New thinking about role of restaurants

Late on a Wednesday morning, an industry savant treated a roomful of restaurant-chain executives to an explanation of his business philosophy. This is the sort of guy who flies in private jets and has serious need of estate planning, with a $4-billion chain in his charge. Yet here’s the magic Ron Shaich said he’d learned from building Panera Bread: Aim for richer lives and a better society, not bigger profits.

Two weeks later, students at New York’s Institute of Culinary Education were completing their foodservice curriculum with a walk-through of the ventures they hoped to start after graduation. By design, these were formal business plans, presented to a panel of industry vets who gently assessed both the ideas and the appropriateness of the presentation. Of the five students who aired their ideas on the day I served as a greybeard, all but one pledged that their businesses would deliver societal benefits along with dollar-and-cents returns.

A stellar success and a handful of aspirants just starting out: They hail from opposing ends of the experience spectrum, but they share a view of what a restaurant business should be. With that mindset evident at both poles, is there any doubt it’ll seep into the mainstream of the business?

There are ample signs that it’s happening already, as you’ll see in our upcoming issue. And more keep coming. This week, for instance, Chipotle scolded the Food & Drug Administration for its regulatory stance on the use of pesticides on food crops. The one-time McDonald’s holding said point-blank that it wants the agency to take a harder line on processes that boost yields and hence temper food costs. It’s just not good for farm sustainability, the fast-food chain said in a press release.

This is no longer Kumbaya stuff. Chipotle and Panera are big corporations owned by Wall Street. It’s not that they’ve veered left toward the nearest ashram. It’s that a broader, more responsible sensibility is shifting into the business world, restaurants included.

You’ll learn in our May issue about Panera’s embrace of this broader-minded strain of capitalism. But how about the students and their business plans?

Here’s how they’re hoping to meld a social consciousness with an old-fashioned profit motive:

Katy Severson, who drove around the country before culinary school to learn regional cuisines firsthand, wants to open a gastropub, The Mayflower, where she can feature the best of what she sampled. “Food has a history and a soul,” she explains in her business plan. “This philosophy will be reflected in the way The Mayflower operates in every facet: from the way we source our food and how that food is treated before it sits on our plates, to the way we treat our staff, to the way we decorate our restaurants, plate our food, and most importantly treat our customers.”

She’d penciled out a pro-forma P&L that allowed for healthcare coverage for employees. “I have experience with not getting benefits,” she explained to her classmates and the judging panel.

Mitchell Dorsey intends to feature only “responsibly sourced” foods in Burg Inn, the farm-to-fork restaurant he plans to open in East Williamsburg, a gentrifying corner of Brooklyn.
Sergio Gutierrez plans to showcase aspiring local musicians in his La Maja, one of the community ties he’s planning for the Monterey, Mexico, gastropub.

A classmate planning a Brooklyn tapas bar pledged that it would be “not just another business in the area, but also a part of [the] local community and its needs.”

Using local ingredients, previously the flag signaling a socially conscious restaurant, was the rule for all the student presenters, not the exception.

Not surprisingly, before Shaich spoke at our Restaurant Leadership Conference, another presenter was asked about the viability of chains purchasing locally.

The industry has sufficiently tempered its cheap-and-easy sourcing mindset to shift local purchasing into the industry consciousness.

All signs say it’s just the beginning of a change in attitudes.

What I learned at school yesterday

Every semester I’m privileged to address a class at New York’s Institute for Culinary Education, a springboard for entrepreneurs to become restaurant proprietors. My assignment is to provide an overview of the hot and fading concepts of the moment. But I learn more than the students because their feedback provides a sense of the direction they intend to steer the business. And I’m here to attest we’re about to turn back to the classics.

The youngsters use the opportunity to ask me about the concepts that have caught their fancy and what they might like to open after graduation. In recent years their focus has been on the avant garde—places like marshmallow shops, carts of all stripes, a barbecue place that borrows the dress codes of Twin Peaks and Hooters, and a wine shop and bar for Gen Yers.

