And speaking of O’Charley’s

Jeffrey Warne, recently named CEO of Nashville-based O’Charley’s Inc. and The Tennessean, the Nashville newspaper, did a Q&A with him in today’s Sunday edition.

Here is just one question, as answered by Warne:

How has the company controlled margins?

If you go back to 2008, we made the tough decision to reduce support staff. We eliminated some positions and through attrition we did significantly reduce the staff by about 20 percent. We also set up in 2008 a labor model that would predict when guests are in the building.

Using eight years of historical data, we mapped when guests were in our restaurants in 15-minute increments. The labor model was very effective at controlling labor costs. When we matched our labor as best as we could to when (guests) were in the building, our guest satisfaction scores took off, as well.

It is an informative series of questions and answers with a “numbers guy” and you can read the entire interview here:

http://tinyurl.com/Warne-interview

But you might want to hurry, as this article could be archived pretty quickly and might not be available for long.

Super Bowl

The New Orleans storyline in today’s Super Bowl reminds me of the aftermath of Katrina.

I was working for P. F. Chang’s at the time and corporate pledged $500,000 for Katrina relief only days after the event. Included in that was something that the tipped employees pledged – we dedicated one day of tips to be donated to the cause. This was about a week after Katrina.

We had t-shirts printed up (mine is around somewhere; if I find it, maybe I’ll post a picture later.

It was a simple white t-shirt with a halftone screenshot of the radar image of Katrina immediately prior to landfall. Everyone wore the shirt and we told our guests that we were donating all tips to Katrina relief. Many guests tossed in extra money and we as a chain raised beaucoups of money.

If I remember correctly, we called it “The Lucky Cat Relief”. The Lucky Cat is part of P. F. Chang’s culture. Every Chang’s has a large Asian-styled ceramic cat which is holding one paw up. The “Lucky Cat’ is a symbol of wealth and luck and many Asian businesses use it in the hopes of attracting customers and wealth. While predominately associated with Japanese culture, it has been appropriated by the Chinese as well.

We were proud of ourselves, proud of corporate for stepping up to the plate and proud of our guests, who were extra generous in the face of a national disaster.

This is especially resonant in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. With donations starting to dry up, perhaps some restaurants might consider a similar “relief action”

Just putting that out there…

Oh, Canada

No really. Oh Canada :sigh: Why don’t you know any better?

$30 on $300 is a really shitty tip. It really is.

What astounds me is, from all accounts, you’re supposed to have roughly the same tip standards as us in the US, 15% as the “average”. I’ve already given up the idea that, unlike many in the US, you’re just not going to tip on the final post-tax total. I get it, really I do, so, when the bill is $330 and you leave me $30, I give you the fact that you’re actually only tipping on $300. I also give up any notion of getting 20% even with the most outstanding service. That’s just a given.

So why is it that 10% is such a common tip? Is it because you know you’ll never be back in the same restaurant, so you feel you can save money on the back of your server. Is it because you’re proud of being thrifty? Anyone who spends $330 on a meal for you adults and two young adults is obviously not so very concerned about “thrift”, if you catch my drift. Do I really have to tell you that I make 2.13 an hour? I know it’s not that way everywhere in the States, but 9 times out of ten, it’s well below the $7 or whatever minimum wage is today.

You are all so nice and well-scrubbed and well-spoken. Your grooming is above average. You like to watch men with sticks and dangerously sharp shoes slam into each other, occasionally slash at each other with said sticks and get into massive fights. I can dig that. Hell, those very people know how to tip, even when they come from the Uzbekistan or Finland.

I guess what I want to know is where this 10% thing that you have become so famous for comes from. Apparently it doesn’t come  from your own restaurant tipping traditions. How is it that so many of you are on the same page on this?

Could you please turn the page?

