurant—tells the restaurant story in a consistent, authentic, and enticing fashion.”

SHOULD I ADVERTISE? The answer, of course, is “it depends.” But it also depends how you define advertising. According to Chait, the marketing message starts with the choice of location and the physical space and environment. “The concept of what I would call classic marketing, which used to be based around advertising, is significantly less effective for restaurants than it used to be,” he says.

Millennials, for example, aren’t interested in traditional marketing and advertising. So, Chait says, “The space and the way it’s perceived in the market in terms of uniqueness and its gestalt becomes a lot of the marketing.”

Kevin Boehm, co-founder of Boka Restaurant Group in Chicago, considers his restau-rants’ stories and messaging to be their biggest selling point (and doesn’t pursue tra-ditional advertising models). “For us, marketing has always been creating stories that people want to write about rather than buying ads. Within that, we create content in our own backyard.”

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Restaurant groups can leverage the power of their networks. “Our early marketing goals for a new restaurant are focused on raising awareness and successfully communicating the restaurant concept and offerings to our key demographics,” says Andrew Oliver of Toronto’s Oliver & Bonacini Restaurants. They use a mix of digital content, including photos taken during multiple photo shoots, and more traditional PR. “Where appro-priate, we aim to leverage the Oliver & Bonacini name, as our guests directly associ-ate our brand with high-quality food and service. At the same time, however, we are careful not to let the O&B brand overshadow a restaurant’s individual personality and characteristics.”

While OpenTable is widely perceived as a reservation platform, it’s also an incredibly effective way to reach new diners, as we seat 20 million diners each month. “I think of OpenTable in two ways, a marketing piece and as a hospitality piece,” says Boehm.

“Those are two totally different functions. I talk to people who say they can’t rationalize the cost, but then spend thousands of dollars on an ad. There are so many people out there who want instant gratification, that will drive up to a neighborhood, spin their OpenTable app and ask, ‘What can I get for two people right now at 7 o’clock in this area?’ If your restaurant doesn’t exist there, you’re completely missing out.”

AS YOU’RE OPENING, USE OPENTABLE TO:• Reach locals through the platform’s search, listing, and geo-targeting functions,

just by virtue of being on the network.• Assist in soft openings by providing friends and family with a secure reserva-

tions link. • Start building your email database so you can market to and build relationships

with your guests.• Set up dashboards to begin tracking booking and service patterns, allowing you to

hone your hospitality over time.

REACHING DINERS

“OpenTable is a more relevant marketing tool than a traditional marketing

tool or a traditional advertisement.” —BILL CHAIT

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4 Tips for Marketing a Brand New Idea —Dan Simons of Founding Farmers

Washington D.C.’s Founding Farmers launched in 2008 with a unique message and model: farmer-owned restaurants. According to owner Dan Simons, one of the biggest challenges was marketing an idea that no one had heard of. Here’s what his team did first.

• Craft your special, unique message. At the same time, remain cognizant that folks are, at the end of the day, hungry for a burger at fair price. Make it available, but don’t force it on them. People come to a restaurant because they’re hungry. If you start believing that’s not the primary reason, you can lose your way.

• Figure out how to convey that message. For us, it’s being farmer-owned. Answer the question: how do we tell that story without simply saying it?

• Make every story support your message. The answer to the above question: We invested in waterless urinals and hand dryers instead of paper towels. Our aprons were made by an American seamstress. These all tie back to our message: when farmers own a restaurant, they care about all of these things.

• Share the message with your team. We prioritized the voice of the server through ongoing education and discussion with our front-of-house team. That way they had the stories to tell.

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SAY IT YOURSELF

Use Social Media CHOOSE THE AMOUNT OF ONLINE PRESENCE YOU HAVE THE ABILITY TO MAIN-TAIN. PRIORITIZE YOUR WEBSITE AND FACEBOOK PAGE FIRST, THEN BUILD AWARENESS ON INSTAGRAM AND TWITTER. As technology has changed the game in choosing a restaurant’s location, social media has revolutionized the way restaurants communicate with the public. You now have a direct line to people who are inherently interested in your cause and actively want to hear from you. What might have seemed an afterthought five years ago is now mission critical to any strategy and success story.

Ideally, you have the time and resources to build out a solid presence around the web before the restaurant opens. But if that’s not possible, it’s never too late to start and grow a following. You should reserve a website and social handles as far ahead of an opening as possible, even if you don’t use them for a while. Later we’ll cover best prac-tices for social media, but to start, here are some things to keep in mind.



2. Facebook. The largest of the networks, we’re more comfortable using Facebook to connect than a phone these days. Use your Facebook page for important information like hours and location, and consider adding and updating photo albums to give people a real feel for your restaurant.

3. Instagram. Instagram is white-hot with restaurants right now, and not just for pictures of beautifully-composed dishes (though those certainly work well).

“Instagram is about communicating what a place is about on a general and specific level to give

people a feel of exactly what it is.” —BILL CHAIT

4. Twitter. For communicating with a tech-savvy, very local audience, Twitter is the way to go. Twitter can require more care and feeding than the other channels and can do great things for a business—but it’s only as valuable as you are active, especially if you get a lot of customer service-type requests, which Twitter has become known for. (Who among us hasn’t tweeted to an airline?)

The first two items on this list are critical. Instagram is a “should have” and Twitter sits squarely in the “nice to have” category. Most importantly, choose the amount of online presence you have the ability to maintain. A dated Facebook page or Instagram feed sends the message that you can’t be bothered to update the page, and that translates to your restaurant’s public peception.

WHERE TO SAY IT? IMPORTANT CHANNELS

1. Your website. This can be as simple as a landing page with your name, phone number, address, and opening hours or can be more complex. Your website is a great place for all other social media to link back to, giving your online presence strong roots. Squarespace allows you to do this with modern, clean, and low-cost designs. Larger groups may want to go with a design and development agency who will work with you through the design, implementation, and website management process.

“Coinciding with the initial announcement of a restaurant opening, we will launch a landing page with just the

topline details: logo, launch date, a few sentences about the concept, and an e-newsletter sign-up. We also use the website call out to hiring opportunities. Then, soon

before the official opening, we will launch the full website.” —ANDREW OLIVER

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“Now that social media has gotten so big and you can create a lot of your own content inexpensively, it’s been about building stuff

that’s better than everyone else builds.” —KEVIN BOEHM

Real Talk

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Create great content. Good marketing has always been about creating content that’s rich: a story or video about the restaurant’s design, for example. We create layers: food, hospitality, and design. As long as you have layers of all those three things, content will be newsworthy.

Do it better. With so much competition it’s become about building content that’s bet-ter than everyone else builds. When we opened GT Fish & Oyster, we decided to film videos almost like you would film a TV show. We created 10 episodes leading up to the restaurant opening, from a look at the test kitchen, to putting the drink menu together, to construction and design, to the actual hiring. We filmed the entire hiring process. People started to follow it and the personalities involved—so they were not interested just in the principles of the restaurant, but in the people who worked there.

Have a plan. Most people are building their buzz organically through social media. The one thing you have to remember is that it’s a competition, and you can’t flippantly make this content. You need a plan and you need to make sure you execute—make sure it’s lighted correctly, for example.

Quality matters. Anyone can do video on their phone now. If you’re going to produce videos, make sure they are of good quality. When someone looks at pictures or video of your restaurant and gets a sense of how detailed you are in those regards, it’s a microcosm of how detailed you’re going to be at the restaurant.

Build excitement. When we announced who our chef-partner was going to be at Perennial, Paul Virant, we got 10,000 views because we built it up beforehand, for a month. In the video, we showed Rob, then me, then Paul. When we partnered with Bristol for Balena, we showed all the food that was going to be on the menu. You couldn’t see any of us, we shot it all from the necks down. So viewers saw all the food coming out with descriptions underneath. At the very end the cameras rose up and said, “See you in Halstead this fall.” What you hope is that you build up some sort of suspense or excitement based on the information in the video, and you get a lot of eyes on it.

Remember the goal. Of course, the ultimate goal is that you get a lot of people’s eyes on it. If you build something that’s truly funny or cool or interesting, than it’s going to be picked up by a lot of people. We build these up for a month on social media and our YouTube channel, and encourage online publications to share the content.

How To: Go Viral with Videos,

from Kevin Boehm, Boka Group

Boka Group’s Kevin Boehm and his partner Rob Katz had a serious interest in video. So, they did what any smart entrepreneur would do and combined their interests—and a brilliant and effective marketing strategy was born. Videos chronicling restaurant openings and big announcements, produced by the Boka Group team and a video pro-duction partner, netted huge viewership online and tons of buzz for a small time and financial investment. Here’s how they did it.



A tone guide should be considered a living document, updated frequently with success-ful examples, ideas, or learnings from past campaigns.

SOCIAL AS A SERVICE Besides projecting your image outward, social media channels give you a direct line to your customers. When they talk to you on social, don’t just listen, respond!

As he was starting his business, Founding Farmers’ Dan Simons responded to online comments personally. “We focused on engagement when people would comment or ask questions. Every comment from someone else we viewed as a table visit. We knew as restaurateurs how to engage at the table, and I applied the same thinking. I handled every single comment complaint or compliment online and treated it like a table visit. When we made a mistake, we apologized and made it right while weaving in our story. Our guests liked and cared about this.”

Obviously, responding to all comments yourself isn’t sustainable nor a good use of your time as your business grows. Simons has advice for this phase, too. Continue to treat social media like table visits. You don’t let entry-level employees handle table visits, so don’t let entry-level people do your social media. Just because someone is active on social doesn’t make them the best qualified to run a brand on social. (Though some-times it works out that way.)

“We focused on engagement when people would comment, criticize, or ask questions. Every comment from someone

else we viewed as if it were a table visit. We knew as restaurateurs how to engage at the table, and I applied the

same thinking to the digital world. I handled every single comment, complaint or compliment online and treated it

like I was tableside with the guest. When we made a mistake, we owned it, and made it right while weaving in our story.

Our guests liked and cared about this, and we built lasting positive relationships that may have begun with a negative.”

What to Say? Creating ToneCREATE A TONE GUIDE FOR CONSISTENCY ACROSS CHANNELS, AND USE IT AS A POINT OF REFERENCE FOR YOUR WHOLE TEAM.

Consistency of the tone you use on social media will extend your restaurant’s message. Outside consulting services and internal marketing teams usually create tone guides for a brand’s social media presence, but you don’t need a marketing team to create your own. A GM or interested manager can establish similar standards based your brand vision and messaging. The important thing is that a guide serves as a point of reference for anyone who touches the social accounts. It’s especially useful when training new team members to take over, or maintaining consistency as your team and brand grow.

A SUCCESSFUL TONE GUIDE INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING: 1. Your mission or vision statement. 2. A personification of your voice. (‘Your hip friend who knows about all the newest

hot spots before anyone else.”)3. Words you use to describe your brand. 4. Words you’d never use to describe your brand. 5. Subjects or content areas important to the restaurant and brand. 6. A rough schedule or sense of post frequency.