But yesterday’s class asked about formats like cafes, bistros, wings places, tapas bars, neighborhood pubs and sports bars. It wasn’t as if they were oblivious to how many examples of those concepts are in the market already. To the contrary, they were one of the more informed groups I’ve addressed; they’d clearly done their homework in scoping out the state of the industry and where opportunities might lay.

That research had convinced them there’s room in those crowded fields for a newcomer that could differentiate itself through execution. And they had some definite ideas about how they could do it better.

I was struck by how many times the students mentioned comfort as one of the attributes that would push their ventures ahead of the pack. Novelty wasn’t that important to them.

It was a marked difference in orientation from past groups, but this old-is-new mindset makes sense. The sport-dining sensibility that reached its apex with molecular gastronomy is giving way to a more grounded appreciation of fundamentals—good food in a comfortable atmosphere with friendly service.

NRA Show generates some new-concept buzz

If discussions at the NRA show are any indication, concept development is revving up again.

A speaker in an education session on energy and water conservation, of all topics, mentioned that Pizza Fusion CEO Vaughan Lazar was in the brainstorming process for a second venture. Like Fusion, the spin-off would be grounded on green principles, the speaker said.

Pizza Fusion confirmed the report in New Age fashion by retweeting an audience member’s Twitter recount of the remark. It the company’s passing along the word, it must be true.

Meanwhile, a veteran chain-builder who asked not to be identified remarked off-hand that he’s considering a new concept, too. He wouldn’t provide details, but all of his previous ventures have been in the fast-casual segment.

Stay tuned for details.

Service as a concept differentiator

Once upon a time, restaurant innovators focused on the menu as their means of differentiation. But look at today’s innovators and there’s no denying that modes of service are the way of standing out.

Consider, for instance, ZED451, one of the more upscale (and interesting) concepts in the portfolio of Tavistock Group, also the parent of Freebird World Burritos and the ethnic concepts formerly run by eBrands.

The company describes ZED as “a contemporary, internationally inspired steakhouse,” but it’s really a high-end, ultra-high-quality riff on the old Sizzler steak-and-buffet format. Guests help themselves to an extensive spread of fresh, seasonal sides, often with ethnic roots. Included in the spread are salads, vegetables, soups, breads and cheeses.

As you munch what you took, chefs roam the tables with platters of steak, seafood, poultry and game. They carve the proteins for you and explain how it was made, since they were the ones who prepared it.

Servers are still part of the mix. They take and serve drink orders, and presumably clear away empty dishes.

But clearly the concept takes the notion of a display kitchen one step further, bringing the kitchen out to the table to discuss what he or she made for you.

Vapiano, a German chain featuring Italian food, has a similar objective. Like Rich Melman’s FoodLife in Chicago, guests go from station to station for the elements of the meal, charging what they get to a card holding a smart chip. For instance, they can stop at a pasta station and have something made expressly for them. The food is prepared by a “cook-tainer” who converses with them as he or she whips up the serving. The guest brings the food to his or her table.

The U.S. arm of the company describes it as “somewhere between the nicest of fast casual and hippest of casual.”

Of course there’s no shortage of more-conventional entrants in the fast-casual sector, sometimes in decidedly unexpected pairings. Ruby Tuesday is moving away from full service with its development deal with Lime Fresh, a Mexican concept that some might label Chipotle 2.0.

But perhaps the winner in service uniqueness has to be the handful of avant garde places that Technomic has dubbed non-food restaurants. We at MonkeyDish.com prefer to think of them as B.Y.O.F. places, as in have getting the food from elsewhere.

As Technomic’s Darren Tristano explained at our Restaurant Leadership Conference, these new places are basically bars without a kitchen. They encourage you to have food delivered, maybe from a preferred nearby restaurant, or to bring it in from the restaurant trucks or carts outside. Then they sell you the accompanying drinks.

They don’t have to invest in a kitchen or devote space to ovens and the like. Nor do they need the usual venting and exhaust fixtures that render many urban spots unfeasible for a restaurant.

Restaurants without the food. Who’d have thought it? It’s the non-menu menu.