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Human Resources: How the Other Half Lives

Apr 30, 2016

Front-of-house staff, and back-of-house staff, that is—and sometimes it seems like never the twain shall meet.

These are two very different groups of people, with different jobs, skill sets, schedules and pay grades. They may even have different work ethics, temperaments and ambitions—very few aspiring actors, for instance, take a job working the broiler line in a restaurant kitchen.

Many restaurant professionals who have come up in the industry have worked both sides of the equation, in the kitchen and on the floor, and have learned firsthand the sometimes adversarial relationship between BOH and FOH.

Servers can fear the kitchen crew, especially if the chef is temperamental or given to yelling (the trope of the big, bad, foulmouthed chef as portrayed by Gordon Ramsey on “Kitchen Nightmares” is not so far from the truth). The dining room crew depends on the kitchen to get the orders right and timed correctly, and woe betide the waiter who has to bring back a steak that a customer says is overcooked.

Back in the kitchen, the cooks can resent the servers, who get to spend time in an air-conditioned dining room, and who go out for drinks together after the shift while we were still scrubbing down our stations. And they can really resent it when word comes back that one of them has snagged a hundred-dollar tip—more than a minimum wage kitchen worker makes in an entire day.

Recently, supporters of eliminating gratuities have addressed this inequity in pay as one of the many reasons to get rid of tipping. Proponents like Danny Meyer argue that a “hospitality included” policy, which would build the tip into menu prices, would allow management to pay back- and front-of-house employees more equally. This would help with retention and morale, at least in the kitchen, and many people feel it’s also morally the right thing to do. Camino, an upscale restaurant in Oakland, CA (which now has a mandated minimum wage of $12.25 an hour), recently eliminated tipping—and raised its prices by 22%—with a notice on the menu that states “Our prices now include service so we can pay our employees a living wage.”

 

Restaurant tipping is ingrained in the United States, however, and if will be a long time, if ever, until the restaurant gratuity goes away entirely. But there are other ways to foster better communication between kitchen and dining room staff.

 

  • Make mutual respect part of company culture and policy
  • Include front- and back-of-house equally in all perks, recognition and skill-building programs
  • Keep hours reasonable and working conditions comfortable for all staff; don’t let the kitchen culture be “survival of the fittest”
  • Consider closing the restaurant twice a year for a whole-staff party or trip
  • Get kitchen and dining room staffs both involved in trainings like wine tastings or recipe development
  • Keep the door open for suggestions, complaints and commentary
  • Don’t hesitate to step in when there are problems

 

You could also do what Holy Belly in Paris did, and swap kitchen and dining room roles so the crew could understand each other’s pain. The video may be in French, but the issues are universal.

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Menu Management: A Big Piece of the Labor Puzzle

Apr 29, 2016

Menu Management: A Big Piece of the Labor Puzzle

Labor is the single biggest challenge facing the restaurant industry today, and the issue goes beyond hiring, scheduling and training. This focused article will explore how menu management—a disciplined, five-step approach to assessing what’s on the menu and how it’s prepared—can help optimize existing labor.

Menu Management is a Key to Labor Optimization

By Dean Small

Labor is the single biggest challenge facing the restaurant industry today. Demographically, the entry-level labor pool is shrinking, as Americans have fewer children. Regulations affecting minimum wage and healthcare are adding to the squeeze, and soon we may have changes in immigration policy that could also affect an important source of hardworking hourly workers.

There are plenty of other issues that impact an operator’s ability to make money, including higher expenses in just about every area, from food and occupancy costs to the price of insurance, to say nothing about increased competition, from both foodservice and retail. That makes most operators even more nervous about raising menu prices enough to cover the shortfall.

It’s an era of having to do more with less.