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Use Outside Resources

Generating PressYOU HAVE ONE SHOT AT OPENING COVERAGE. ENLIST A PR AGENCY TO HELP YOU CREATE ALL OF THE ASSETS YOU NEED TO TELL YOUR STORY—BIOS, PHOTOS, A PRESS RELEASE—AND GET THAT STORY IN FRONT OF THE MEDIA. You message is honed, your staff trained, your calendar set. What’s missing? A profes-sional PR agency ties all of these things together in a neat package with a bow on top

—and puts your message squarely in front of the people who need to hear it first: the media.

“You only have one shot at that opening coverage,” says Elizabeth Hamel, account supervisor at Wagstaff Worldwide. “There are great opportunities—dedicated coverage, a post that’s only about your restaurant—that are only available when you first open.”

A PR agency is able to hone your focus and fill in any blanks in your strategy that could leave press guessing. Offerings vary by agency and relationship, but generally you can expect an agency to do the following:

• Draft bios of key players in the restaurant.• Create a one-sheet document to familiarize press with your concept, chef, other

personalities, menu, decor, or any other restaurant highlights.• Create an opening press release. • Produce photographs, or help you produce an early photo shoot to showcase your

restaurant and menu.• Create an opening press strategy, securing well-timed placement via appropriate

channels, from long-lead magazines to websites and blogs that thrive on of-the-moment coverage.

• Manage relationships with press before, during, and after an opening. • Gather and share press feedback. PR professionals are good at synthesizing

feedback and presenting it to the client in an actionable way.



“PR is still important. People ask, ‘Do we really need PR anymore? We have social media.’ Aligning yourself with someone who has really good judgment, from a PR perspective, means launching stories with the

right person at the right time. That is crucial.” —KEVIN BOEHM

If at all possible, plan to engage with a firm several months before your restaurant’s opening. It’s much easier for them to shape and control the message from the start than to come in several months later when you’re concerned your restaurant isn’t receiving enough press.

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How to Use PR to Maximize Your Opening

—Elizabeth Hamel, Wagstaff Worldwide

ELIZABETH HAMEL’S TIPS FOR CAPITALIZING ON THE BIG IMPACT AN OPENING WILL HAVE IN THE MEDIA

Sign on with PR early. Agencies like to work with clients well before a restaurant opening—ideally, according to Hamel, at least three months in advance.

Take photos. Don’t worry if your space isn’t finished. As soon as the chef knows at least a few dishes that will appear on the menu, make arrangements to photograph them. Use a different restaurant or kitchen space if necessary. It’s best to have images ready to go to share with press, says Hamel.

Talk social strategy. Whether you’re hiring someone in-house, already have a staff member eager to help, or engage with an outside agency, social media strategy is a huge part of your larger PR strategy. If your social and PR are handled by different peo-ple, take time to make sure everyone is on the same page from the beginning: both messaging-and expectations-wise.

Get a splash page online immediately. It’s OK if your website isn’t ready to go months before your opening—that’s normal. But prioritize a splash or landing page, a single page that lives at your website address listing at least your restaurant’s name. Hamel also likes to include links to any social channels you plan to use to this page.

Talk opening date. Or at least opening season. When you do set an exact date, Hamel likes to announce it about a week before. This gives press a comfortable heads-up while giving you enough time and assurance that you’ll make that date.

Be clear about plans. If you’re opening with dinner service but plan to launch brunch within the first year, share that information. There’s no substitute for opening press, but new service launches or big menu changes make great stories.



Reservations As a Media Moment

START A COUNTDOWN TO THE DAY YOU TURN ON ONLINE RESERVATIONS TO BUILD ANTICIPATION, CREATE DEMAND, AND DRIVE BOOKINGS.

“We built up the opening buzz with photos and videos, and then said, ‘Next week on Tuesday we’re opening up OpenTable reservations,’” says Boehm. The story came out Tuesday morning, and demand continued to grow. For Boehm, Boka Group, and Duck Duck Goat, this was a wildly successful strategy.

Beyond convenience and tech savvy, using OpenTable for opening reservations cre-ates an additional hook for press coverage. When Boka Group announced the initial OpenTable reservations date for the opening of Duck Duck Goat in Chicago, Eater cov-ered the news with a dedicated post—and the restaurant got nearly 10,000 reservations over the course of six hours.

REAL TALK

“Sometimes we end up being on longer before the opening than a client initially anticipated because the opening gets pushed back. That happens all the time

and is expected with restaurant openings.” —ELIZABETH HAMEL

H O W T O G R O W & T H R I V E I N T H E R E S T A U R A N T B U S I N E S S 2 0


METRICS TO CONSIDER Finding a magic metric that measures the success or ROI of these “squishy” efforts (squishy as the opposite of concrete) is a near-impossible task. There are several ways you can measure success, though, and together these metrics paint a larger picture.

• Bookings and covers: Brand awareness is important, but the most critical measure of success if you want to stay in business will always be this: Are people coming to your restaurant? You can’t always tie visits back to specific marketing efforts, but if a spike in reservations is correlated with a major media story, you can assume a connection. Plus, sometimes the simplest answers are the best. Plenty of successful restaurateurs welcome guests at the host stand and ask, “How did you hear about us?”

• Website visits that come from other digital, social content: This varies depending on the service you use to build and maintain your website. If you’ve built your site in Squarespace, for example, you can use Squarespace’s analytics tool. Google Analytics also works for any site (including those from Squarespace). The amount of available information may seem daunting, so focus on what’s most important to you: total visits, the traffic coming from a social campaign, or search terms used to land on your page.

• Media hits: Who wrote about your restaurant? How big was the feature? What sort of audience did it reach? Were other restaurants included? Start a spreadsheet of publications and the names of reporters so you can reach out, thank them for the coverage, and start an ongoing conversation. These are people you can reach out to later on when you open for lunch or offer a New Year’s Eve special.

• Digital ad tracking: How many impressions did your ad receive? Clicks? Conversions? Accessing these analytical tools depends on the platform you use to run your ads. If you’re just getting started, Google Ads (google.com/ads) is a good place to start; you can build and customize your own ad campaign which will give you immediate access to reports that track how many people saw your ad, and how many clicked. While investing here might make sense for larger groups, it’s not necessarily a good use of precious capital for smaller, independent restaurants. Those types of concepts will benefit from OpenTable’s in-house digital marketing efforts, which aim to get your restaurant’s table availability at the top of search results.


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Anecdotal EvidenceLOOK AT A MIX OF BUSINESS AND ENGAGEMENT METRICS TO MEASURE SUCCESS, AND HAVE FAITH THAT THE EFFORT YOU PUT INTO BUILDING YOUR BRAND WILL PAY OFF. Don’t discount that gut feeling you have after spending a lot of time on a social media or PR initiative—creative marketing does translate to guest visits. While, again, there’s no magic metric that says an Instagram post to 1,000 followers leads to 100 reserva-tions, you will begin to notice patterns.

“It’s hard for people to believe in that, but good social media absolutely does translate to people coming into the restaurant,” says Bill Chait.

Andrew Oliver agrees, saying, “Overall, we pay close attention to all feedback—from guests, media, employees—to ensure our concepts, offerings, and communications are being received well and in the intended way, always in line with the restaurant brand and vision.”

These new success measurements are far more nuanced and subtle than the offers of yesterday. “Obviously if you have an offer that says, ‘mention free pasta when you walk in and we’ll give you a free pasta,’ you can measure your message’s impact,” says Chait.

“But that’s now passé and we view that as very brand damaging. The best approach: be as savvy as possible to all of your available channels and look at them as a large picture instead of disparate parts.”

In short: you can measure both business metrics (people in your restaurant, covers, sales) and brand engagement metrics (impressions, followers). Keep in mind that both of these are important and deserve your attention. An Instagram “like” may translate to a sale, but there’s no guarantee—so you should maintain a healthy balance of measur-ing both of these metrics.

• Growth of social followings: Has your following grown? By how much? Twitter accounts come with built-in analytics at analytics.twitter.com. The breakdown shows reach, follower growth, and popular posts helpfully organized by month. Instagram is now offering analytics support for business accounts only—to designate your account as a business account, you must link it to a business Facebook page. (Currently this is the only way to access Instagram’s in-house analytics platform.)

• Engagement on social media: How many people are commenting? Sharing? And what are they saying? Praise or critical feedback early on can be incredibly helpful in solidifying your social strategy, training your staff, and so much more.

REAL TALK

“I don’t think we have an analytic that we use exactly. It’s all about how many followers

you have and how many views the video has. If you produce something, you end up having

50 views, and you only had 10 followers at the end of the day, you failed.”

—KEVIN BOEHM

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Danger! Early Warnings and

Red Flags from those who have seen them all

PRIORITIZE CONSISTENCY.“Very often the restaurants we see opening and closing quickly either did not have consistency or didn’t evolve. In a city like New York that is moving all the time, there is no way you can survive that. And consistency is very important, because clients do not easily forget a bad experience.” —Eric Ripert, Le Bernardin

OFFER MORE THAN ONE THING.“People think that restaurants are about, ‘I’m a really good cook so I’m going to be able to open a restaurant,’ or ‘I’ve got a really great recipe for pasta, so I’m going to open a restaurant.’ Unfortunately there are a lot more reasons that people go to restaurants. Restaurants have to be successful at cutting across different factors that make them popular. When people have a narrow view of what is going to make a restaurant suc-cessful, they don’t understand you have to have more than one element, you have to have several.” —Bill Chait

CONTROL YOUR COSTS.“Because the consumer always wants more for less, it’s extremely hard to make enough money to continue on with if you’re not near-perfect in controlling your costs and execution. The costs associated with the restaurant business, including food costs and labor costs, have done nothing but go up. If you want to use fresh, local ingredients, you’re at the mercy of elements that have little or nothing to do with you—so you have to plan around what you can control.” —Andrew Oliver, Oliver & Bonacini Restaurants

GIVE GUESTS WHAT THEY WANT.“You have to listen to your guests. I talked to someone who was working on a new location in a different state for a California-based brand and insisted on having the exact same menu. People in the new demographic didn’t respond to it, and he saw his numbers go down.” —Andrew Mosblech, Director of Operations, The Kitchen Bistros



On Reviews and Reviewers

Early Diner ReviewsASK GUESTS FOR FEEDBACK ONLINE AND OFFLINE TO START BUILDING YOUR REPUTATION. You’re already familiar with the notion of user-submitted reviews on online sites and how important they’ve become to business success. For a new or young restaurant, good reviews on these sites are important for generating new business and contribut-ing to your restaurant’s overall reputation. As early as opening day, you can encourage positive reviews.

If people have a positive experience and express that sentiment to you or your staff, let them know you’d appreciate a review on OpenTable or other review sites. Mention you are a new restaurant and you would love their help to get the word out. You can also subtly include this information with the check presenter; a separate card or line on the check encouraging diners to leave a review of your new restaurant isn’t intrusive. This way, you start to lay a positive foundation that will definitely be useful and important down the road.

