Restaurant loyalty

[robert ames]

how many covers you need a night is a function of how many seats you have to fill.

without that information the number of covers is meaningless.

 

[mark e]

originally posted by robert ames:
how many covers you need a night is a function of now [sic] many seats you have to fill.

without that information the number of covers is meaningless.

I'm not sure I agree (if I have understood what you mean). It is the cost of rent (as VLM pointed out) and goods (and in some markets city-specific payroll taxes and requirements) not the percentage of seats you fill. If your rent were very low you might have a 100 seat restaurant and only need a given per person check average and only need to fill 60 seats a night to make a profit. Make sense?

 

[VLM]

originally posted by Rahsaan:

originally posted by VLM:
I know a place that I wish Rahsaan would hit 6 times a year, it would inspire me to keep having a killer wine list (since customers, in general, give zero fucks it is really more of a charity than anything).

Hint well taken!

When I recently refreshed my memory of your wine list, I was indeed reminded of how special it is. I should probably make an effort to enjoy it in the near future.

If I'm being brutally honest, my memories of the food at Rue Cler are certainly good but the food is more exciting at Mateo, the new Mothers and Sons, or even the Counting House. And when I go out to dinner it is usually not with wine geeks, so we end up at one of these places. But perhaps I should revisit.

That's fair. The food isn't exciting. It's meant to be consistent and to accentuate the wine.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

What mark e said, and also: To get my question down on paper, I had to think about some specific kind of restaurant, fiscally speaking. If it is too small or too big then I suppose different rules apply. So, I took something middling: 75 seats filled twice per night.

I have been to restaurants with 5 tables and I have been to restaurants with 5 floors... I'm not in the restaurant business but I'm pretty sure they think differently about pretty much everything.

 

[robert ames]

originally posted by mark e:

originally posted by robert ames:
how many covers you need a night is a function of now [sic] many seats you have to fill.

without that information the number of covers is meaningless.

I'm not sure I agree (if I have understood what you mean). It is the cost of rent (as VLM pointed out) and goods (and in some markets city-specific payroll taxes and requirements) not the percentage of seats you fill. If your rent were very low you might have a 100 seat restaurant and only need a given per person check average and only need to fill 60 seats a night to make a profit. Make sense?

if you are in somewhere with very low rent, it is not likely that you will be able to attract a large number of diners. regardless, that is not what i am talking about.

my point is that number of covers is meaningless. the number butts that you can get in x number seats a night--the number of covers per seat--is what drives the equation this question is probing. if you have the capability of feeding say 200 people a night and you can only average 75, then averaging 75 covers is not a success story--due to the overhead of running a business of that capacity. if your max is 90 covers, averaging 75 sounds great (with the assumption that the overall business plan is sound).

restauranting is not a business where you get to be cavalier with unnecessary overhead.

the world where rent is low and business is great is pie in the sky--a world where lafite rothschild is $50/btl.

 

[Rahsaan]

originally posted by robert ames:


the world where rent is low and business is great is pie in the sky--a world where lafite rothschild is $50/btl.

Sounds like the 1970s/early 80s.

 

[MarkS]

originally posted by Rahsaan:

originally posted by robert ames:


the world where rent is low and business is great is pie in the sky--a world where lafite rothschild is $50/btl.

Sounds like the 1970s/early 80s.

Sounds like heaven.

 

[Jayson Cohen]

originally posted by evan hansen:

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
But if I need 150 covers/night to keep the lights on, it appears that a restaurant must rely on a steady stream of new guests.

Restaurateurs out there, is that how it is? Do your business plans incorporate a bias towards 'new guests'?

I can't speak to what it's like in highly saturated cities like SF or NYC, but in Detroit, our model is simple: Be as good as we can be at everything we do within our concept, and people will come. And more importantly, we try to offer the best hospitality within our "style" of service to everyone, regardless of who they are.