Menu management is one answer. This disciplined approach to what’s on the menu and how it’s prepared can help significantly with labor optimization.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Evaluate your existing menu for orphan (single-use) production items and products – Orphan ingredients, especially any items that you make, represent a missed opportunity to cross-utilize. They take time to prep, time to inventory, time to organize. If you’re only using pineapple pico de gallo on one menu item, even if that item captures a healthy percentage of sales, you’re doing it wrong.
  2. Assess the menu mix to determine true labor needs – Our rule of thumb is that for every menu item, there are at least three subrecipes; for chicken enchiladas, for instance, there’s a recipe for the filling, a recipe for cooking the chicken, and a plating recipe. There may also be subrecipes for a sauce (like that pineapple pico), a finishing drizzle, and accompanying rice and beans. You need to break down each menu item to see how much labor is involved in each step before you can truly know the labor needed to produce it.
  3. Conduct a time-motion assessment to evaluate what production items are driving labor requirements – Where’s all your labor time going? Knowing what items require what labor allows you to compress that requirement. Our client California Pizza Kitchen knew money was being left on the table in the back-of-the-house but it couldn’t determine where this was happening. We helped them set guidelines for every single recipe and subrecipe, in the back-of-the-house and on the line, and identified places where a total of four to five hours were being wasted in duplicated efforts every day; that equated to $6 million a year chainwide.
  4. Create multiple-yield recipes to meet projected volume requirements – Let’s say you’re making Ranch dressing every day. Stop. If Ranch dressing has a three-day shelf life, make a big batch on Monday and another one on Thursday; you’ve saved 30 minutes on the other five days assembling, mixing, labeling and storing Ranch dressing. What else could you do with that 2 ½ hours? If you know you’ll be slow on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday—you’re using your POS or other historicals for this, right?—there should be recipes for a 2-gallon batch and for a 4-gallon batch. You’d be surprised how few major chains do this; management figures the unit chef will know, but guess what? Do this for every production recipe that doesn’t have to be made every day.
  5. Identify time requirements on each recipe – Once you know the amount of time required for every single menu item component, then and only then can you add everything up and get a baseline for all labor hours needed. Then you can compare actual labor time against theoretical; the gap is your wasted labor. And that’s what you can begin to optimize.

This menu assessment phase is just one facet of labor optimization in the back-of-the-house. Others include making an investment in more efficient equipment, identifying tasks that can be produced more quickly by using smallwares and other tools, implementing better closing procedures, and much much more. But knowing your menu and the time it takes to produce it is where you start.

Dean Small is Founder and CEO of Synergy Restaurant Consultants (www.synergyconsultants.com), a team of restaurant industry veterans who specialize in both launching new restaurant startups and jump-starting struggling or financially distressed brands.

https://www.synergyconsultants.com/resources/content-library/

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Here are five ways that restaurant operators can improve their bottom line and it won’t cost them a cent

Apr 26, 2016

 

  1. Kitchen Labor Schedules

Most operators use old methodologies and scheduling to determine labor needs.  These approaches are flawed and ultimately hurt the bottom line due to inefficient use of excess labor.

 

FIX:  Create preparation times for each menu item to understand how much labor is truly required for food preparation. Using projected times requirements, self-life and multiple yield strategies to set production needs could save a restaurant 2-3 hours of labor per day.

 

  1. Menu 

Menu Management is a discipline.  Most restaurants have far too many menu selections, this causes a broad range of operational, inventory, production, labor, throughput, ticket times and training concerns.

 

FIX:  Most restaurants have POS capabilities that will enable them to run a Product Mix to determine what are the high and low performers.  Assess which items drive sales and profitability.  Eliminate menu selections that underperform and drive labor costs.  Try to eliminate 10% of your menu by eliminating menu items that are not performing.

 

  1. Team Work

Oftentimes dining room servers become very territorial and lack a teamwork attitude that managers fail to enforce which hurts overall service, throughput, table turns, and the guest experience.

 

FIX: Managers should hold pre-shift meetings every day and discuss ways to encourage a teamwork culture. Full hands in and out, helping others pre-bus tables and running food and beverages are the basics of good teamwork.

 

 

  1. Inventory Management

Many restaurant operators don’t take food and liquor inventory management serious enough.   Many independents do annual inventories and use food purchases to determine food cost which is not accurate.  When you have a GAP of over a 1.5% (the difference between actual versus the theoretical) in excess of point it’s time to get serious about inventory control.

 

FIX: We would recommend weekly inventories, implementing a secured meat cage, lock the back door, secure the liquor room, storage rooms, eliminate back packs being stored on site and implement portion control tools.   We live in a pennies business.  Manage the Pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.

 

  1. Energy and Utility Opportunities

Oftentimes cooks turn on the hoods and all the equipment when the walk in the door which drives spikes in energy costs and wastes gas and electricity. Defrosting food under excessive quantities of wasted water.

 

FIX: An equipment power up and power down schedule is easy to implement and should be enforced to reduce utility expenses.  Turn on broilers, hoods and fryers when needed or 15 minutes prior to opening.  At slower periods of time strategically power down equipment as this strategy will reduce utility expenses.  Finally, create a freezer pull chart that allows frozen foods to slack out in the cooler and not under water, which is a waste of water and a precious resource.

 

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Survive, Thrive… or Turn Turtle

Apr 21, 2016

By Dean Small

There’s a bit of slang from the nautical world that can be used to describe what can happen to a restaurant brand in these competitive and challenging times: “turning turtle.”