PROFESSIONAL REVIEWS A successful review in the press is perhaps the best proof of early PR and marketing success, and of course everyone wants one. An early review is a true test of all of your planning and marketing in action.

A solid PR strategy can help, but obviously can’t completely control a journalist’s opin-ion. “When the expectation that a reviewer had going into the restaurant matched with what they received once there—that’s how you get a good review,” says Hamel. “If they have a different expectation—maybe they heard wrong information from a friend, or misunderstand your concept—it could make for a bad review. When the experience doesn’t match what a reviewer thought it would be, that’s how you get a bad review.” She adds that it’s PR’s job to manage these expectations for journalists, hence the importance of early messaging and action.

No one is immune from this press cycle. “Food critics and lists, you cannot control,” says Eric Ripert of New York’s revered Le Bernardin. “But no matter what we get, when it’s positive, especially coming from a food critic—we celebrate. We celebrate and share that with the staff because it’s their motivation, it’s a reward.” On the flip side, “If we don’t get something positive we share it with the team as well, but in a constructive way. We discuss what was the mistake or what is the weakness and if we believe we have a weakness we address it and change it.”

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8. Make the most of opening coverage. Enlist a PR agency to help you create all of the assets you need to tell your story—bios, photos, a press release—and get that story in front of the media. Use reservations as a media moment!

9. Measure your success. As early as possible, strike a balance between business metrics (covers, sales) and anecdotal evidence (social followers, “likes”). Understanding how these work in tandem is key to understanding and guiding your success.

10. Encourage positive reviews. Ask guests for feedback online and offline to start building your reputation.

Key Takeaways1. Understand your place in the restaurant ecosystem. Your location, menu,

clientele, decor, and staff all set the tone for your restaurant’s brand, tone, and feel.

2. Set up your floor for success. Customize your floor management tools to reflect your restaurant’s unique flow—decide when you want reservations, what you expect turn times to be, and when you’ll accept large parties.

3. Prioritize staff training. The people who work in your restaurant are a critical part of your brand and your communication with guests.

4. Figure out the best way to tell your story. A solid mix of website, social media, PR, and in-restaurant storytelling enhance and enforce your brand. Be creative!

5. Choose the amount of online presence you have the ability to maintain. Prioritize your website and Facebook page first, then build awareness on Instagram and Twitter.

6. Reach as many potential diners as possible. Think outside traditional advertising channels and get in front of diners where they are looking for a special experience. Start building relationships with them early on.

7. Create a tone guide for consistency across channels. Define your vision, voice, and content plan, and use the guide as a point of reference for your whole team.

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Part 2: Middle StageAfter a few months of operation but after the

opening buzz has worn off, the next part of a

restaurant’s lifecycle contains unique challenges.

Now that you have some operation under your

belt, it’s likely time to make decisions that take

advantage of a knowledgeable, engaged staff;

maximize efficiency; and enhance your current

marketing and PR strategy. You might also

consider a change—staff, menu, layout—or even

a new location.



Stay In The Flow

Invest in PeopleTHE FIRST STEP IN THIS STAGE: OPERATE EFFICIENTLY. THIS MEANS INVESTING IN A WELL-TRAINED STAFF AND STREAMLINED AND EFFICIENT OPERATIONS AND PROCESSES, WHILE KEEPING AN EYE TOWARD THE FUTURE.

As discussed previously, people are some of the most important resources you have. After you’ve found good talent for opening, it’s important to nurture that talent.

“Recruiting is a challenge,” says Andrew Mosblech, Director of Operations at The Kitchen Bistros, out of Boulder, CO. “The old adage is true: It’s hard to find good people. Restaurants keep opening and opening and there are probably not enough skilled people to even staff those restaurants.”

STAFF TRAINING AND CONTINUING EDUCATION Everyone, from restaurants with one location to the largest national groups, can benefit from a formalized training program. The program itself doesn’t have to be formal, just the approach. “We have a way of bringing managers into the company,” says Founding Farmers’ Dan Simons. “It’s called Farm School.” The program is a mix of on-the-job training specific to the Founding Farmers philosophy as well as intensive classroom training to make sure managers completely understand the brand vision.

Conversely, Jacob Heller, Cost Analyst and OpenTable liaison at Bravo Brio Restaurant Group, has 118 locations to consider when training staff. “We have an online training site available only to internal managers. I made 12 intro videos for OpenTable that all of the restaurant managers can watch detailing everything from the basics on how to take a reservation on the iPad, to how to seat a walk-in, to more advanced functionality.”

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These examples detail opposite ends of the spectrum, but share key strategies:• Choose what works best for your situation. Your restaurant’s vision, mission,

location, and resources all dictate how to best educate staff. What works for a small restaurant might not scale for a large group.

• Standardize training and education. Whether on-the-job, classroom, or some combination, work through an onboarding and continuing education process. Then document it.

• Work through transitions. Because they’re in a period of rapid growth, Mosblech and his team at The Kitchen are constantly documenting and workshopping all training and education initiatives. “What’s new for us is taking what used to be a progressive, oral tradition and documenting every piece of it. We put everything on paper and work with staff from the ground up.”

• Be flexible. As your restaurant changes, grows, or expands, your needs will change. Any training programs should adjust accordingly.

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Get your message aligned. You can’t spread your vision without having a solid one. Alignment is one of the ingredients of a great company, meaning everyone is on the same page. This starts with creating a solid message at the top and disseminating it through internal communications, any printed training or onboarding materials, and training staff.

Think about your restaurant’s evolution. What does that look like? By continually evolving, you attract and retain the best talent. People who have a lot of aptitude and ability don’t want to figure something out and be stuck inside the box they built. They want to build a new box.

Vary your training program. If you do on-the-job training only, you miss the opportunity to teach the academic hows and whys. On-the-job training teaches the operational how and the hospitality vibe; classroom allows for role play and deep explanations of the why, and the motivations that can inspire people to consistently followed the prescribed how.

Consider teaching programs yourself. I find developing real curriculums and teach-ing them myself is very valuable. People love to learn from the owners!

Choose the right medium. I’m a big fan of classroom teaching because I want to teach staff in a personal, direct, and interactive way. I leave distance learning to bigger corporations.

Stay true to your mission. We promised ourselves we would always evolve. We’re walking our internal talk, even if when it gets challenging. We’re doing it this way because we said we were going to.

How To Attract and Nurture

the Best Talent —Dan Simons, Founding Farmers



AN EYE TO THE FUTURE In addition to the day-to-day improvements you’ll notice with a well-trained and educated staff, remember to keep an eye toward what’s ahead. “We are always thinking about a pipeline,” says Mosblech. “A lot of great restaurant groups talk about a bench, where they’re up one or two managers at all times, or looking at mid-level managers and asking, ‘How can I breed this person to become an AGM? How can I breed that AGM to become a GM?’ Because of this, our recruiting conversation is happening months in advance.”

This exercise comes back to having a solid vision and message for your restaurant. This way, you’re able to nurture talent you have in order to create the best possible fit for your growing business.

Operate EfficientlyLOOK FOR ANY OPPORTUNITY TO INCREASE EFFICIENCY. SEEMINGLY SMALL CHANGES TO LABOR AND FLOW CAN HELP YOU SERVE MORE GUESTS AND BOOST PROFITS. Efficient operations create a good work environment—and help your restaurant’s bottom line. After some time spent in business, work to identify any areas for improve-ment, however small.

EXAMINE THE NUMBERS Simons’ advice: look closely at the numbers. “Because we cook so much from scratch—bread and pasta, for example—we were able to look for our own internal productivity increases. Especially in the bakery, when you can really get the production schedule to align with demand, you’re able to reduce labor costs by following productivity metrics in each department. We measure sales per labor hour for our productivity.”

His team uses this approach for all areas of the restaurant—the prep kitchen, the line, server performance—and identifies each job’s productivity metric. “This has helped us to see things that might be a great idea, but are too inefficient and don’t create value,” he says. “Do we need to reengineer the work? Eliminate the work? Or, should we try to drive more sales in the area that work produces? Studying productivity and under-standing the math is the place where the reengineering really comes into play.”

CONSIDER YOUR FRONT-OF-HOUSE FLOW Analyze your spend and output and find opportunities there, but also look critically at your front-of-house flow. Look at:

• Number of covers per night. Could you do more, based on your concept and space?

• Turn times. Are they accurate in your floor management settings? Are there ways to optimize them based on the patterns you’ve observed? Where might there be opportunities for an additional turn?

• Reservation settings. What is your largest reservation size? Could you adjust your settings to accept larger parties at certain times on certain days of the week? (Tuesday at 5 p.m., you may find space for that party of 10.)

• Shoulder times. When is your restaurant empty? When do you need more business?

• Steps of service. Are there things you can eliminate or streamline to turn tables faster?

• Your menu. What’s selling? What’s not selling? Remember: listen to guest feedback and adapt appropriately.

• Staffing. Determine your busiest hours and slowest hours. Are you scheduling the right mix of staff at the right time? For example: don’t pay three managers during a time that’s better suited for two.

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Let’s say you have a 100-seat restaurant. If 100 people all showed up at the same time, the restaurant would fall apart—the dining room, the bar, the kitchen. Instead, you want to control the pacing: by limiting the number of people who can walk in the door at any given time, or by carefully choosing how much availability you want to show online. Operators can control access to reservation times, creating a night with three turns instead of two, for example. But the process has always been manual and imper-fect. With OpenTable data, we can see how many people are searching for a restaurant on a particular date, and how many people searched for the past three years. With this information, the system can intelligently optimize availability according to demand in a way that’s completely automated. The way you can think about it is, get three turns without having to do all this manual work at restaurants that have the demand to do so,” says Wagner.

Guest Center is designed to be adaptable, to work for any restaurant at any stage and to grow along with your restaurant. Hone in on the details to drill down and truly under-stand your guests. Each operational observation is an opportunity to improve your sys-tems, run more smoothly, and build your business. Never stop digging in and making seemingly small adjustments—they will pay off big.

Once you know what’s working and what’s not, take action. Update turn times in your system to reflect your typical traffic patterns, and you may find you can squeeze in an extra turn. Welcome large parties during your shoulder times to generate extra busi-ness. Tweak your menu to showcase more of the dishes and ingredients your guests love. Control your labor cost.

If you’re working with a full restaurant most nights, there’s still room for table optimi-zation. OpenTable’s Guest Center system is designed to be flexible to help you get the most out of every table—it can make decisions to optimize turns, depending how much demand you have for a certain date. It can block certain times to encourage reserva-tions that maximize table turns.

“Every restaurant wants to be full, but not right away and not all at one time,” says Adam Wagner, OpenTable’s Product Manager for inventory solutions. “It’s important to control the flow of people in and out of the door.”

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Control what you need to in order to maintain consistency. Our stores are trained to use Guest Center on the iPad, and that’s all they need to worry about. Anything that needs to be set up on the back end is taken care of by myself or our District Manager. We learned that allowing every restaurant manager to edit floor plans and table combinations increased the chance not only of inconsistency, but also the potential to negatively affect capacity.

