101 Restaurant Secrets
Ross Boardman
© 2012 Ross Boardman. All rights reserved
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1048-7
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Dedication:
To my wife Susan xxx
Introduction.
“90% of new restaurants fail within their first year because someone out there said, “You know, I like to cook. And people enjoy my food.
Maybe I should start a restaurant!”
Scott Ginsberg
One of the true mysteries of life has to be asking “why”, when someone doesn’t learn or listen. There is a real arrogance to a person who still has life and won’t grow or take on new ideas. In my times in the hospitality business I have made some amazing foul ups and real failures in judgement. If someone had come to me at the beginning of my journey and given me a few pointers, I would have come back for more and more inspiration.
We bought a small family restaurant nano seconds before the global cash crunch kicked in during 2008. Despite the feeling of plummeting into a darkness with no customers and very little experience, we got through. In the three years we owned our first place we more than doubled the turnover, got written up in national news and won several awards.
Many of the lessons we learnt came from asking questions, learning, self training and watching others. This book is a toolkit of some of the real nuggets we picked up along the way. The biggest lesson was in understanding that simplicity is always the best approach. Sometimes you have to spend a lot more time making things simple, but the investment will pay off.
There are 101 different tools and lessons in this book. Some you will fall in love with and some you will hate. If you choose only to use a couple of the ideas on these pages, you have already made a return on the price on the cover.
Is this for you?
This may be one of the most important parts of this book, so please read, absorb and answer honestly. There is only one person who needs to know the truth here and that is you.
1 Does your skill in cooking come from creating great dinner parties?
2 Did you work in a bar or restaurant when you were a student?
3 Do you want a place that you can hang out in with your friends?
4 Have you watched a lot of TV shows on restaurant problems and service improvement?
5 Do you find it hard NOT to please people?
6 Do you believe a restaurant is like any other business?
If you answered yes to any of the above then there is a good chance that this is not for you. Owning and running a restaurant requires a set of technical and business skills very specific to the industry. On top of that you need to have the motivation for getting into the trade. It does help to understand the long hours and some of the jobs in the hospitality business, but you really need to know how to operate a restaurant as an owner and not from behind the beer tap.
Having somewhere your friends can come and hang out is good, but they are customers who befriend you. It is too easy to be the nicest person in town and give away free drinks and food. Remember it is still a business, your real friends will know that.
The differences between a dinner party host and a chef are too numerous to discuss here, more on that later. There are a lot of buildings, films, fashions and restaurants I could criticise from my armchair, but I only know how to fix restaurants from personal hands-on experience.
I wrote this book from sometimes getting it right the first time. The major lessons were from getting it wrong and then not repeating the same mistake. It might not work perfectly the second time, so you make sure you don’t repeat that next mistake. One real truth is that learning from other peoples mistakes is very valuable if you understand what has been taught.
This book is about many of the mistakes I learnt from and if this is for you, I want to share them with you.
Costing
Costing – What is it?
Costing in our context is the science of establishing how much each item on the menu costs in raw material terms. If you are selling a bottle of wine or a steak dinner, the principles are just the same. There are many factors in restaurant success, this is one of the most important. Accurate timely costings will ensure you have a viable product and that you will have a measurable element of profit.
You may be asking yourself why you should be doing any of this as you are not an accountant. The simple answer is that your accountant will have nothing to count, if you don’t get your costing done properly. Some of the building blocks of costing may look intimidating and some even contradictory to rational thought. It may take some time to get used to, but will eventually become second nature. It is a lot more complicated working out where your profit comes from if you haven’t gone through a process of costing.
The flow works like this:
1 Develop a FULL recipe for each menu item
2 Keep a current master list
3 Check what you need to cost
4 Cost everything
5 Understand the difference between stock weight and plate weight
6 Count all waste
7 Cost
8 Calculate menu price
9 Keep that master list updated
Follow these steps for every item you sell and you will be in a better position to make decisions. Again, none of this is rocket science, but it does take a bit of time to internalise the lessons if they are unfamiliar.
Developing the recipe
There are three reasons for recipes, which is often 2 more than many chefs appreciate. First you need to know how to cook the dish, then you need to build your costs and finally, you may get to publish that cookbook one day.
With building any recipe there is one thing I can not emphasize more, cost everything in there. What do you need to cost for a pan fried rib eye steak? Some would say a steak. That’s a fair start to the exercise, but if you are cooking something from a recipe you need all the ingredients listed.
Even if the ingredients are at such a small level that you feel they would not be material to your costing, still measure them and record your findings. At some point you may substitute or upgrade ingredients and you may see a shift in the costs. Nothing is too small to capture the first time out.
Ingredients for a steak recipe:
10oz ribeye steak
½ oz butter
½ oz oil
1tsp chopped parsley
1 sprig of rosemary
2 cloves of garlic
Pinch of salt
Grind of black