 

Turning turtle, or turtling, is when a boat completely capsizes and is positioned hull to the sky and mast to the bottom of the sea. A skilled captain can keep it from happening but once a boat has shifted past the point of no return, the boat falls into a death roll, and there’s nothing the crew can do to prevent themselves from going over. In a small sailing dinghy, it’s pretty easy for a couple of people to lean on the rails and pull the boat upright, but in a larger vessel, turning turtle often spells the end.

 

I was thinking of how apt an expression this is for restaurant failure when I recently found myself dumped into the water from a Hobie Cat while on vacation, embarrassed but unharmed after having done everything wrong: flying too much sail, steering erratically, not paying attention to the shifting winds.

It seems like a lot of restaurant brands have turned turtle lately, or are barely hanging on, for a lot of the same reasons. In many cases, cash flow may be the only thing keeping these places going, especially in small three- or four-unit chains.

 

At Synergy Restaurant Consultants, we see this all the time. A couple of entrepreneurs open what they think is The Next Big Thing, and it starts out really well—guests come, the place is jammed all the time, and they are making lots of money. So they let out a bit more sail so to speak and open a second unit.

But guess what? It’s not going so great at the second unit and they blame a bad location or a bad winter or a bad manager—a fluke. All those things may be true, and despite the underperformance of the second unit, they go ahead and roll the dice that it’s not their concept that’s bad, and they open a third unit. Next thing they know, it’s only the cash flow from the original unit that’s keeping the other two afloat; turns out it was the first one that was the fluke. That’s when many new restaurant brands call us, and we use our proven strategies to keep them from going under.

 

Then there are what I call the Walking Dead, those restaurants that are just surviving, netting 4 to 5 % net operating profit, just barely making ends meet. You’ve probably seen them, too, the ones that are steering their ship erratically by trying a little bit of everything—bigger menu, smaller menu, couponing, reduced hours—hoping to hit on the thing that will keep them in the race.

 

To really thrive in the restaurant business—doing 10 or 12 or even 15 percent net operating profit—your brand needs to operate like a well-oiled machine. You’ve got to have systems standards, controls, procedures and strong management in place. Sure, the brands that thrive have the same challenges as everyone else—high food costs, crappy weather, and the biggest one of all: labor, but they can anticipate the shifting winds and they have a solid but nimble ship.

 

They can do things if their food costs edge up or the minimum wage increases, like remove problematic menu items, raise prices or decrease portion sizes or consolidate labor functions. Their ship is basically sound.

 

At Synergy, we specialize in helping turtles turn back upright and mere survivors become thriving, profitable businesses. We’re the experts at innovation and efficiency in the restaurant industry, and we’re better at this than anyone else.

 

Watch this space for more ideas and solutions in the weeks and months ahead.

 

Boat photo credit: Andy license CC by 2.0

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Get Ready for Higher Minimum Wages

Apr 21, 2016

Make no mistake; higher statewide minimum wages are happening, first in California and New York, and surely in other states as well. Many larger cities, including Los Angeles and Seattle, have already enacted laws that would phase in $15 per hour rates over the coming years. These laws are complex and often onerous, even for those operators who agree with the “living wage” ideology, and if this November’s elections swing towards Democrat, the movement will grow.

 

Restaurant margins are already tight, as all operators know. But many consumers favor minimum wage increases, and companies that have resisted such increases in the past have paid the price in patron disapproval. It’s a thorny issue all around, in which both sides have valid points.

 

Short of raising prices and cutting staff, operators need to get a menu development and labor optimization plan together. Even with higher wages, restaurants are having difficulty finding and retaining staff, for demographic and competitive reasons. We also can see that food costs are going nowhere but up.

 

Here are 10 steps operators should be taking now. We’ll go into many of these in detail in future blog posts.

 

  1. Assess your menu mix to determine your true labor needs; if there are items on the menu that require a disproportionate amount of labor, change the recipe or nix it altogether
  2. Boost cross-utilization by eliminating orphan ingredient SKUs and sub-recipes used in just one or two items
  3. Study historical data to make sure you’re not overproducing—or underproducing—prep for any given day
  4. By the same token, forecast labor needs by studying past customer counts; if most of your dinner business doesn’t start until seven, don’t have every server coming in at 5 p.m.
  5. Create signature dishes that will set your operation apart from the competition; when local patrons are in the mood for popular items like a burger or lobster mac-and-cheese, they should think of your restaurant
  6. Build average checks with the so-called left side of the menu, including soups, salads, starters and small plates, snacks and sides, as well as desserts
  7. Consider additional profit centers such as self-service catering or happy hour. These revenue boosters represent the efficient use of labor, inventory and prep space
  8. Train front-of-house staff in the fine art of suggestive selling to boost checks—and their tips
  9. Be scrupulous about eliminating waste, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because waste is a huge drain on food costs
  10. Decrease the ratio of bell-ringer items like proteins on plated items, in favor of more produce, grains and other lower-cost ingredients

 

At Synergy Restaurant Consultants, we’ve got solutions for the challenges associated with labor inefficiency. Get in touch if you have any questions for us or if you would like to discuss the many ways Synergy can help support your goals.