PS, I almost made $200 tonight. I would have had you even bothered to tip $35 on $300 (pretax), which would have still been a shitty tip (five more bucks would have killed you?). It makes it really shitty when you make $196 having had 20% of your business leave you a bad tip and leaves you just short of a milestone number. That’s right, your shitty four top was 1/5th of my whole night from a sales standpoint. On a Saturday night. It was actually a fourth of my covers, having waited on 16 people total (6 tables total). I can hear you say, “Well, I spent money, didn’t I? If I had only spend $200 and left you $30, you would have done about the same amount of work and you would have gotten your darned 15%, right? Well, my friend from the North, it doesn’t work that way. It’s a percentage game, which you know, since you lift me almost exactly 10%. You knew what you were doing, didn’t you? Plus, if you had only spent $200, you would have left me $20, you smartass!. I don’t think people outside the industry know how we feel about our percentages. I know it’s all about how much you take home in the end, but we really do gain job satisfaction out of hitting our marks, and that includes hitting our percentages. I would have rather ended up with $180 in sales if you had spent $150 and left me $ 22. I would have felt better about the night. Yes, I know it’s really not about my feelings and all that, but I just wanted you to know.  

OK, rant over. I feel better now.

Good and not-so-good news about restaurants in this economy

 

Nation’s Restaurant News has two articles in their “Breaking News” feature that points out the complexities of restaurants dealing with the economic crisis: 

O’Charley’s posts positive guest counts By Elissa  Elan 

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Feb. 4, 2010) While consumer pressures tied to the recession pushed fourth-quarter sales into negative territory at the three chains of O’Charley’s Inc., its namesake brand and Stoney River Legendary Steaks chain posted their first year-to-year traffic increases in more than three years. 

The company also posted a narrowed net loss of $15.2 million, or 72 cents per share, for the quarter ended Dec. 27, versus a loss of $68.2 million, or $3.34 per share, in the same quarter a year ago. The improvement was mostly because of year-ago charges, when O’Charley’s booked more than $60 million in impairment for goodwill and restaurant closures. 

Latest-quarter revenue declined 6.9 percent to $188.9 million, the result of consumers cutting back on spending, O’Charley’s officials said. The company, which operates or franchises 368 restaurants under the O’Charley’s, Stoney River Legendary Steaks and Ninety Nine Restaurants casual-dining brands, had expected sales of between $190 million and $195 million. 

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.nrn.com/breakingNews.aspx?id=379064#ixzz0emPxsy0Q

 

Notice that this is a good news/bad news sort of thing. Cover counts are up, but people are spending less. This means that sales are still soft.

 

Also:

 

U.S. restaurant count declines

By Molly  Gise 

CHICAGO (Feb. 4, 2010) The number of U.S. restaurants fell this past fall as the industry continued to suffer from serious declines in traffic and sales. The rate of closures, however, was less than what was reported last spring. 

According to The NPD Group’s ReCount data released Wednesday, the total number of U.S. restaurants declined 0.3 percent, or by 1,652 restaurants, to 578,353 locations in the fall of 2009, compared with the fall of 2008. ReCount tracks commercial restaurant locations twice a year, in the spring and fall. 

Restaurant closures were more severe in the spring of 2009, when the total number of U.S. restaurants fell 1 percent from a year earlier, reflecting the loss of more than 4,000 eateries. 

“NPD’s fall 2009 ReCount reflects a slowdown in chains expanding, and two years of a challenging economy already weeding out the poorest performing restaurants,” said Greg Starzynski, NPD’s director of product development for foodservice. 

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.nrn.com/breakingNews.aspx?id=378990#ixzz0emQwTWvj

 

 

So, while there are positive signs, the restaurant sector continues to face challenges, which makes it even more incumbent for waiters to execute at a high level. If you’re seeing more people but less total sales, upselling is more important than ever. As always, upselling shouldn’t be done solely to extract the maximum amount of money from the guest, but should be done to enhance the dining experience. Never lose sight of this basic tenet.

 

And now…the rest of the story

Yesterday, I talked about , Laura Martinez, the blind lady who wanted to, trained for, and became a chef.

