Restaurants According to Ben

So I guess I should just come out and say it. “I love restaurants!” There it is. So there is no confusion. So no one on down the road can say, “You must hate dining out.” Absolutely not. In fact, the opposite is true. I do love restaurants. I enjoy them so much, I made it my livelihood for a number of years. I enjoy entertaining people. I enjoy crowds. I enjoy great tasting cuisine, prepared with impeccable ingredients, and served with enthusiasm. I love restaurants so much, that I admire great ones. I love restaurants and would dine out each night of the week, if I didn’t understand that not every restaurant is value, and that some of them use techniques to increase their margins, which directly affect the experience of dining out.
So dining out becomes an evaluation for me. And that is why I was paid to do just that, evaluate restaurants. Sitting at a table in a restaurant, I can gauge in just a few seconds how well run and well-maintained the establishment is. Spotted flatware shows the utensils weren’t wiped dry but left to “drip-dry,” a server involved in mindless chatter to an employee about that evening’s events after they are off work, diners at another table with empty glasses, and uncleared tables throughout the dining room with dirty dishes from past guests. These are obvious, but clear examples of details that calculate the worth of the experience because every restaurateur encounters thousands of decisions each day that will affect his guests’ experience.
Let’s role play… and not like that.
You are a restaurateur. You have three main expenses: food and beverage, labor, and operating expenses. Your operating expenses, such as utilities and rent, do not change that much. In the winter they may go up from running the heat, but in the summer they could also rise from running the air conditioning. The bottom line is that unless your landlord hikes up your lease, or someone leaves the A/C on 60 overnight, your operating expenses should remain nearly the same. Your labor cost should dabble at 20% and your food cost should be concrete at 30%, some places can get down to 25%, and Chinese and Mexican restaurants can boast 15-20% food costs.
But to maintain these labor and food costs, you have decisions. Jumbo Lump Crabmeat goes up $2/lb. Do you continue to buy it for your crab cakes, or do you drop to lump instead? What would your guests prefer? It’s Friday night, you have a new line cook working, should you bring in an extra guy to back him up? This will cost you more on your labor, but what if the newbie can’t get food out in time? What if tickets run slow? How will that affect your guests? It is 8 o’clock on a Tuesday, your servers beg you to cut someone, leaving you with less staff on the floor, but leaving your servers with an opportunity to make more money? What do you do? What if 12 people come in all at once, and your servers get weeded? What if you say no, and your servers make no money because it is slow? Finding good staff is hard, and if they aren’t making good money, they won’t stay long.
These dilemmas occur daily for a restaurant owner. But they must always be mindful of the guest experience. But how do I know whether or not the place I have just sat down at, with the spotted utensils, and the thirsty diners at table 23, will provide me with a good guest experience? I don’t. And that is why I stopped dining out so much, and I started dining in.
I realized that I could apply the insights from running a commercial kitchen, such as, creating specials to burn-out old product, to never waste anything, and to create menus with overlapping ingredients to keep overhead down and upkeep simple, to my own kitchen at home and save me and my family a bundle of money while maintaining a enlivened palate.
Let’s be frank. I already told you that most restaurants hover around a 25% food cost. So what does that mean for someone dining out? The bill you are paying is only 25% food. The other 75% is for the experience and the preparation. Service is not included in the U.S. That cost you another 15%-20% more. So 75% of each meal dining out is paying for your experience and the preparation of the meal. So each meal should be evaluated. How much value does it hold? Should you spend $8 on a sandwich from a deli? And how about take out, or to-go-orders. Restaurants love this. Why do you think the national chains have now gone out of there way to accommodate call-in orders to the point that they will rush the food out to your car? Think about it? They are selling you food at the same price as if you came in and dined in their restaurant. But you aren’t taking up a seat in their dining room. They don’t have to consider your guest experience as much as a table of four inside. It is a win-win for them. 75% of that pickup order is paying for the upkeep, maintenance and profit margin of the business. To-go orders are a waste of money. I never order them. Why would I want to pay the same price as someone getting full-service at a table, and have to take home a meal that steams itself gooey inside a styrofoam container to come to my home, where I have to use my condiments, my silverware, and I have to clean it up afterwards? That is not a good guest experience.
But let me backup by saying, some places are worth it. My favorite sandwich shop in Memphis, called Fino’s, makes a sandwich that I would never try to recreate or duplicate myself. The preparation they go through is perfect. If I want that sandwich, then I am going to get it from then. And that is what a good guest experience is all about. My lessons through being a restaurateur have taught me, though, to keep those instances for certain nights, and to not rely heavily on dining out for your everyday meals. By doing so, you are missing out on the ability to save yourself money and eat healthier than picking up dinner somewhere every night of the week.

So, Ben, you have convinced me that dining out is not practical, what am I supposed to do now?

Well, as you will discover, I am not a professional chef. I do not get my recipes from the Food Network because you will slit your wrist trying to track down an organic mushroom farm to pick your own wild mushrooms for a risotto or some other obscure item that they try to impress you with. More than a chef, I am a home economist. You’ve heard of that, right? HomeEc. We didn’t have to study that when I was in school, and I think that is both good and bad. I think it has left us somewhat deprived and ignorant of basic cooking instincts, which are truly instincts. You basically know when you are following a recipe if or when something smells wrong, looks wrong, or worse… taste wrong.
By not being a chef, nor wanting to be a chef (I have worked with enough to know how hard it can be), I have more of a simplified approach to cooking. None of my recipes are complicated, they aren’t even challenging, but what they are is good, fresh, inexpensive ingredients, brought together in a timely fashion.
Take this story for example. As I was consulting a chef once, I noticed there was frozen broccoli in her freezer. I asked her what it was for, and she said it was for broccoli cheese soup. I challenged her to make her finest broccoli cheese soup, and we would have a competition the following day to see whose tasted better. I left the restaurant and purchased fresh broccoli from a local produce market. As I was making my soup that night, I called the chef and said, “Don’t forget to cost out your soup.”
She couldn’t believe it. “But I put fine European cheese in it!”
“Exactly. We must know the cost.”
The ingredients for my soup were: broccoli, cheddar cheese, flour, milk, butter, cream, and salt and pepper. As simple as you can get.
The next day, what would you know, the wait staff unanimously chose my golden rue full of fresh, broccoli florettes to her paltry, bland, thin dish. The cost of my soup was fifty-eight cents a portion, hers was $2.34.
“How can we sell that?” I asked her.
“We can’t,” she said.
The point was made.

A very simple, quick, cost-effective approach is what we will take in our klitchens because that is what successful restaurants do in theirs.