 

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Pop-Up Restaurants: A Fad or Here to Stay?

Apr 15, 2016

Every few days, we hear of a new pop-up restaurant opening. Some for a few days or weeks, open to public, and others in secret locations for a night or two only. In taking a look at their soaring popularity, let’s consider why diners are hooked and operators continue to offer them.

 

The Appeal to Diners

Today, people are after the new, the unique. On one hand, dining out is an increasingly everyday occurrence for a growing portion of the population. With that in mind, for special occasions and nights out, however, the average dinner is no longer enough. People are looking for adventure. Guests seek something they can brag to their friends about, or bring them along to. Essentially, pop-ups offer in-the-moment action worthy of Instagram.

 

The Appeal to Operators

For operators, pop-ups are a great way to test a new restaurant concept. By letting guests have a “trial” of a concept, you’ll get feedback, as casually or formally as you’d like. Operators can then make tweaks, seeing what worked and what did not, before making the financial, energetic and location-based commitment of a permanent brick-and-mortar concept.

 

What’s more, if managed and promoted properly, pop-ups can be quite profitable. Pop-up diners aren’t looking for a deal or everyday value. Guests will pay as much or more than they would for the same meal as a brick-and-mortar experience.

 

Are pop-ups here to stay? Over the years, and ins one markets, pop-up restaurants’ popularity may wane a bit, but this ever-changing style of eating and unique way of presenting food and culinary ideas will stick around in one way or another.

 

Menu photo credit: Soon Lee license CC by SA 2.0

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Fire Up Menus with Artisan Cooking Platforms

Apr 13, 2016

The enticing, elemental aroma of steaks cooking on a wood fire. Plump, juicy chickens revolving on a rotisserie. Delicious pizza, baking to perfect crispness in a stone hearth oven. All of it in full view of the customer.

This is the allure of artisan cooking platforms. Cooking over an open flame has exerted a powerful draw on humankind since the discovery of fire—or, rather, the controlled use of fire—during the early Stone Ages. It was a turning point in cultural evolution then, and it is an important feature of on-trend and dynamic restaurant concepts today.

The word artisan may have lost some of its meaning in this marketing-oriented era, but the craft of artisan cooking is still very much alive, and in fact it’s been staging a robust resurgence.

Buzzworthy chefs have been embracing traditional styles of food preparation (hello, house-made pickles and house-cured salumi!) and ancient methods of cooking, including cooking over wood and other solid fuels.

 

According to Tim Green, Synergy’s resident pizza specialist and artisan cooking guru, cooking with solid fuel is the oldest method of cooking, and perhaps the simplest. For the purposes of this discussion, “solid fuel” means any material that has mass and matter that is flammable and nontoxic, including wood, charcoal and to a lesser extent coal. The equipment itself encompasses stone-hearth ovens, grills, and rotisseries, as well as more specialized platforms such as tandoor ovens, duck ovens, and specific styles of grilling such as robata and yakitori.

 

“People have an innate love of this type of cooking,” says Green, who joined Synergy earlier this year after serving as corporate chef for the famed Wood Stone Corp. for 15 years. “Who hasn’t craved the taste of a marshmallow or a hot dog cooked over the open flame of a campfire, or a juicy hamburger fresh of the charcoal grill?”

 

In a restaurant setting, solid-fuel cooking confers many benefits and poses some challenges as well. From the operator’s point of view, there is simplicity. “One of the biggest challenges we face today in the industry is the cost of skilled labor, training, and employee turnover,” explains Green. “Cooking with solid fuel eliminates the need for complex sauces, marinades, sauté skills and lots of specialized equipment. By eliminating these processes, we decrease food inventory, prep time, cooking equipment, and real-estate for that equipment, training, and food waste.”

 

The benefit for the customers is flavor—and a compelling backstory. Cooking with solid fuel and an open flame achieves great food flavors and textures. When done in the context of an open kitchen, it speaks to transparency, freshness and a statement of skill and quality. “Cooking with solid fuel/open flame/stone hearth methods is tremendously theatrical,” says Green. “Guests love to see fire, and are even more excited when their food is cooked with that fire. Seeing an open kitchen with solid fuel and smelling the unique aromas of wood or charcoal tells us that our food will be fresh, whole, and full of flavor. The customer also perceives that cooking with a live fire means that the cook must be paying great attention to the food. We like that.”