Don’t ya just love a happy ending, especially one as juicy as this one?

Charlie Trotter job offer makes blind chef’s dreams come true

Tribune profiled woman’s quest in December

By Rex W. Huppke, Tribune reporter

January 27, 2010

In late December, the Tribune profiled a young blind woman chasing her dream of becoming a chef. Laura Martinez will finish her work at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary program at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago this spring, but she was worried her disability might make it difficult to find work doing what she loves.

Passionate about food and, according to the head of the program, tremendously skilled, Martinez’s worries are now over.

A producer for CBS “The Early Show” read the Tribune story and decided to send a crew to report on Martinez. To add a twist, CBS arranged for renowned Chicago chef Charlie Trotter to come with them to watch Martinez at work in the cafeteria kitchen at the Chicago Lighthouse, a center for people who are blind or visually impaired.

“We thought he’d go, he’d offer some encouragement and that would be that,” said Robert Kozberg of CBS.

Instead, the chef offered Martinez a job.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/ct-met-blind-chef-20100127,0,6107489.story

Behind the scenes at Charlie Trotter’s, from the very fine, and ironically named (at least in this case) blog, “Taste With the Eyes”, from Lori Lynn. Visit her blog here:

http://www.tastewiththeeyes.com/

Did you hear the one about the blind chef?

No, there’s no punchline. Well, not exactly.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Blind woman learning to be a chef

Student at Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago hopes to open restaurant one day

By Rex W Huppke
December 27, 2009

A kitchen is a spiritual place for Laura Martinez, a space that arouses her senses, excites her imagination. It’s not where she imagined herself finding such satisfaction. When she was too young to understand that she was blind, she dreamed of being a surgeon. She grew up and out of such fantasies and studied briefly to be a psychologist.

But the kitchen beckoned. It lured her away from her family in Moline, Ill., to the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary program at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago.

“I’d never worked with a blind student before,” said Karine Bravais-Slyman, who heads the institute’s general education department, “but Laura did incredibly well in the kitchen. She showed many students that even with this type of impairment, she could still do better than students who have their sight.”

Read the rest of the article here:

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2009/dec/27/food/chi-blind-chef-27-dec27

In the next post, we’ll reveal the “punch line”…

New link added – Red Lobster Blog

Written by “Lobster Boy”, this blog is a great inside view of the highly corporate Red Lobster chain (now owned by Darden, they are one of the longest lasting “mid-market” chains in the country).

Under the “About Me” section, this passage:

“I’ve worked for Red Lobster for the better part of a decade. They used to care for their employees, now we’re just another warm body in their soulless corporation”. 

Despite this rather bleak assessment, it’s obvious that there’s some affection for the restaurant when you read the blog in toto. It’s a bleak hope for a better working environment, but sometimes you have to basically take this almost on faith. Whether it’s a new corporate directive about station size (which happened early in the life of the blog), to the most current posts about coupons and the lack of trust that corporate places in its waitstaff to process the coupons honestly, it’s always an entertaining read from someone who’s been with the company for years. For those who have never worked in a highly corporate environment, this will be a bit of an eye-opener. For those who have, there will be a lot of “Oh yeah, I’ve been there”.

This is actually one of the oldest waiter blogs out there. For some odd reason, it had always been on my backburner in terms of adding to ye olde blogroll. for that, I have a lot of regret, because it actually should have been one of the first that I added. I mean, ya gotta love someone who counts Red Lobster Training Videos along side Napoleon Dynamite and Office Space as his favorite movies. Right? Plus, as an added bonus, you get the occasional recipe and information on current promotions. What more could you ask for? Just don’t utter the words “endless shrimp” when you’re within earshot. ‘K?

So, let’s welcome Lobster Boy properly. Let’s have some champagne with our lobster, shall we? And no bloody coupons either.

Object lessons and the value of arcana

You know how I’m always throwing weird stuff your way? Information that you may never need as a waiter?