So far, it's worked quite well. We anticipated that we'd get a lot of repeat guests, and we do. But we also still get a lot of new guests, folks from out of town, and so on.

We're able to track that about a third of our sales come from repeat customers, but that data is VERY incomplete, so I imagine it's higher than that. But we're doing 150 covers on OK weekdays and 300+ covers on a moderately busy Saturday, so there's a big range there and a lot of them are certainly new each week.

originally posted by Tristan Welles:
In the few instances where I could source from the same supply it is very inefficient to do so. So the supply chain is another factor that validates the higher quality of food, in many instances, that restaurants can produce.

Much like my earlier sentiments, I imagine NYC and SF to be quite different, but in Detroit, this isn't wrong. We have a very large farmer's market in the city, but it's a mix of both small and very large producers and resellers, and there are smaller markets in the suburbs, but they are indeed quite small. At our restaurant, we work most frequently with farmers that can deliver. My partner/chef certainly walks the market, but we get a lot from urban farms (another thing that'd be rare in high value real estate markets like NYC and SF) that is simply dropped off at our door.

Conversely, on a visit to Madison where I was talking to an orchard owner and walking the market to find provisions for dinner, it was clear that a lot of the great farms in the region were represented there and almost none of the market was chewed up with less reputable producers. Honestly, it was a dream market, and there were a few chefs that they recognized and pointed out on a Saturday morning.

Beyond the local produce, I think most markets, whether it's SF or Madison or Detroit, skew toward restaurants. We definitely get good cheese, oysters, overnighted seafood, freshly milled flours from earlier in the week, etc that a lot of places can't get. And when they do, we get to refuse it if it's off in any way, whereas a reseller might not grant you that advantage.

Bless you. Next time i'm in Detroit....

How big/good are the Oakland and Washtenaw County Farmers' Markets these days? There used to be a decent number of farms in Northern Oakland and Macomb Counties, and in Washtenaw, all with easy access to Detroit and the main burbs, but it's been a long time, and I never thought about them in terms of restaurant supply.

 

[evan hansen]

originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
How big/good are the Oakland and Washtenaw County Farmers' Markets these days? There used to be a decent number of farms in Northern Oakland and Macomb Counties, and in Washtenaw, all with easy access to Detroit and the main burbs, but it's been a long time, and I never thought about them in terms of restaurant supply.

Still tons of farms. It's a good agricultural state, obviously. The interesting shift, as far as I can tell, is in some people starting to see an opportunity to specialize. They're far from common, but we have a few producers that only do heirloom dried beans and are starting to experiment with older varieties of corn and squash. One of our servers has a small farm as part of an incubator in Ann Arbor, and she's got about a half dozen comrades in that same incubator project. They all sell at a small market in A2 and/or produce for some of the restaurants, pickling companies, and so on. Some of them do different varieties of all kinds of things, which is fun to see and gives everyone some options.

The markets themselves aren't bad, though I've never seen anything here like what I saw in Wisconsin. Beyond Detroit, which now has a couple of smaller markets as well as Eastern Market, there are good ones in Royal Oak and Farmington. Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti both have active markets with a lot of local farms. There are some pretty strong, reasonably big ones that are doing some cool things -- Tantre, Sunseed, and others -- out that way. There's a really sophisticated operation a bit further north near Brighton called Stone Coop that does a lot of varieties, all beautiful stuff. They've got a top notch root cellar, big barn with a great washing/packing area, and so on. And there's a woman who does only grass fed, all organic lamb out their way too. Full Circle Farms. Too expensive for us to routinely serve, but it's delicious. She works with very specific breeds, forces a mother/kid relationship so the herd takes care of itself, keeps the cleanest barn I've ever seen, and then pastures them all season on a mix of wild grasses.

I honestly don't even know the half of it. I've been out to a few of these farms, but there's a lot going on these days and I'm largely stuck in my office at the restaurant staring at the computer.