Make resources available to everyone who needs to use them. We have an online training site available to managers. I made a 12-video series about OpenTable showing everything from the basics on how to take a reservation or seat a walk-in to walking through all of the functionality.

Use available tools to extend your reach. Sometimes it takes time to audit and give feedback so we can make sure that each of our restaurants is set up consistently. A few months ago, we started testing party sizes larger than 12. We found that when you go onto the metro pages for some restaurants, accepting an online reservation for 20 makes us stick out.

Make changes that make sense for your restaurant. Large restaurant groups are not one size fits all. For example, we tested private dining for a year in all of our restaurants. Adoption was very dependent on the location; some restaurants had 10 to 12 requests per month, some had four or five the entire year. We looked at the data and decided which were getting the biggest benefit and we chose which locations would participate in the program.

Technology helps, but it should not replace the human touch. Those videos also cover things like having the right mindset around the systems—for example, under-standing that it’s just a tool and we have to be the brains behind the tool. We can’t just rely on the system to run the host stand. That’s available to all of our general manag-ers and assistant managers in the restaurants.

How To Use OpenTable to Your

Advantage Efficiently —Jacob Heller, BBRG

Large corporate restaurant groups can teach anyone something about efficiency. Jacob Heller, Cost Analyst and OpenTable liaison for Bravo Brio Restaurant Group, has imple-mented a number of procedures and practices to keep all of his group’s 118 restaurants running efficiently while maintaining consistency.



When Business Slows DownWHEN YOU NEED MORE DINERS, FIRST IDENTIFY WHEN YOU NEED THEM. THEN BOOST YOUR PRESENCE ACROSS CERTAIN WEBSITES AND PLATFORMS TO REACH A NEW, HUNGRY AUDIENCE.

Most restaurants experience the up-and-down shifts of demand as they evolve. But there’s plenty you can do from a marketing perspective to reach new diners and re-en-gage with those you already know.

REAL TALK

“You can’t lie to today’s sophisticated consumers. You can’t tell them what you think would

appeal to them instead of the truth. If you do that, you alienate your diner forever.”

—BILL CHAIT

IDENTIFY YOUR WEAK SPOTS If you’ve looked at your shoulder times and determined when you’re empty, you know where you need help. What can you do to encourage more traffic? Focus on filling the house during those times.

To acquire more diners and generate more business, you may decide to purchase ads on sites like Facebook or Google. Those sites will then “boost” your ad to certain people in their audience, who will see it and hopefully click through and book a table. Restaurants on OpenTable only pay when a diner is actually seated, so restaurants don’t pay for exposure alone—only true guests.

Restaurants can also boost their presence on OpenTable and position themselves in front of an audience of diners who are actively looking for a table. OpenTable’s Bonus Point Tables program can drive interest and traffic to your restaurant, offering higher reward points at certain times of day (and having your restaurant appear at the top of search results). The cost per seated diner is higher with this program, but if you’re already invested in your restaurant’s opening hours, paying a bit more for a table that will spend $40/per person works in your favor. Think of it like search engine market-ing: you’re securing premium placement and unparalleled visibility with some of the world’s most sophisticated diners.

SOCIAL MEDIA At this stage, it’s time to continue your social media and marketing plans, remaining consistent in style and tone, while considering what a potential guest or repeat cus-tomer might want to see. “It’s to your benefit if you position yourself correctly,” says restaurateur Bill Chait. “People can see what you are and say, ‘Hey, that’s what I want.’” Chait recommends using social media to evoke your restaurant’s feel. Including food photos is smart, but your feed shouldn’t be a constant barrage of menu items. “It’s more about communicating what this place is about on a general as well as specific level to give people a feel of what it is. All marketing that is effective is all tied together with the gestalt of the location, of the menu, of the service system.”

This is also a good time to evaluate what’s working and what’s not. Are there specific social posts that received a lot of engagement? How do you build on those? Use your past success to firm up your social strategy. Is the right person on your staff managing social accounts? Is the process as streamlined as it could be? Once you have an idea of what’s working, you’ll be better suited to optimize it for success.

And, finally, check your following! Who are your fans and followers? What do they like? What do they ask for in the comments? You’ve captured a captive audience that wants to hear from you, so give them what they want. This is also the time to identify key players in your market on social media. Who are the local influencers—food press, bloggers, photographers, and others who dine out regularly? Follow them and engage with their posts. Next time you have a newsworthy moment (opening for brunch ser-vice, for example) invite these folks in for a preview to engage them even further.

RATINGS AND REVIEWS As discussed in the first section of this guide, user-submitted review sites are a necessary part of your restaurant’s message and, ultimately, its success. Says Chait, “You are always subject to the marketing that’s happening inside the restaurant and is projected outward through things like social media and user-submitted reviews. If you can figure out how to take advantage of anything that projects out your image, that’s a huge marketing tool.”

Many review sites allow you, the business owner, to respond directly to guest ratings and reviews. Most are public-facing, meaning that anyone who can read a user-submitted review can also see your response. Others, like OpenTable, give diners the option to share their contact information so that owners and managers can follow up to learn exactly what happened and how they can make it right. Both can work to your advantage.

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• Respond directly to serious allegations. Allegations of foodborne illness or staff misconduct require a fast and personal response.

• It’s OK to message someone directly. Thanks to the internet, it’s relatively easy to contact someone directly. It’s also OK to ask for contact information in order to follow up or offer a more thorough response than one shared on a public site. This is also a good venue to privately invite them back into the restaurant to give you another chance to make it right.

EXTERNAL PRESS What’s a PR moment in this middle stage, after the opening buzz? “Articles written about you obviously help,” says Chait. “But no one has continuous unending articles.” He’s right—after the initial splash, you need to create newsworthy events that lend eas-ily to press coverage.

This is something a PR agency or internal marketing team can help to do, but there’s plenty an owner or General Manager can do to make news when you might not see an obvious story.

The frequency with which you respond to reviews will vary depending on time and resources, but there are a few guidelines to consider.

• Be consistent. Some business owners like to respond to every single review. Others will respond to only negative reviews, or those that contain misinformation. Whatever tactic you choose, try to practice it across the board. If you’re overwhelmed by the volume of comments and reviews, decide on a number or frequency to address. Responding to every critique is unreasonable and can make you look defensive. Replying to only positive reviews or comments gives the impression you’re purposely ignoring negative feedback.

• Don’t get defensive. Sometimes a reviewer is just wrong, but calling too much attention to the mistake may put you on the defensive in the eyes of the reader. For example: a GM shared recently that a reviewer posted that their soup was thickened with cornstarch, which was absolutely false.

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POTENTIAL MEDIA MOMENTS: • Extend opening buzz by staggering announcements of lunch, brunch,

or breakfast service. • Open another space within your space—a downstairs bar, a private dining room,

or a chef’s table, for example. • Plan for anniversaries. Think “one year in” features that highlight your restaurant’s

first year, challenges, and any changes you’ve made along the way. • Announce something new on an important date: a new cocktail in honor of your

one-year anniversary, or a new signature menu item released for a holiday or special event in your city.

• Feature your staff. A new bartender or chef makes for great press. Or, focus on a staff member’s interest or passion. Does your head bartender know everything about Japanese whisky? Did your head chef just complete an inspirational tour of Asia?

• Consider partnerships or special promotions. Local distillers, winemakers, breweries, or local food or local food suppliers are great for this.

• Throw a special event: a tasting menu with your sommelier’s favorite pairings, or a passed hors d’oeuvres event to celebrate a new appetizer menu.

• Participate in a charity event. Cater food, or offer your restaurant as a venue. Doing good makes you look good—in the most authentic way.

Essentially, you want to be able to talk about something new at any stage. Remember, while you’re head-down operating your business, plenty of moments can potentially stand out as unique opportunities for media coverage.

Timing is critical here. Wagstaff Worldwide’s Elizabeth Hamel recommends waiting a couple months (perhaps two to three) before either announcing new meal service or a new space to extend your reach. “We’re able to help secure mini opening coverage fea-tures around these events,” she says.

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Metrics to ConsiderTAKE STOCK OF YOUR PERFORMANCE BY REEXAMINING YOUR COVER VOLUME, YOUR MENU, AND BUSINESS NUMBERS. WHERE CAN YOU DO BETTER?

With months of operation and real data to reflect upon, you probably have a good sense of where your restaurant is, what’s working, what’s not working, and what needs to change.

What to look at: • Number and frequency of reservations: Have they changed? How and why?

Which times are most popular (and least popular)?• Party size: What size is most typical? Are you meeting demand? Is your floor set

up accordingly?• Popularity of special programs: Private dining. Gift cards. Are you offering

enough? Are you promoting them enough?• Menu items: What do people ask for? What keeps them coming back? Is anything

missing? Think about any specials you’ve offered. Were any crowd-pleasing enough to make the regular menu?

• Guest feedback: What are people saying in the restaurant? What are they saying on social media? In reviews?

• Numbers: Metrics are your best friend here. As discussed above, Founding Farmers’ Dan Simons allows the numbers to guide much of his decision-making process. “We have a philosophy that I call profit architecture. While it’s great if a restaurant is popular and people love the food, if when you analyze check average and table turns, along with sales per square foot and occupancy costs, you realize the math doesn’t work‚ then the hard work begins: maybe the kitchen is too big; too few seats per square foot, or the check average and throughput don’t support to combine the required labor—something needs to change, and it takes insightful math to drive the right instincts.”

Use this time to develop a daily routine around how you interact with your restaurant as a manager. Maybe you review last night’s sales and tonight’s reservations over your morning cup of coffee and check in with your team to make adjustments. Whatever you do, always know what’s happening on the floor and where you stand with your success metrics. Especially when you’re operating more than one concept, that can be challenging.


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REAL TALK

“A line out the door at a place that isn’t operating efficiently

just means you are going to have that many more sad people

when you close. Those are the restaurants that have a good

consumer proposition but don’t have a sound profit proposition.”

—DAN SIMONS, FOUNDING FARMERS

One way OpenTable has empowered restaurant owners and managers to make better business decisions is with our Guest Center iPhone app. You can see real-time insights about your business and know what’s happening at the host stand no matter where you are: shift overviews, total covers, and peaks in service. And when VIPs call asking for a table, you can add their reservation straight from your phone. That kind of instant access allows you to prepare for service (and prepare your team).

With the iPhone app, we’re also laying a foundation to deliver powerful business tools into the hands of owners and GMs—to optimize their marketing and generate demand at the push of a button.

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE• (Another) note on the ROI of social media: “People see a few pictures, then hear about you through word of mouth. Everything that social media is about is communication with people who are like-minded influencers, whether they’re your friends or people that you follow. All of those people are part of the communication system of the restaurant. And that’s the nuance of this.”—Bill Chait

• A note on the ROI of PR efforts: “As we go on and are working with clients who have been open over three years, it’s a little tougher to show ROI. It’s hard to equate a small media placement with actual people going into the restaurant,” says Elizabeth Hamel. “We try to make sure our efforts are being amplified on social media by our restaurant and by our agency. This is tough, and as an industry we struggle with it.”