Well, you never know when that little bit of weird info might be useful sometime.

But, sometimes it doesn’t even help if you’re not nimble on your feet and you just can’t add 2 plus 2 and come up with 4 after multiplying by 2 and dividing by two. That’s what happened to me tonight and it should be an object lesson to everyone to try and stay mentally quick and try to always think outside the box and put information that you have gleaned in your career to good use, even if you have to do a few mental gymnastics.

No, it’s not nearly as earth shattering as I’ve made it out to be. But it’s a good teaching tool.

The host of the 10 top I was was waiting on had ordered several bottles of wine when he got to the Cabernets. He started to mention Meritages and excluded a certain one as a Meritage, even though he didn’t know the bottle and it was in our “Cabernet and Blends” section, which only calls a Meritage a Meritage when it’s labeled a Meritage.

Perhaps I should digress at this point for those of you who haven’t delved really deeply into wines yet. 

Meritage (pronounced MER – i- tijz, not mer-i – TAJZ, as some people pronounce it) is basically a marketing term for a California Bordeaux blend. As in Bordeaux, it can actually be a blend of varying percentages of the following big five Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Malbec (there are a couple of other minor blending grapes that can be used as well). There are certain percentage guidelines that have to be met and, most importantly, to call your wine a Meritage, you must pay a licensing fee to The Meritage Alliance to use the term, as it’s a proprietary term bound by certain quality guidelines (and of course, the payment of the fee).

Hence, there are plenty of wines that are actually Meritage-esque blends but don’t call themeselves Meritage because they either don’t want to comply with the strict guidelines or they don’t want to pay the fee.

So, when he started talking about Meritage, I wasn’t sure whether he was trying to avoid it or get it; he had already ordered 4 different wines at that point and this was right after they sat down, so I hadn’t really had a chance to read him yet. At this point, he pointed to one of the wines on the list and said, “I guess this isn’t a Meritage here”.

Well, I didn’t know the wine, but, of course I knew that it might very well be a Meritage-style wine for all I knew. And, I know a bit about wines but I couldn’t give him a definitive answer because I just didn’t know for sure about this particular one (I knew that we had 3 Meritage-designated wines in the category, but I also knew that we had a couple of wines that would be comparable to a Meritage). He pointed again to it and said, “Well, see, it can’t be a Meritage”.

Once again, knowing lots about wine, I shrugged again and said, “Well sir, I just don’t know for sure since there are some wines that are the same as a Meritage blend but can’t call themselves Meritage…blah, blah, blah”.

Once again, he pointed to it and said, “But I really can’t be one, can it”? He then said, “I’ll get it” before I could respond.

As I’m walking to the register, it finally dawned on me as I looked down for the VIN number so I could punch it in.

He wasn’t pointing at the Vintner name, he was pointing at the SINGLE VINEYARD NAME.

Ahhhh, so THAT’S the point that he was making. He must have thought I was a real blockhead.  And I was.

Don’t get me wrong – believe it or not, there are some single vineyard Meritages. But they are few and far between because that single vineyard has to be planted with some of the Meritage varietals. Technically, if I had followed his train of thought, I could have shown myself to be the big expert that I’m not, but that would have meant that I would have had to be able to follow his chain of logic.

I didn’t even make the connection that my guest made, although he was a little confused about the regs. When I brought the wine to the table for presentation, I said, “I get what you were saying”. He said, “Yes, 85% of the wine has to be Cabernet because of the single vineyard designation”, although when I just checked, it seems that it’s actually 95%.  And then there’s the complication that there are different ways to designate single vineyards. The concept of a Meritage and a single vineyard designation would seem to be at odds as a Meritage can’t have more than 90% of a single varietal. Since there is the rare wine that is both “Meritage-approved” and single vineyard, there is obviously some wiggle room. So, had he been correct about the percentage needed to be labels with a single vineyard name, a Meritage could have conceivably been made because the percentage wouldn’t have exceeded 90%.

