Hello chefs. You're listening to chefs, PSA
podcast. I'm your host Entre natera.
On today's episode. We are doing part two of opening
your restaurant, so stay tuned. Before we get started, let me
give you an update on how things have been going.
We just got back from San Francisco and I was over there,
speaking on a panel conference for hotel asset managers.
So for people that don't know what that is.
An asset manager is basically, the person that's the liaison
between a hotel owner and, like, a hotel GM or whatever.
There's The Operators. I was on a panel to discuss food
and beverage trends. Where they're going how to deal
with there chefs. What's Innovative, what's new?
What's going on in AI? Anyway.
I was, there was fun. I had.
And I was like, 24 hours in San Francisco.
Had to find somewhere to eat. I ate really good pizza.
I want to say that the name of the place was Empire pizzas
Sicilian style, pizza was excellent actually.
And for people that don't know Sicilian Styles like that, you
know, thicker crust was, like, a pan pizza square, or rectangle.
In this case, many of those excellent.
So shout out to those guys, That whatever they're doing, it's
really fucking good. So I also ate another place
called dela, Rosa Pizza. I couldn't tell you where in San
Francisco's downtown anyway stumbled upon it.
Someone's that go there. I don't know how I got there.
I didn't have GPS. I just stumbled in ate some
pizzas also, excellent. I kind of say Empire was better
anyway. Nonetheless, the food in San
Francisco? Is good.
I forget how good the food is there.
I think they just have a better frame of reference there of what
good food is, right? So I think San Francisco even
though they the city did get a little bit snubbed by many
awards recently. I still think it's one of the
strongest Food cities in the country of the United States.
Maybe even one could make an argument that it is the
strongest. You know, obviously the argument
goes New York San Francisco. Anyway we digress.
What else have I been up to? I started writing the new book
that I'm working on I just currently titled bad sooo good
Chef so bad Sue comma good chef. And the way that I decided to
write the book is it's a conversation between a sous
chef. And his current Chef as the Sous
chefs, getting ready to leave to go to another restaurant.
And he's nervous about not being a good sous-chef.
He's afraid either bad sous chef so it's a conversation between
the two and really what inspired this conversation.
Is a lot of the weekly cigar Sunday's that I do where we sit
down and we go back and forth and I get a lot of questions.
I noticed a lot of the questions are repetitive and it's hard for
me to give a long format answer in an Instagram real or not a
real and A short story. Sorry, which is only a minute.
And sometimes I'm like, I got to answer.
I'm looking at the little timer kind of like shit.
I gotta hurry up. And a lot of times I don't I
mean I'm putting thought into the answers but I want to put
more thought into the answer and there's a different gear that I
go into when I'm writing versus when I'm speaking.
You know, my podcast gear is different from my Instagram gear
which is different from my being in the kitchen gear, which is
different from my riding gear. And I feel like when I'm writing
because I'm able to go back and reread what I say and edit I'm
able to put the most amount of thought into what I'm writing
versus different things. So anyway, that book is coming
out, I'm excited about it and for people that have been asking
because a lot of people ask me, how do you crank Out book so
fast. So I'm going to share my secret
with you when I'm writing books and this has nothing to do with
opening a restaurant. This is just anecdotal, but when
I'm writing books, what I do is II got a bunch of sticky notes
and I just put them on a big whiteboard as a, okay?
We're going to write about this. So I list out all the things
that I want to write about every day.
Just put a sticky note on front of the computer.
I make sure I sit down and write even though sometimes I don't
want to and that's actually most days.
I don't want to. I just it's more about the habit
of getting into it and some days I write shit like I'm looking at
this, like the fuck is this? This is terrible.
But anyway, nonetheless, I forced myself to sit down and
write The next thing I do is you know before I used to have an
editor and now you know I used to have a lot of problems with
my editors in the first couple of books I noticed it was not
catch all the typos or grammar whatever.
And so now obviously open my eyes, much more efficient.
So I'll cut what I write paste it in Ai and ask you to edit for
me which probably was what these people were doing.
Anyway, I think my editor was using an AI software but now
it's like I'm in control of that.
I use AI software to edit my word.
So anyway, that's how I write. And then when it comes to
typing, because a lot of people say, oh, don't you get tired of
typing? No, I don't.
And the reason I don't is, sometimes I type, but not always
a lot of times. I use the dictate button, that's
on Microsoft Word. So I could just speak into the
microphone. And obviously I'm used to doing
that with podcast, so that's my writing secret.
But anyway, wanted to share that with you for people that are
maybe interested in writing your own books.
That's how I do it. Okay.
Anyway, we digress. Now, let's get into opening your
restaurant, and I should say that this is, this probably
should have been a series more than just, the last episode in
this one. So you should go back and listen
to episode 21 restaurant mental exercises.