The Realization MomentFROM SMALL CHANGES AND GRADUAL EVOLUTION TO A FULL-ON RECON- CEPTING, CHANGE IS INEVITABLE IN THIS INDUSTRY. RETHINKING YOUR SERVICE STYLE, SPACE, OR TALENT CAN BOOST YOUR BUSINESS AND KEEP YOU RELEVANT OVER THE YEARS.

Sometimes, even after doing all of the above, you come to the realization that it’s time for a change. It doesn’t have to be a big change, either; don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself all the time. This could be because it’s been years since your restaurant has had a change, or it could be that you sense something’s not working as well as it should be, and you need to adjust to survive. No one is immune to this. “I’m a firm believer in always taking inventory both personally and professionally of where you’ve been, where you’re currently at, and where you want to be,” says Boka Group’s Kevin Boehm. Don’t fear the big projects; that’s how you stay in business.

CHANGE THE SERVICE “At one point we realized the service and ambiance was very haughty—the style the clientele liked in the ‘70s and ‘80s but what today would be seen as stuffy service,” says Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin. “In the ‘90s we decided that style wasn’t relevant anymore and we decided to relax our service. We kept the formality in terms of steps of service, the technicality and the excellence, but we changed the way waiters interacted with clients.” In 2016, after 30 years of operation, Le Bernardin was named one of the top restaurants in New York City by writer Adam Platt.

CHANGE THE SPACE Obviously, in Le Bernardin’s 30 years of existence, they’ve experienced more than just service changes. “Five years ago we redid the dining room entirely,” says Ripert. “We felt the service had evolved, the food had evolved, and the decor was no longer in harmony with our food and service.” Le Bernardin chose a more contemporary design, bringing more energy and interactivity to the room. “Keeping the same comfort but taking the stuffy away.”

Is It Time To Change?

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New York Times restaurant reviewer reacted to the change, saying, “The old dining room was always compared to a corporate boardroom, but for some reason its monumen-tal scale and profusion of framed canvases in an antiquated style made me think of the atrium of a minor art museum. That’s all different now… The achievement of [the new] design is that the interior now walks in step with Le Bernardin’s cuisine. Both are up-to-date, lively, intimate and playful.”

CHANGE THE CHEF Chicago’s Boka Restaurant has had three chefs over the course of 13 years. “When we opened, we got busy, then slowed. We got our second chef, he won Food and Wine’s Best New Chef in 2008 and we got busy again. In ‘13 it started to wane a bit and we brought Lee Wolen, our current chef,” says Boehm. Each time the chef changed, he explains, it had the feel of a brand new opening.

CHANGE IT ALL With Boka’s chef changes came menu changes and space changes. “It was a relaunch,” says Boehm. Even though Boka was successful and doing fine, he says, the team wanted to get back to where they were at their peak level. “The only way to do that was to build upon where we’d already been, so we gutted the restaurant and completely rebuilt it.”

REAL TALK

“You have to do something big or it’s not a relaunch. You maybe don’t have to do full design and chef and

menu, but you probably have to do two of those three.” —KEVIN BOEHM

Take Advice From OthersFEEDBACK FROM A PR AGENCY OR GUEST REVIEWS SHOULD GUIDE YOUR VISION FOR THE FUTURE.

PR staff, whether agency or internal, are great barometers for understanding how well your restaurant is being received, both in the press and with diners. Because PR pros get feedback directly from media—those who craft your restaurant’s press image—they’re able to identify any issues (or success stories) early on. “Generally, feedback that we see in reviews is especially important, and we always flag that for clients,” says Hamel.

“If one person says something I’ve never heard before, I don’t usually bring that up.” Conversely, “If I start hearing the same thing over and over again, it’s time to address it.” These issues can range from small to large. “If it’s something really major, like they got a terrible review, or the menu isn’t working, or the concept doesn’t work, we’ll have those conversations,” she adds. “But usually we don’t have to tell a restaurant these things, because they already know.” In this scenario, consider a PR agency the messen-ger, but restaurateurs should look to their own teams for major decisions.

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The Realization MomentHEALTHY GROWTH HAPPENS WHEN YOU HAVE A SOLID TEAM AND SUSTAINABLE SYSTEMS IN PLACE. Your restaurant is successful. Your vision is solid. Your marketing strategy is working and you are enjoying increased popularity. What’s next? Perhaps a second location—either more of the same, or perhaps a new concept.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING “It’s very easy to dilute what you’ve done in the opening of the first when when you open the second location,” says Chait. Ask yourself:

• Do we have the resources? Not just money—do you have the right people? The right roles? In some cases, restaurateurs are driven to open new concepts because they want to develop talent who deserves to move up. This is an excellent situation to find yourself in.

• Do we have the time? There aren’t enough hours in the day to replicate everything you did with your first opening without the ability to do some of those things yourself. A trustworthy team is critical for this.

• Do we have the right systems in place in the original location to sustain a second? A second restaurant does not operate in a vacuum; the original location will feel effects even if the second concept is completely different.

• Understand why you were successful in the first place. Is it your pricing? Is it your food quality? If you’re not replicating what made your first restaurant work, you won’t be connected to the same segment when you open a second.

SWEAT THE DETAILS “Deciding we were ready to expand was a combination of believing we had developed the managerial talent to still execute well, combined with the demand for reserva-tions,” says Founding Farmers’ Dan Simons. “We had more demand than we had seats. There was a line out the door.” Once you’ve made that decision, though, the details matter.

Is It Time To Expand?

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Ask yourself: • Will this be a second location or new concept?• What flagship elements do I need to keep and translate to the new location? “If you’re going to replicate your brand you need some brand recognition at the core. This could be graphic design, could be certain signature menu items, could be decor in the restaurant, but it has to express your message.” —Andrew Mosblech, The Kitchen

• What do I need to change? This could be a lot or a little, depending on your location. What hours can your new market support? What menu items won’t work? What resonates? You can’t expect the exact same things to work in a new location—something as simple as work schedules in the neighborhood will affect business.

• Who will run the restaurant? Do you want to take staff from an existing location? What does that mean for the existing location’s continued success?

• What intentional changes will you make? What can you build upon? When Simons opened the second Founding Farmers location, he intentionally targeted the D.C. suburbs after a successful downtown location. “I felt like a lot of guests out there would know us from downtown, and now we’re just putting one closer to where they are. We made sure to evolve the design, and the food and beverage menus, we wanted to give our guests an evolution of the brand, not a replication.” Not only did he extend his reach, he gave the same customers more opportunities to engage with the Founding Farmers brand.

REAL TALK

“One of the biggest differences between unique concepts and chains is that chains can advertise and

streamline the efficiencies of all their locations from one ad and one promotion; with unique concepts, it’s very targeted and there isn’t the money to justify X, Y, and Z at one restaurant. Relying on word of mouth, we see

which promotions actually get traction; we have to sort through the noise and pinpoint what does well.”

—ANDREW OLIVER

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Understand your vision thoroughly. The Kitchen started because our founders wanted a world-class neighborhood restaurant that sourced locally as much as possible. Then, they got turbo-charged with the idea of evolving food culture in America: simple food, carefully sourced, and thoughtfully prepared. That was our mission vision.

Communicate your message internally. Everyone working in our restaurants knows why we’re here, from busers to general managers, because we believe in our mission and share that message every day.

Grow practice and procedure as you expand. As we’ve grown, we’ve put in systems like training manuals, checklists, higher profit-and-loss reporting practices, and the associated rigor and cadence. Once these systems are in place and function efficiently, there’s less noise and more opportunity for rapid growth.

Research each new market and tailor your goals and expectations appropriately. Our goal is to participate in the community and give back; that’s why we’re here, and we’re lucky that people open their arms to this goal. But, for example, Chicago is a very competitive town where people like their Chicago restaurants. When we opened in Chicago, we purposely targeted a great local chef and didn’t make a lot of noise in our opening. We wanted to become a part of the fabric of the community first; the buzz-building followed. A different community might want us to make a huge splash.

Listen to your guests. You need to know what they want and also be flexible enough to change. Of course, you need to have some brand recognition at your core when opening in a new market, but you can’t always replicate what you’ve done elsewhere. Be willing to adjust quickly.

How To: Scale Your Restaurant’s Vision

—Andrew Mosblech, The Kitchen Bistros

PERFECT YOUR TRAINING AND REPORTING SYSTEMS AND UNDERSTAND THE NUANCES OF A NEW MARKET BEFORE SCALING A SUCCESSFUL CONCEPT.

The Kitchen Restaurant Group, based in Boulder, opened a second location nearly 10 years after its first. Now, they’re expecting to reach at least seven locations before the end of 2017. Andrew Mosblech, Director of Operations for The Kitchen Bistros, explains how they’ve managed to stay true to their original vision and mission even while entering new markets.



• But respond retroactively if you have to. This is part of being flexible and willing to change within the constraints of your brand. For example, certain menu items or ingredients might perform well in a restaurant’s original location, but won’t translate to new diners in a new city. Be prepared for this feedback—especially if it could impact a signature menu item that you consider important to the brand.

SPECIAL CONCERNS FOR ENTERING A NEW MARKET What works in one location may not work in a second—and you don’t have to cross time zones to notice these differences. Even a location in a different part of town could have its own set of challenges: a suburban vs. a city location, for example. A few things to consider:

• Staff. Relocating trained staff members from your original location can help your brand; training a brand-new staff with no connection to the first restaurant might create a discord. “When we have a GM or a head chef or a handful of managers that are completely indoctrinated in the culture, and they have a high level of competency operationally, it makes the opening much smoother and it ensures the brand integrity,” says Mosblech.

• Menu items. If your restaurant features seasonal items, these can vary greatly by location. A place like Colorado is hyper-seasonal; California, by contrast, has local ingredients less affected by the time of year.

• Other intangible resources. Who is the best liquor distributor? What local brewery is doing great work? What channels are best for self-promotion? Who are the local influencers? These small pieces of information can make all the difference as you get to know a new area. Don’t discount the community that makes your original location successful. What can you learn from the first and bring to the next one?

Mosblech recently opened The Kitchen’s fifth location in Memphis, a community not known for the sort of food and ingredient sourcing the Boulder-based group is based on.

“We have strict sourcing guidelines,” he says. “It has to be local to a certain percentage, it has to be relationship-driven to a certain percentage, it has to be organic to a certain percentage. In some ‘food deserts’ in America, that doesn’t exist.

“We have to work as far as a year out lobbying to get these things locally,” he says. “We’ve partnered with other restaurants to do this—if there are three or four restaurants putting up purchases, maybe we can convince a farmer to diversify their crop or bring in a new seed that they otherwise wouldn’t plant.”