But I’m sort of getting away from my main points.

First (and in no particular order of importance) – there is always someone who knows more about wine than you do. And, if that person seems to be your customer, take your cues from them. Don’t try to one-up them with your knowledge.

Second – prepare with as much wine knowledge as you can muster, but you must be prepared to connect the dots, even when the connection is hard to make. It’s not always obvious. I certainly found this out myself.

Third – when you are the lucky recipient of an object lesson, take it to heart and learn from it.

Fourth – wine regulations and labeling aren’t always cut and dried. Sometimes there are mazes to negotiate. but the more knowledge you have, the better. For instance, the novice usually thinks of Bordeaux as Cabernet Sauvignon or Cab blends. However, “right bank” Bordeaux wines emphasize Merlot to a great extent, to the point where the famed Petrus, generally the most expensive Bordeaux  available, is almost 100% Merlot and has no Cabernet Sauvignon at all. If you only get the “wine talking points” from an occasional wine training session, you probably wouldn’t know this and you can embarrass yourself in front of a wine geek guest if you’re not careful. This is why it’s so important to assemble as many facts about food and wine as you can – you want to be able to educate the guest if necessary, but you also want to avoid embarrassment whenever possible. Here’s the rub though – it’s helpful to actually be able to think beyond the linear. sometimes you have to get from A to C by going to D and then backtracking to B before you finally get to C. I failed at that sort of thinking. Hopefully, my failure will help you think outside the box.

Here’s an example of a single vineyard wine.

Culinary term of the day – confit

Confit, roughly pronounced cone – FEE, is an old French technique for preserving game like duck, goose and other fowl and pork. A specialty of the Gascony region of France, but found in other regions as well, this was the way for a household to preserve meat over the winter. The confit would be stored in earthenware vessels and put in the root cellar for overwintering (obviously, once refrigeration came into play, it could be stored that was as well).

Usually, the breast of a duck or other fowl would be reserved for other uses, while the legs and thighs would be cooked in the confit fashion. This involved salting the meat, sometimes adding garlic and herbs, and chilling overnight to prep for cooking. The legs would then be rendered of their fat, which would be retained for cooking. The legs would be removed from the garlic and herbs and put in a baking dish and covered with the fat (if there wasn’t enough to cover the legs, additional fat would be added).

The cooking vessel would then be put in a slow oven for several hours, allowing the meat to slowly poach in its own fat. The meat would then be put in sealed earthenware vessels completely covered in the fat, which would harden into a lard-like substance and would keep oxygen away from the meat. The meat would last through the winter and be able to be used in the spring, although it could certainly be used anytime before then as well.

This method of cooking is perfect for fowl dark meat because it completely tenderizes the meat and makes it really savory and  “fall-off-the-bone” tender. It’s used for pork as well, using extra lard if necessary. The “big two” confits are duck and goose. The French traditionally differentiate between these two confits and other birds and meats prepared in this manner. Goose fat is more commonly used in these cases, as ducks are smaller and don’t generate as much fat as a goose.

In modern kitchens, duck confit is a popular addition to many menus. It has an advantage that it can be made for a week’s worth of service. What doesn’t get used gets put into the walk-in along with the fat, which then congeals, ready to be removed later and rewarmed. One nice pairing that I’ve seen is a confit, shredded and served on top of something like a grit cake or polenta along with a dollop of nice berry/chili jam. It can also be used in soups, bean dishes like cassoulet or any place where pulled meat is useful.

Modern chefs have extended the confit metaphor to vegetables as well, especially red bell peppers. Even preserved lemons are a form of “confit”, especially when olive oil is used to cover  lemons that are submerged in sea salt (basically a form of maceration). Basically, if you’re talking about cooked veggies, you use a similar cooking technique to traditional confit technique using olive oil to replace the fat and then slow cooking the veggies over low heat until tender. Rarely, confit is used to describe candied fruit, but we in the US usually don’t see such “preserved” fruit described as confit.