That one really should have been the first one in this whole
series because that episode takes you through the process
of, have you thought of everything that needs to go into
your concept? Did you think about the play?
Where did you think about the uniforms that episode just kind
of walks you through the process of everything that you would
need to go through? Through mentally to design and
visualize your restaurant. The other two episodes that you
should go back and listen to is number 19, how to create your
kitchen culture. So I'm going to gloss over that
in this episode but basically an episode 19 it's how to get
everyone to work on the same standard.
I won't get too much into that in this episode because I
already covered it in episode 19.
So that should also be a part of this series.
And then also go back and listen to episode 23 on marketing
yourself as a chef because Obviously, without marketing,
you know, you run the risk of getting lost in the noise.
So marketing is a differentiator, those three
episodes along with the last one which is part one should go with
this one, which is part two, but the main focus of this
particular episode is going to be what happens.
Now that you're in the building. Usually what happens is all the
equipment starts arriving. You got to put away all the
boxes. You got to wash all the small
Wares and normally the The week before opening and about, we're
actually probably like the month depending on how soon you get
access to the building about a month before opening, and about
the next two months after that are probably going to be the
most difficult period, unless you're closing the restaurant.
Like so the opening and the closing is really the most
difficult Parts. Opening sucks, closing sucks.
But let's just talk about opening for a second.
The first three months of operation.
So one month prior to opening and two months post opening are
going to be the most difficult. Let's assume you're in the
building. You have to set your chin up,
you have to organize it. You got to wash all the small
Wares, you should have already created training, manuals for
your staff culinary, team and service team, and that will
usually be some sort of, you know, depend on what you call
it, the recipe book, The use record, the pickup chart, the
menu syllabus, everyone calls it, something different, but
nonetheless, you should have some sort of documented.
Packet that you could give to your staff that has a photograph
of the recipe that has the ingredients of the recipe, that
has the allergen. So is there a Liam, as your
Dairy, whatever the case may be, to make sure that they know that
this dish has this and it's a big explain that to the guest.
Is there a narrative or some sort of story that goes with the
dish? So you can say, oh yeah, these
truffles were forged over here or, you know, we found these
deer in the woods for, you know, the salad that we're making
inspired by Rene redzepi, all those things, definitely,
Important. You want to make sure that you
have some sort of narrative marking on the table, so does it
get a fork? Does it get a knife?
Is there any special touch points?
All that should be in your menu syllabus right?
So you can give that to your service team.
You give that to your culinary teams play, know what they're
doing, they should have recipes and so on, and so forth.
Hopefully you've done all that before opening and you're not
doing that right before. Then you're going to go into
training and in my opinion you should do some sort of slideshow
presentation menu training without them tasting first.
Get everyone familiar with the stories, get them familiar with
you, make sure that they're taking good notes.
Let them see the photos of the food.
I'll do all that on day one because what I've notice, if you
let them taste right away, a lot of times, people just focus on
eating and not really paying attention to what they're
tasting. So I spend a good portion of the
day, educating them on what they Culture is what the standards
are with the food's going to look like, go through all the
non-negotiables of the restaurant.
And then the next a focus on the tasting.
I let the cooks prepare as many of the dishes as possible
because they are going to be the ones that are prepared.
Then you get into what's known as Mach service or friends and
family. Whatever the case may be call it
whatever you want, but that is basically training for you and
your staff and there's a couple of different ways to do that.
But sometimes it's like you invite friends and family.
Sometimes it's just staff. Sometimes you you know, you
invite people, you give them 50% off.
Sometimes it's all calm. That depends on you.
And you know what your budget is and what you want to do, if you
can I mean the more training your staff has the better,
there's a cost associated with that it gets more expensive, the
more you train but obviously the more you train, the better you
will be when you open your doors.
There's different ways that you could do that.
So let's just say you're using your staff only, you could have
an, a team and A B team. So, for example, The A Team goes
and eats and the B-Team cooks and serves and then they flip so
18b team or it could be, you know, the friends of the people
that work there or it could be people that you invite Etc, what
you really want to do is you want to make sure that you're
getting feedback from the people that are eating and you also
want to make sure that your stress testing the operation.
So you want to push the Human the service team to their limit
because you want to find out what the breaking point is
before you open. You don't want to find that out
after you. Open, you gradually, increase
the cover. So, again, let's just say you're
doing this for three days on day one, maybe you're doing 50
covers on day to maybe you're doing 100 covers.
And then on day 3, maybe you're going and depending on what the
two previous days are, maybe you're going up to 150, I'd
rather fail and pre mock service then in actual service.
So, if you find out, hey, we push to 150, but Our sweet spot
is 100, that when you open up, you say, okay?
We're going to start at 100 until we're confident enough to
go back to 150 because you do only get one chance to open
correctly and everyone is going to come out to the new
restaurant. Everyone wants to go to the new
restaurant and try the food and judge them and get on social
media. And say, there were there at
that hot new restaurant, not understanding that.