Respond to What Guests Want

STAY AHEAD OF EMERGING DINING AND SERVICE TRENDS, AND BE FLEXIBLE WITH YOUR VISION.

“It’s so important to listen to guests, be flexible to the demographic you serve, and be willing to adjust quickly,” says Mosblech of opening new locations.

• Stay ahead of the market. “All restaurants should reflect the manner in which people are eating today,” says Chait. Many people aren’t looking for a three-course, salad-entree-dessert menu anymore. Instead, people share food, order multiple dishes between themselves, and graze through waves of food and cocktails. “Our menus are a reflection of how people are eating today, and you always have to be looking at this because it changes over time.”

• A new location is an opportunity to tweak your formula. “Our next restaurant is called Farmers & Distillers; same restaurant DNA, but an evolved idea where we take our commitment to making our own product and thus have built a distillery inside the new restaurant,” says Simons, who calls his restaurant expansion a

“collection,” not a chain. “For our next Founding Farmers location, we will have solar on the roof and some menu changes, but we’ll continue to use the Founding Farmers name as a beacon for guest recognition.”

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Key Takeaways1. Efficient operation is the first step to ensuring continued success after

opening. Look for ways to make all of your processes, from staffing to front-of-house operations, as efficient as possible.

2. Your staff is your most important asset. A consistent vision, message, and proper training will ensure they deliver the best possible results. Continue to engage and develop them as time goes on.

3. Pay close attention to your success metrics. Look at productivity, covers, sales, and labor to identify areas for improvement. Understand what’s really working, and respond accordingly.

4. Optimize your front-of-house flow. Analyze covers and turn times regularly to identify smart ways to move faster and serve more guests.

5. Implement practices to maintain efficiency and consistency. Especially in larger organizations, establish a workflow with your staff that includes accessible training, clear responsibilities, and room for new learnings.

6. Identify your weak areas. In the inevitable business lull that occurs after the opening buzz has worn off, look for ways to engage with customers: social media engagement, new PR moments, and advertising solutions are great ways to increase awareness and bring people in.

7. Create buzz after an opening with PR. Announce a new service period, celebrate milestones, or partner with other brands. milestones, or partner with other brands.

8. Don’t be afraid of change—embrace it! Big projects, like a complete overhaul of the dining room, can mean big changes in business. Small changes can make a big difference, too. Tell your new story and reach a new audience.

9. When considering expansion, take stock of where you are and where you want to go. Make sure you have a solid team and sustainable systems in place before you grow your business. Tap into the community in your new location and start forging relationships early on.

10. Be proactive about your evolution. Stay ahead of dining trends, and be flexible with your vision so you can stay relevant over the years to come.

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Part 3: Ongoing Success and Long-Term SustainabilityThere’s no strict timeline for reaching this stage of stability

and lasting success. Markers of this success are different for

everyone and can include feeling as if your vision is realized

and honed, your operations run efficiently—thanks to

procedure, process, and a well-trained staff—or, of course,

reaching a profitable state.



To stay relevant, you have to keep changing—your menu, your service, and your space. Finally, success! This is no time to stay stagnant. If anything, reaching this level of ongoing success is a perfect opportunity to continue to iterate on the elements of your restaurant that made it a success in the first place.

THE REALITY OF CONSTANT CHANGE Just because you’ve found what works doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way forever. “I think all restaurants have to evolve,” says Bill Chait. “There’s no possible way to stay static and maintain a business.”

REAL TALK

“Just like in life, when you stop having goals at your restaurant, you start to die.”

—KEVIN BOEHM

WHAT TO CHANGE? To be fair, the changes needed vary depending on restaurant type and location. If your restaurant is located in a tourist-driven area with near-constant traffic and an ever-changing clientele of tourists, a tried-and-true formula could work for years. But for a restaurant looking to maintain its appeal over the course of five, 10, 20 years or more, you should be constantly evolving, according to Chait.

“Particularly the food offerings, the menu—anything you’re selling should change,” he says. “The dining room has to be moved around so that you’re evolving the look and style of it on some level. This is similar to the nature of diners—they’ll order the same thing every time for a while, but eventually they change their order.”

The difference between this more subtle evolution and the kind of large, sweeping change discussed in Part 2 is that it happens in tiny increments, over time. “Part of the evolution for mature restaurants is that you’re making these changes on a regular basis as opposed to sweeping change every five years.”

Stay Motivated: A Mature

Restaurant’s Evolution

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WHAT NOT TO CHANGE? Over time, your restaurant’s vision becomes its soul. This creates an inherent vibe that should be preserved while still tweaking elements around the edges. Chef/Owner Eric Ripert says, “Le Bernardin is 30 years old. What’s interesting in our history is that we have always kept our soul and core. At the same time, we have evolved and we are still relevant.” How? By tweaking execution (not core vision) along the way.

Aim to reach the point where change becomes so ingrained in your restaurant’s ethos that you hardly notice near-constant happening behind the scenes. “Now we evolve without knowing we evolve. When we look back then we see, ‘Wow, in 10 years we have changed so much.’”

Hold Yourself AccountableSET TANGIBLE GOALS TO STAY MOTIVATED AND KEEP STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE.

“Complacency is the death of a restaurant,” says Kevin Boehm. “We sit in each restau-rant every single year and we establish our goals for the next 12 months. We grade ourselves on this. Goals are easy when you’re opening: we want to get three stars in the Chicago Tribune, we want to get a Michelin Bib Gourmand—those things are concrete. When you’re six or seven years old, the goals are harder—you have to think more and be more creative.”

Boehm and his team put their goals on the wall and come back a year later to grade how they performed.

“Once you stop talking about what could be or stop trying to improve every little sector of the

restaurant, that’s when it starts to die.”

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• Diners themselves. What your guests order and how they order makes a difference, but all characteristics of the guests that dine in your restaurant contribute to its soul. Blount shares a humorous example that didn’t exactly go his way: “I once had an elderly customer who was leaving at 11:30 at night as I was standing at the front door. I held the door open and I told her goodnight. She walked back in and said, ‘I know who you are and I want to tell you your grandfather would be ashamed of you.’ And I said, ‘Ma’am, I can think of an awful lot of reasons why my grandfather might be ashamed of me but which particular one offended you tonight? I’d like to be able to address that.’ And she said, ‘In the main dining room of Antoine’s, I sat next to a man in, I tell you, his shirtsleeves, his shirtsleeves!” Instead of apologizing for the cultural shift in norms, Blount reminded her that she wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves as she might have done when his grandfather ran the restaurant.

NOW, MORE THAN EVER, SWEAT THE SMALL THINGS Nailing the details sets your restaurant apart at any stage. Now that the big things are managed, you have more time to focus on those nuances that make your restaurant stand out. From Blount’s perspective, this means both anticipating and responding to guests’ expectations. “I had a very quiet couple who got assigned a young, talkative waiter. When I noticed they weren’t having a good time, I addressed it, asking if I could do anything. We took the waiter out of that situation and changed to a waiter with the personality to meet the expectation of that customer. You have to look for those non-verbal cues. Is the guest enjoying the experience? If not, what can I do to fix that? If you

‘listen’ to your customers this way, I think they actually do tell you.”

Staying Culturally RelevantFROM SEASONAL MENUS TO SHARE PLATES, KEEP UP WITH LARGER SHIFTS IN THE FOOD AND DINING SCENE. Intentional internal change, however small, is something you can control as a restaura-teur. Larger cultural change, though, is something you have to respond to.

CULTURAL CHANGES THAT CAN AFFECT YOUR RESTAURANT’S ETHOS & SUCCESS• Menu trends. “At a chef-driven restaurant, for example, evolution and change

happen on a weekly, if not daily, basis,” says Chait. “Menus rotate seasonally, and there’s a refreshing, from a product standpoint, going on constantly.”

• The way people eat. The small, shareable plate trend has influenced all aspects of a restaurant, from table size and layout to serveware selections. “Twelve years ago, when The Kitchen started, it was all about farm-to-table. In Boulder we were one of the pioneers,” says Andrew Mosblech. “We realized we could do a better service to our community by promoting the idea of local, sustainable food.”

• Mealtime nuances. “Lunch has evolved, especially,” says Chait. “High-quality quick-service restaurants are so popular at lunch. It’s not because people don’t want good service, it’s because people prefer no service. They prefer to wait in line and then get their food.”

• The mix of reservations and walk ins. “There are more reservations now because it’s an easier process,” says Boehm. Once you stop talking about what could be or stop trying to improve every little sector of the restaurant, it marks the beginning of the end.” —Kevin Boehm

• Formality of service. Service, especially in fine dining, has become decidedly less formal over the years—Eric Ripert talked about this in Part 1. Sometimes, as was the case with Le Bernardin, you relax service. In other cases, maintaining a certain standard speaks to a restaurant’s history. CEO Rick Blount says of his New Orleans restaurant Antoine’s, “I have a very, very traditional menu. I have a traditional service style. My staff is in black suits with bow ties—male or female. Our staff still accommodates the ‘new’ but maintains this tradition.”

• Your clientele. “I’m a business in New Orleans,” says Blount. “People here eat a massive amount of seafood. But not all of my customers are from New Orleans, and not all of them have a passion for seafood. So we better think in terms of having fabulous menu items that are loyal to our culture, loyal to our business model, but that aren’t seafood.”

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Preserve the things that make the restaurant special. For example, our guests can request a specific waiter, creating a unique customer-waiter relationship. People are excited to have “their” waiter at Antoine’s, and this spans generations. One of our guests has the same waiter as her mother. That waiter’s father served her grandmother.

Little changes in the interest of adaptability count, too. I tell my waitstaff this all the time: we’re in the business of a thousand details. You can’t mess up any of them. Inevitably, you’re going to mess up some details. For example, a diner is lean-ing back with his legs crossed so the waiter serves him from the right instead of the left, because that’s better than asking him to move. There are a lot of details but you’re going to break some rules—you have to. Everyone does—everyone has to.

Hire the people who get it right, and work to keep them. This is about figuring out culture and remaining true to it. What is your value statement? What is your culture? We have great tenure with our employees. My chef has been here for 43 years, my head waiter, over 50. We have employees that stay a lifetime.

History is important, but large cultural shifts change the way we do business. The younger generation communicates digitally. They’re more comfortable texting than talking. My old business has to understand that. I didn’t understand it at first—I wanted to hold on to the tradition, hold onto the expectation, the verbal conversation, even in something as simple as making a reservation. I was wrong.

Old or new, recognize what fundamentals stay the same. Whether someone comes to dine in my restaurant tonight or they decide dine in a brand new restaurant tonight, the dining experience, the sensory experience, is extremely important. You’re either going to have a great time or you’re not. So whether i’m trying to continue the traditions of 176-year-old restaurant or if I’m trying to develop a set of brand new tra-ditions today, it’s all about the customer’s experience. Nothing else matters.