 

But there are also challenges that come with the commitment to cooking with these artisan platforms. Green points out that many regions of North America no longer allow cooking with solid fuel, particularly urban areas, because of concerns about pollution. Where allowed, there is a need for powerful ventilation systems, fire suppression and the room and manpower to receive and store fuel, whether wood, charcoal or coal, as well as a system to dispose of ashes.

 

And there are certainly issues for the kitchen team. “Cooks need to become Fire Managers as well as cooks, a process that takes training and experience—even for those former campers among the crew who are familiar with fire,” says Green. “It’s not like setting a timer on a combi oven and walking away to do something else—solid fuel cooking needs to be watched closely.” There are even issues of appearance and demeanor when moving cooks out to the stage of an open kitchen, which is something not everyone is comfortable with.

 

But for those operators who take the plunge, there is magic in store. Says Green: “What is every chef looking for today? Simple, bold, flavors from the food we are cooking.” And that goes double for our guests.

 

For more information about artisan cooking platforms and solid fuel cooking, check our blog for updates.

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Israeli: New Cuisine on the Block

Apr 09, 2016

Ottolenghi was just the first sign. Google the name Yotam Ottolenghi or his London restaurant Nopi or his four eponymous delis and you also get eight cookbooks, three television shows and more articles in the food press than you can shake a pita bread at. Collectively, this empire gives a glimpse on what could be the Next Big Thing in global cuisine: Israeli food.

 

Now comes news that another big name in the field, Michael Solomonov, is set to move beyond his eight-year-old Philadelphia restaurant Zahav, with a variety of new Israeli-cuisine projects. There is already a cookbook, and a “hummusiya,” called Disengoff, that serves a rotating array of Israeli-style hummus ranging from traditional tehina to mushroom, black eyed pea, carrot, chicken, and even lamb pistachio, along with housemade pita and Israeli pickles and salads. Sundays see the addition of shakshuka, which amounts to the Israeli national breakfast.

 

Along with business partner Steven Cook, Solomonov will bring Disengoff to and its many kinds of hummus to Manhattan’s Chelsea Market food hall, introducing a much broader audience to this versatile and widely popular food. (The two men also operate the more mainstream Federal Donuts, with five units in the City of Brotherly Love, under the CookNSolo restaurant umbrella.)

 

It’s not hard to see why Israeli cuisine is poised for takeoff. Like Mediterranean food, the cooking of Israel is healthy, vegetable-forward, and bright with the flavors of a sunny, warm climate. It’s also multicultural and getting more so, as settlers of different ethnicities continue to arrive in Israel, adding to a mix that already reflects its German, Russian, Balkan and North African heritage.

 

And despite its exoticism, the cuisine is relatively simple and approachable, emphasizing items like the “small plates” called mezze (many of them salads and dips), grilled meats, rice dishes, savory pastries, and both Ashkenazi and Sephardic specialties such as gefilte fish, couscous and stuffed vegetables.

 

In addition to the hummus, falafel, kebabs and kibbeh (ground meat mixed with bulgur wheat and mint) that are popular throughout the Middle East, there are several Israeli dishes that seem especially appropriate to today’s global food trends.

 

Baba ghanoush – smoky grilled eggplant, mixed into a spread with lemon juice, garlic and tahini (sesame paste)

Borekas (a.k.a. burekas, bourekas) – a family of baked, triangular phyllo pastries stuffed with any number of fillings

Israeli Salad – chopped cucumbers, onions, tomatoes and parsley dressed with lemon juice, olive oil garlic and mint

Labneh – thickened yogurt that can be eaten as is, with olive oil and the spice mix known as za’atar, or mixed with other ingredients, such as crushed almonds or dukkah (coriander, cumin, and sesame seeds with hazelnuts)

Majadara – rice and lentil pilaf

Malawach – Yemenite fried bread similar to a thick pancake

 

The real excitement, however, is the kind of creative and elevated fare that chefs like Ottolenghi and Solomonov are doing, showcasing the delicious ingredients of Israel and other Middle Eastern areas. These include fruits and vegetables like figs, pomegranates, citrus, eggplant, peppers and tomatoes; beans and legumes; chicken and lamb; bulgur and other grains as well as couscous; and flavorings such as olives and olive oil, honey, ginger, sumac, garlic, saffron, fresh herbs, exotic spice blends and more. With a pantry like this, there’s no end to what could happen next.
For more information on Israeli ingredients, check out this article.