Hey, we're still like operating with training wheels, were still
trying to figure this shit out there.
People don't care. Like, they don't understand
that. They're gonna judge, You hardly,
I do didn't have enough salt, or didn't have this like, okay,
it's pre. It's like week one or
pre-opening or mock service. So keep that in mind.
Another thing to keep in mind, when you're doing mock service
and pre-opening, Is that you need to make sure you have very
specific guidelines on how you want people to order.
If you just give people a menu and a free-for-all, they could
order whatever they want, they won't order like your typical
diners because people ordered differently when they have to
pay it versus when it's calm. I know I've been in Pre openings
where it's like, okay, you can order whatever you want, we're
taking care of the whole thing and people were like, you know,
Lobster and shellfish, plateaus and big old steaks.
And it's like, that's not how you would really order.
If you were paying for yourself, like let's get a tin of caviar
for each of us. Let's order everything on the
menu if you want to stress. Test the kitchen.
Yes, but it's not a true test of what they're actually going to
go through. So you want to make sure that if
you can, what I would do is like I'd have menu one menu to menu
three and I would black out certain things on the menu and
say, okay, if you got menu 1, these are the only things you
could order. You also might want to say,
you're only allowed to order, you know, like a normal person.
You might you guys you know for every two people you get to
share two appetizers or one app to whatever the case may be.
Three appetizers, yet one entree, one side and half a
desert per person. So there's two people.
You get one dessert and you got a shirt because if not people
start ordering crazy, right? And the reality is most
restaurants, don't operate like that.
So you want to kind of manage it a little bit so that you get a
true stress test of what opening night is going to look like.
Now, when you go into the opening phase, I think one of
the things that but I do is I always staff one and a half
times what my normal staffing needs would be.
So let's just say, let's just say, I need 10 Cooks in the
kitchen, I'm going to hire 15 because I know about five people
are going to quit because it's too hard Long, Day's long hours,
everyone's working crazy. People are on their feet all
day. It's chaotic it's stressful.
No knows what they're doing people crack.
And they say, you know what, I'm not coming back tomorrow, people
are going to quit on you with no notice.
They're just not going to come back.
You're not going to see them again.
They're going to be a ghost. People are going to break down
in the walk in and start crying because it's hectic and you
know, tempers are high and all this is going on.
So you have to understand that chaos of opening is going to
break a lot of people. So when you're hiring you need a
higher more not like At one and a half is usually what I go.
But I mean, if you have the ability to go to 21, do that
because you're going to lose people after about two months or
so, it starts to settle into. Turnover should turn down
significantly but plan on losing a lot of your staff in the
initial phases of the opening process.
Keep that in mind over staff from a service team standpoint,
you'll normally get, you know, best of the best for some
reason. Service teams always want to
work at the hot new restaurant. Probably Cuz they make the most
amount of tips to initially. And then like, if you go to a
restaurant, when it first opens up and it's the hot new
restaurant, they got like the best servers in the city and
then you go back to that same hot restaurant like a year
later. It's like the worst servers in
the city like what the fuck happened?
Where all the good servers goes like?
Oh yeah, it's it's the nature of the Beast.
They come in and they go out right?
Then go to the next hot new restaurants something, you know,
it's, I tangent, but it's very relevant to this conversation.
I came across this website called Kitchen Confidential.
Prudential's and what it is. It's like rate your employer at
Glassdoor kind of thing, right? For culinary industry.
It's like I worked here. I got paid.
This is what the environment was like.
And when you're opening up a restaurant, I think when you
have apps like this is the way of the future, right?
Social media and all that. Creates much more transparency
in this industry. So I think if you are opening up
a restaurant, you need to be aware that your kitchen culture
and your restaurant work culture needs to be positive from day
one. Because if not, you're gonna
have a very hard time recruiting and I only see things like that.
Becoming more and more prevalent in this industry and all
Industries. Really, but specifically in The
Culinary world because that's what we're talking about.
I do expect that you are going to see things like that.
So if you open up a restaurant and then you have 10 negative
review saying, you know, the owners of jerk chefs a jerk,
right the Sous chefs a jerk. No one like working there they
were mean to me, blah blah blah. They don't pay well Don't go
work there. It's gonna hurt your future
business, right? It's gonna hurt your reputation
in your community to get staff. So you want to make sure that
from day one, you are building that good workplace culture,
knowing that it's going to be intense and stressful and
chaotic. Keep that in mind.
Now, the other thing that and get this is just my opinion.
But if I'm opening up a restaurant, I want to be the top
pane place in the city, right, because when you pay the most,
you don't got to argue and negotiate with people.