No one has all the answers. The challenges are extreme for me. They play out all over the board. I have a very, very traditional menu. I have a traditional service style. All of the staff that works for me have to accommodate the new. The expectation used to be that both men and ladies come dressed for dinner —except that young people don’t dress for dinner, period. It’s not a statement, it’s just reality. How do you balance that? It’s not clear to me today. If I was starting a new restaurant today, it wouldn’t be clear to me either.

How To Balance the Past and the Future

—Rick Blount, Antoine’s

PROTECT YOUR RESTAURANT’S SOUL AND LEGACY, BUT BE FLEXIBLE TO ACCOMMODATE CULTURAL SHIFTS.

Running a historical restaurant, especially one of the oldest in the country, requires a significant amount of balance. Along with the day-to-day challenges of restaurant operation comes understanding how to preserve past tradition (and keep guests who have been visiting for years happy) while attracting new diners and encouraging them to return. Rick Blount is the CEO of Antoine’s in New Orleans, which recently celebrated its 176th year in business, making it the oldest family-owned restaurant in America. Here, some tips on how he balances then and now, which can apply to any restaurant looking to protect its legacy while keeping an eye to the future.



BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS WITH GUESTS WILL SET YOU APART FROM THE COMPETITION AND ESTABLISH A BASE OF LOYAL REGULARS.

Fresh ideas and new takes on tried-and-tested formulas will help spread the word about your restaurant, however established.

“In the larger scheme of things, you want to create marketing from the inside out with the existing people you have,” says Chait. “When you do a good job, the word of mouth spreads and you’re building diners. If you’re not doing that, there’s something going on that you have to look carefully at.”

REAL TALK

“Resuscitation of a restaurant is the hardest thing to do. It starts with whatever’s happening in your restaurant,

taking a critical eye where you’re at. Are we really doing as good as we can? If you’re not, fix those things

and build one customer at a time.” —KEVIN BOEHM

BUILD RELATIONSHIPS The key to ongoing success in the restaurant business is hospitality. Not service, but truly taking care of your guests and making them feel valued. The only way to do that is to build meaningful relationships with guests—and once you do, these relationships will give back to your business again and again.

If you’re using it correctly, your reservation book is a wealth of information about guests who have visited your restaurant. Whether it’s the neighborhood couple that books a table every Friday night or the family visiting from out of town, every guest is an opportunity to create a connection and a memorable experience.

“It’s not just about giving somebody something that’s great, it’s giving somebody something that’s great and is curated for them,” says Eamon Rockey, General Manager at Betony in New York City. “We’ll go about trying to gather as much information as

Marketing At This Stage

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Here’s another smart example from Rockey. “If somebody makes a reservation for an anniversary in March of 2015 and then February rolls around in 2016, we’ll send them an email and say, ‘Thank you for celebrating your special day with us last year. We remember it fondly and would love to have you back this year.’ They’re always incred-ibly impressed. We’re armed with a great body of information and record keeping as a result of using Guest Notes—it enables us to really create these legends.”

Finally, train your team to remember and record knowledge gleaned at different touch points. Captains at Betony fill out logs at the end of each service, writing information they learned about each guest. The reservations team is responsible for entering all of those notes into the OpenTable system so they are prepared for the next visit. Even if you’re operating a more casual restaurant, you can still create a culture of relationship building and knowledge keeping that will inspire guest loyalty and repeat visits.

possible about a person so we can give them everything and anything that’s going to make them happy, and OpenTable’s Guest Notes are the principal tool we use to catalog that information.”

Rockey’s team takes every interaction with a guest as an opportunity to learn about guests and their preferences. Everything they learn they add to the Guest Notes in a diner’s profile: dietary restrictions, favorite wines and cocktails, and special occasions, such as birthdays and anniversaries. That gives them the knowledge to delight guests by having their favorite drink ready as soon as they sit down or to send over a special appetizer because they know how much they enjoyed the foie gras last time.

When guests book via OpenTable, you also have the power to keep the conversation going with them far after their visit. OpenTable partners with email marketing platforms so that you can export your OpenTable email database and create lists for continued communication with guests. For example, you may build a list of all guests who share your zip code and send them information about a neighborhood appreciation event.

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Social MediaSHARE INSPIRING CONTENT, NEWS, AND A SENSE OF FUN TO KEEP GROWING YOUR FOLLOWING. It’s never a bad time to reach a new audience from a fresh perspective, and social media is the best way to do that, whether your restaurant is 10 or 110 years old. “Social media is essential today,” says Ripert. “We have a direct relationship with someone with an interest in what we do, almost like a direct connection with a potential customer.”

SOCIAL TIPS TO TRANSCEND RESTAURANT STAGE• Be inspirational. Share what excites you. “We don’t expect all of our followers to

end up in the dining room,” says Ripert. “But we believe that being inspirational creates an interest and visibility. Of course, potentially it will have some positive impact on the life of the restaurant by adding people coming to Le Bernardin.”

• Share news. Established restaurants can use social to create news events the same way a new restaurant does. Share specials, anniversaries, new menus, new dining room changes, a new staff member—anything! “It’s basically like having your own magazine,” says Ripert. “We now have a massive audience of followers who receive news directly from us.”

• Don’t overthink the process. “We use social media the exact same way we were using appearances on TV or articles in a magazine or newspaper,” says Ripert. “It’s just an extra element to promote the fact that we exist.”

• Have fun. You’ve grown your following by doing what works best for you. Now’s a great time to push the boundaries and try new things to see how people respond. Stick to your strategy here, but don’t be afraid to get creative or take inspiration from others who do it well.

New Social TechnologiesUSE INSTAGRAM STORIES, SNAPCHAT, AND LIVE-STREAMING PLATFORMS TO SHOW FOLLOWERS WHAT MAKES YOUR TEAM, FOOD, AND CULTURE UNIQUE.

If you’ve mastered the social platforms that are necessary for your restaurant, consider experimenting with new ones. Or, start using more features of existing services to tell your restaurant’s story in a new way.

SHARE CASUAL STORIES WITH INSTAGRAM STORIES AND SNAPCHAT Snapchat has become a solid social network in its own right. The learning curve may take a little longer than some of the “traditional” networks, but if you or someone on your staff is excited about the product, it’s an innovative way to reach a particular audience. In short: users post short stories that eventually disappear. You can send these Snaps directly to others—but more importantly for your business you can create a series of Snapchat Stories that are displayed to followers. Because they’re so fleeting, posts on Snapchat are a great way to experiment with creating new types of content. Plus, the off-the-cuff nature of the platform gives followers an insider peek inside the restaurant—your kitchen, staff, and community—that more established channels can’t always offer.

Instagram recently launched a similar feature, allowing users to post a series of images or video meant to feel more casual than a regular Instagram post. Stories are an important way to stay active and relevant on the Instagram platform, especially now that the service algorithmically weighs posts and displays them for relevance, not just timeliness. (Snapchat is a vibrant and robust platform, but if you have time for one, choose Instagram Stories—especially if you already have a viable Instagram presence.)

LIVE-STREAM WITH FACEBOOK LIVE AND TWITTER PERISCOPE Live-streaming is hot right now, and the functionality is available on both Facebook and Twitter. This means that you can use new technology to reach those same fans and followers you’ve already amassed. The same general social content rules apply here: identify the story you want to tell, then show the story. Live-streaming is adaptable to planned and scheduled posts (think: a “how-to” series or reveal of your seasonal menu), but it’s also great for unscripted moments like a trip to the market, the moment a par-ticularly exciting seasonal ingredient arrives in your kitchen, or just having a fun with your bar or front-of-house staff.

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Operational IdeasCARRY THE SAME EXPERIMENTAL ATTITUDE THROUGH YOUR RESTAURANT’S OPERATIONS BY ADDING IN SPECIAL EVENTS OR NEW IDEAS TO YOUR REGULAR SERVICE.

• Special events: Seasonal dinners full of market-driven ingredients, an anniversary party in honor of your tenth year, a or a celebration during a particularly special time for your city or town (a World Series win, Pride weekend, the local dog parade—anything!).

• Special menus: A late-night burger-and-beer special or a special menu celebrating a certain ingredient are easy ways to give a fresh feel to your restaurant.

• Wine dinners: Partner with a local wine producer (or distillery or brewery) for a special menu with beverage pairings. Promote to your guests and your partner’s following.

• Guest chefs: Invite your friends (or your chef’s friends) to guest cook in your kitchen for the evening. Promote the event to your regulars—and your guest’s regulars if they have them.

• Classes or lectures: If you have the space and time, consider positioning your chef as expert on their signature item or a particular technique. Or, enlist a trusted purveyor or friend of your restaurant to lead a class.

Once you’re established, running smoothly, and thinking through these ideas, you should also think broadly about how to get the most out of your space. If you have a large bar or lounge area and that’s an important part of your concept, you can fill the house more often by offering those spots up for reservations—and setting expectations accordingly. OpenTable offers a way to designate bar seats, counter seats, or high-top tables for reservations so you can effectively increase the size your restaurant and availability online. This is another way to give guests exactly what they’re looking for while maximizing any and every available space (and it makes solo dining a lot less awkward).

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Follow the Competition or

Stay the Course?

DON’T FEEL PRESSURED TO FOLLOW EVERY TREND, BUT DO EXPLORE NEW IDEAS TO SEE IF THEY FIT YOUR BRAND. Healthy competition equals evolution, which isn’t a bad thing. Every restaurant—large, small, established, or new—should embrace competition. Understand the difference between embracing the competition, though, and chasing trends for trends’ sake.

“I follow the competition, but only in relative terms,” says Blount. “I pay a lot of attention to how much it

costs to dine in my competitive set.” He favors doubling down on restaurant culture and those features that allow

you to stand out. “If I was listening to my competitors, I wouldn’t be listening to my customers.”

“I don’t follow trends consciously, but I’m sure unconsciously the trends do have an impact on me,” adds Ripert. “I absorb all the trends, but I don’t have a timeline that tells me ‘now is the right time to do X.’” Instead, he recognizes when he has a new idea, and works on it with his team before it makes it to the menu. Le Bernardin has a research and development team that’s dedicated to the study of new techniques, but they’re not following the trends by month, season, or year. “It’s more of an organic way of absorb-ing what’s happening around me,” he says.

REAL TALK

I don’t think there’s an awful lot of real success in playing follow the leader. You need to be the leader.

—RICK BLOUNT

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TRADITIONAL PR “We tried to get as much PR and marketing out of the anniversary,” says Blount. They appeared on a Good Morning America segment, and a second on Fox & Friends alongside the Delmonico’s chef. “It was wonderful watch because my chef and the Delmonico’s chef are so passionate about playing with food. They’re fun to be around. It’s not just what they get paid for, it’s what they love.”

CREATIVE, FUN, UNIQUE IDEAS As the oldest family-owned restaurant in America, Antoine’s certainly stands out. So, they came up with a way to celebrate this unique feature: a family reunion. “We were curious, where are all the descendants of Antoine?” With a little digging, they found them—385 descendents from 12 countries (plus kids and grandkids) came to a family reunion in New Orleans to celebrate.