If you search Google, you’ll find many good confit recipes and places to use various confits. Try it out. It’s easy to do and delivers savory meat which is just as good dug out of the fat and eaten as it is used in some hoity-toity dish.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

So, we got about 4 inches of snow here Friday afternoon through the early hours of Saturday.

For many folks, that’s a laugher of a snow storm. For us, it was the most snow we’ve had since one freak afternoon about 7 years ago, we got 7 inches in an hour (we were told by the experts that we got more snow in that hour than they get in the Rockies). We usually get a dusting or two every year and, every other year, we might get an inch or two that sticks around.

This snow was a bit unusual as it was good fluffy, powdery snow followed in the evening hours by light, but steady amounts of freezing rain and sleet. This meant that we ended up with a nice crust on top of the snow. Thankfully, we avoiding the major ice accumulation that others in the South got.

So, in the morning, I decided to see how the roads were and I went for a spin to the local MAPCO to get coffee and a nuked honey bun. Folks, I couldn’t even get out of my driveway! And my driveway is flat. I was spinning my wheels and creating little troughs of brown ice. Fortunately a couple of neighbors came by and gave me a push and off I went.

Having lived in Colorado for a year with an 1979 RX-7, and having driven a lot in Nothern Germany where black ice is a constant concern, I felt confident that I wouldn’t literally be going for a spin. The streets were bad but if you took your time, it was passable…barely. the thing is, I have a very similar car to the RX-7 (which isn’t the best car to have in such driving conditions). It’s a small, 2-seat convertible that only weighs about a little over a ton…rear wheel drive to boot. In Colorado, you’re driving on packed snow a lot, which was easier than driving on hardened mounds of snow topped with increasingly congealed ice.

But I made it without incident.

I called to see if we were going to be open and, sure enough, we were. About half of our staff called out, so we were down to an 8 man floor. Still, I wasn’t expecting a lot of business because our city was almost completely shut down.

But I wasn’t counting on the fact that many of our guests have 4-wheel and all-wheel drive vehicles, and surprisingly, apparently know how to use them. I say surprisingly because most of the vehicles have only seen off-road and bad conditions on Lifetime disaster movies.

We actually still had 110 on the books. And we ended up doing probably over 150 easily (at the end of the night, I didn’t look).

What surprised me was that I got hit with two really bad tips, both just a hair over 11% post tax (maybe 13% for the pre-tax). Service was just fine. Kitchen held up their end just fine. People were “nice”. In fact, tips in general were lower than usual until the end. I didn’t see 20% until one of my last tables, but I did get three of them by the time the night was over. You have to understand that only a few of my tables generally tip 15% or less. Tonight, it was the majority.

It’s weird – maybe this is like what valets talk about when they bitch about rainy nights. They aren’t bitching about the conditions, they’re bitching about the tendency of people to be cheap. It’s counter-intuitive. You’d think that people would appreciate valets having to run around in the rain, but many people apparently don’t. You’d think that people would appreciate waiters who risked life and limb to serve their sorry asses. heck, I only hit 1 curb as I drifted helpless to one side of the road when I hit solid ice. In fact, I was stuck there until someone happened by and gave me a push.

But I had the last laugh of the tables that gave me $30 on $311 (post tax) and $25 on $250 (post tax).

Thanks to the volume, I grossed $310 and walked $290. You might have sucked, but I didn’t, bitches. and I still averaged about 19% on my post tax sales (about 3 % points lower than usual).

So there!

Oh, PS, thanks to the two Canadian girls from London, Ontario who tipped me 17.5% pre tax! In cash!

Not “in cash!” because I didn’t have to claim it (I did and I claim all of my cash tips), “in cash!” because they actually had to count the money out and figure out how much they were going to leave me. They weren’t just writing in a 10% or 12% credit card tip like we are used to Canadians in this part of the country doing. For me, a 16% post tax tip from a Canadian is like a 20% tip from someone else, so ladies, I appreciate your generosity a long way from home.