Like you're paying the most To get the best of the best cooks
in shops to come work for you, knowing that you're going to
have turnover, eventually, it kind of settles down and then
you go back to one to one. But initially, I think you want
to be paying the most and you know, eventually that changes
when things open up and someone else is going to come on and
they're going to be the highest-paid Kitchen in the
city. But I think initially for me, I
always want to be the most expensive restaurant.
And I also wanted to be paying the most, because here's
something. And this is just my opinion.
But this is also been My strategy people don't ever say.
Let's go order. The second most bottle of
champagne when someone wants to flex, they say, give me the most
expensive thing. Give me the most expensive,
whatever on the Mayo, on the most expensive steak.
I want the most expensive caviar.
When people want to flex, you need to allow them the ability
to flex. So I always thought I'm going to
do, you want to flex and show off your money?
I will be more than glad to take it.
So, let's be the most expensive. I don't want to be known as the
second most expensive. No one ever says.
Let's go to the second. Most expensive restaurant.
Especially if they want to flex, right?
So, that would be my strategy there, the other strategy, and
maybe that's not your model, maybe your, you know, maybe your
Maybe you're a casual spot so that doesn't matter.
But let's assume maybe for this conversation, your high-end
behind him. Casual forget what I said.
The other thing is people never say, let's go work at the place
that pays second, like, they all want to work at the place that
pays the most no one wants to work at the place that is
silver, metal. Second best, if you are at the
top, you are the Apex. Everyone's going to want to come
work for you. It's a no-brainer.
You will have fewer staffing issues.
If you open up and you say let's just do it right from the
beginning. Let's pay the most right?
And it's good for everyone, it's trust me.
We could have a whole conversation about Bout this.
But anyway, I always think pay the most have a good workplace
culture and that will solve a lot of the issues moving
forward. Anyway, things to think about,
And then finally when the doors open and things start to settle.
My advice is, don't start out with the most difficult menus
because things are not going to go.
Well, you're going to have to change things on the Fly.
Cooks are still learning. You can start introducing the
difficulty as time goes on. And you also have to understand
like is the city. Like, if is the city ready for
what you're trying to do, is it a proven concept or do you have
to prove it? Something that you need to think
about what I recommend is every day after service.
You sit down your culinary team. That's the leaders.
And you also sit down with the service team leaders and you
discuss every single point of failure that happened and you
discuss it and you find Solutions because if you're not
finding solutions to problems early on, they will become big
problems later on. So let's just say you have a
dish on the menu, there's dishes too many touch points and it's
too complicated in the cook and always crashes the line and
Everyone Falls behind Behind when they order that.
Oh shit. Dish.
Like they ordered pop. They order the oh shit dish.
The solvent like on day one. Don't let your ego get in the
way get rid of it. Put it on the menu later when
everyone gets better. If there's a dish that's
crashing, the kitchen on on opening week then get it out of
the way. Like unless it's like the number
one dish like your steak house and it is the, you know, the
steak then okay. Maybe that's a different story
but solve it quickly. Try and solve these problems as
quickly. Don't let your ego get too
attached attached to specific dishes or ways of operating if
things don't work right away. Unless you know that Hey, you
know what? It'll take time but this is
going to work in the long run. Maybe it's a good idea.
Those are all things that I think people need to consider
when opening a restaurant. Treat your team.
Well, stock up the fridges with coffee, Red Bull, water, snacks,
whatever the case may be, make sure people are nourished
hydrated and energized, ready to go awake and ready.
And then, you know, I talk about this in the culture episode, but
make sure that you establish boundaries from the jump.
So if people color outside of the lines, you correct them
right away and they know that this is the way it's going to be
last thing that I'll talk about on this podcast with regards to
open a restaurant. And the team is make sure you
have a solid stewarding DISH, Team and treat them well because
there's nothing worse than opening up a restaurant.
And you got dishes, stacked to the ceiling and the dishwasher
walks out. And now your cooks that are
exhausted and your servers that are exhausted, have to clean up
Stewart in area and they're like, okay, I'm definitely not
coming back. So consider all those things.
Anyway, let's wrap it up. I hope you enjoyed this series
on opening up a restaurant. If you feel free to comment on
here, I think there's a comment box.
If you're listening on Spotify, make sure you leave five stars
on this episode on all episodes right chefs.
PSA is only a five-star podcast, go back and listen to episodes,
21. 19, and 23. Those are the episodes that kind
of are included to help you open up a restaurant as well.
So, mental exercises, creating kitchen, culture and marketing,
all important, when it comes to open, Restaurant.
And then lastly, if you want to support the show, go to Chef
cbsla.com. You can get all the books.
All the merchandise, everything that we do, we have the two free
ebook. So culinary dictionary, and also
100 basic recipes. Go get culinary leadership.
Fundamentals. The book or kitchen Art of War.
If your are a strategist, anyway.
Thank you. All see you next week and hit
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