In every case, Blount says these initiatives were more fun than anything, celebrating the restaurant’s history coupled with the history of food. Guests appreciate this authen-ticity and a true story. Celebrate your success in a way that feels authentic to you and your business—this enthusiasm will translate.

Celebrate Your SuccessesMARK WINS AND MILESTONES WITH STAFF AND GUESTS ALIKE TO BUILD COM-MUNITY AROUND YOUR RESTAURANT.

Major milestones are as much a celebration for you as a business as they are for your guests, and you should celebrate them appropriately. For example, Antoine’s celebrated its 175th year of service last year, and celebrated in a variety of ways.

PARTNERSHIPS Blount took his head chef and two cooks to New York City to partner with Delmonico’s, serving classic Antoine’s dishes in an unusual setting. “We really did have fun with it. I thought it was hilarious, Wall Street bankers sitting there, really really needing to try a bowl of alligator soup. We had a ball.”

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7. Don’t be afraid to experiment. When your restaurant business is established, it’s a great time to experiment with new channels and platforms, such as Snapchat and live-streaming. Get creative!

8. Hold special events to engage your community. Events, new menus, pop-ups and wine dinners will bring new guests in and give your regulars yet another reason to love you.

9. Stay relevant, but don’t chase the competition. Do what makes sense for your brands in the face of new trends and technology.

10. Celebrate your success! This is a tough business—you (and your team) earned it. Never be too busy to mark wins and milestones.

Key Takeaways1. Change is necessary for success. Just because you found what

works doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way forever. Always keep evolving your brand—including your menu, service, and space.

2. Hold yourself accountable. Set goals to stay motivated and keep striving for excellence (James Beard Foundation, here you come!).

3. Pay attention to cultural shifts and apply them to your restaurant. You can control what happens in your restaurant, but not what happens on a larger scale outside of it. Stay quietly relevant.

4. Honor the past and prepare for the future. Protect your restaurant’s soul and legacy, but be flexible enough to appeal to new audiences.

5. Build relationships with your guests. It’s not enough to bring new people in the door constantly; you need to create loyalty and make them want to come back. Pull it off by giving great hospitality and creating memorable experiences.

6. Keep growing your social following. Share inspiring content and news (and a sense of fun).

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RICK BLOUNTCEO, Antoine’s Rick Blount is the current CEO at the 176-year-old Antoine’s in New

Orleans. Rick worked at Antoine’s as a teenager and college student. He

then went on to manage and own a variety of successful business enter-

prises in both the New Orleans area and Texas.

Rick came back to Antoine’s in March of 2005 and has enjoyed being

back in the family business. In recent years, he has expanded the

Antoine’s footprint to include the Hermes Bar and Antoine’s Annex, a

European Café on Royal Street.

KEVIN BOEHMOwner, BOKA Restaurant Group After opening 20 successful restaurants over two decades, James Beard-

nominated restaurateur Kevin Boehm has become one of the nation’s

most successful owner/operators.

Born in 1970, Boehm grew up in Springfield, Illinois and knew at a young

age he was destined to be in the restaurant business. After dropping out

of University of Illinois, he saved enough money as a server to open his

first restaurant in 1992. In 2002, Boehm partnered with Rob Katz and the

two established Boka Restaurant Group. Since then the pair has opened

15 restaurants—including Boka, Girl & the Goat, Perennial Virant, and

most recently, GT Prime—and established themselves as one of the great

chef-driven groups in the country.

The groups many accolades include three stars from the Chicago Tribune,

a Michelin star, and recognition from Food and Wine’s Best New Chefs.

Boehm and Katz were James Beard semi-finalists for Best Restaurateur

in America in 2015, and finalists in 2016. Kevin lives in Chicago with his

wife and 3 children.

Bios

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ELIZABETH HAMEL Account Supervisor, Wagstaff WorldwideOriginally hailing from Orlando, FL, Elizabeth arrived in Chicago in 2002,

ready to take on whatever the big city could dish out. While attending

the University of Illinois at Chicago, she worked at a number of the city’s

best restaurants, hosting, serving, and occasionally stepping behind the

bar. Following graduation, Elizabeth worked as director of special events

at the acclaimed BOKA Restaurant Group, a position she held for the

next three years. At BOKA, Elizabeth discovered an interest for hospital-

ity marketing and public relations, skills she honed further at her next

position with a boutique public relations firm in downtown Chicago and

then by earning her master’s degree from Northwestern University’s

Integrated Marketing Communications program in December 2012.

Elizabeth brings a keen interest in the ever-changing Chicago culinary

scene to her position at Wagstaff, always keeping an eye out for the next

trend or great opportunity for her chef and restaurant clients. Outside

of work, Elizabeth enjoys taking her Boston Terrier to the dog beach,

exploring new neighborhoods, or simply reading a great book.

JACOB HELLERCost Analyst, Bravo Brio Restaurant GroupJacob Heller is a cost analyst and has been with BBRG for just over three

years. In addition to cost, purchasing, project, and benefit analysis, he is

the internal lead for the OpenTable system. He develops standard train-

ing material for all BBRG restaurants (currently 116 locations) and trains

the system to the host staff at all new restaurant openings. He also travels

periodically to refresh the knowledge at existing restaurants. He lives in

Columbus with his wife and cat. (Favorite ice-cream flavor is chocolate.)

BILL CHAITFormer Managing Partner, Sprout LAA native Angeleno, Bill Chait has been involved in the restaurant indus-

try for more than 25 years during which time he has developed and

operated several successful restaurant concepts. Bill is the founder of

a multi-unit restaurant operation, Louise’s Trattoria, with locations in

Southern California, Wisconsin, Washington DC and Maryland. Chait’s

other restaurant concepts have included Angel City Grill, The Beverly

Restaurant and Market and Louise’s Italian Kitchen. In 2010, he created

the nationally acclaimed LA pop-up restaurant Test Kitchen, which

pioneered an exciting new concept in dining featuring world renowned

guest chefs and budding culinary talent. The Test Kitchen “Townhouse”

on Pico is now home to Picca and Sotto restaurants and a culinary out-

post on the west side.

Chait is the former Managing Partner of Sprout LA, a restaurant col-

laboration with leading chefs whose projects include restaurants such

as Bestia with chefs Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis, Petty Cash

and Republique with Walter and Margarita Manzke, Otium with Chef

Timothy Hollingsworth, Redbird with chef Neal Fraser and managing

partner Amy Knoll, and The Rose with chef Jason Neroni. Chait and

his restaurants have been featured in countless publications including,

most recently, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Bon Appetit,

Nation’s Restaurant News, Sunset Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine,

Entrepreneur Magazine and Bloomberg Financial.

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ANDREW MOSBLECH Director of Operations, The Kitchen BistrosAndrew is the Director of Operations at The Kitchen Bistros, a family of

restaurants from The Kitchen Restaurant Group that sources its ingre-

dients from local farms.The Kitchen Bistros operate locations across

Colorado, Chicago, and Memphis. Prior to joining The Kitchen Restaurant

Group in Boulder, Colorado, Andrew served as the Director of Service Ops

and Catering at Urban Kitchen Group in southern California.

ANDREW OLIVERPresident, Oliver & Bonacini RestaurantsAndrew Oliver began his career in finance and asset management before

joining Oliver & Bonacini Restaurants in 2010 to head up the compa-

ny’s private dining and events division. As the eldest son of Oliver &

Bonacini Restaurants co-founder, Peter Oliver, Andrew possessed a clear

understanding of the company’s vision and values, and was quickly

able to lead O&B Events and Catering to unprecedented expansion and

sales growth.

In 2012, Andrew was appointed the President of Oliver & Bonacini

Restaurants, where he has now assumed responsibility for overall com-

pany operations, including O&B’s portfolio of upscale restaurants, strate-

gic direction and future expansion. In 2009, he founded Rooster Capital

Corp., a boutique alternative asset management company focused on

partnering with companies through minority or majority investments

and providing assistance in growth strategies.

ERIC RIPERT Chef, Co-owner, Le BernardinEric Ripert is the chef and co-owner of the acclaimed New York

restaurant Le Bernardin. Born in Antibes, France, Eric moved to to

Andorra, a small country just over the Spanish border, as a young

child. His family instilled their own passion for food in the young

Ripert, and at the age of 15 he left home to attend culinary school in

Perpignan. At 17, he moved to Paris and cooked at the legendary La

Tour D’Argent before taking a position at the Michelin three-starred

Jamin. After fulfilling his military service, Ripert returned to Jamin

under Joel Robuchon to serve as chef poissonier.

In 1989, Ripert worked under Jean-Louis Palladin as sous-chef at Jean

Louis at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Ripert moved to

New York in 1991, working briefly as David Bouley’s sous-chef before

Maguy and Gilbert Le Coze recruited him as chef for Le Bernardin.

Ripert has since firmly established himself as one of New York’s—

and the world’s—great chefs.

In September 2014, Ripert and Le Coze opened Aldo Sohm Wine Bar.

That same month, the two expanded Le Bernardin’s private dining

offerings with Le Bernardin Privé, a dynamic space above Aldo Sohm

Wine Bar that can accommodate a range of events. Ripert is the Vice

Chairman of the board of City Harvest, working to bring together New

York’s top chefs and restaurateurs to raise funds and increase the

quality and quantity of food donations to New York’s neediest. When

not in the kitchen, Ripert enjoys good tequila and peace and quiet.

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EAMON ROCKEYGeneral Manager, BetonyEamon Rockey grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the son of two pro-

fessional chefs who sparked his passion for food and encouraged him

to enter the kitchen. At age 14 he started working after school at Sakura,

Hattiesburg’s only sushi restaurant at the time.

He later attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, where

he pursued his Bachelor’s Degree and focused on the service side of the

hospitality business. Upon graduation, Eamon moved to New York City,

where for the past ten years he has worked his way up in dining rooms

at acclaimed restaurants such as Gilt, Eleven Madison Park, Atera, and

Aska. When not at Betony, Eamon enjoys cooking, collecting food and

beverage-related books, exploring new restaurants, as well as biking and

the performing arts.

DAN SIMONS Owner, Founding FarmersWithin the industry and among his own team, Dan Simons is known for

his energetic leadership style and passion for hospitality. An impressive

career in the management ranks at several large, high-volume restau-

rants helped to propel him toward starting his own firm, which he

founded in 2004 with mentor Michael Vucurevich. Founding Farmers,

which they launched in 2008 with North Dakota Farmers Union, is the

accumulation of their many years of industry experience, as well as their

successful working relationship.

As a skilled communicator, Dan is frequently called on to serve as the

voice of Founding Farmers, whether he’s inspiring potential investors or

sharing his knowledge at hospitality and educational events. The respon-

sible practices, which form the backbone of Founding Farmers are an

extension of the way he strives to live his own life. He takes great pride

in being able to continually incorporate new methods and initiatives

that give back to the environment and the community. He has been the

recipient of a variety of awards within the restaurant industry and the

business world that honor his commitment to sustainability and socially

responsible practices.

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