Burt Wolf Learns How To Start A Restaurant || Travels & Traditions

#1701 MAKING A RESTAURANT, PART 1

One of the first questions that come to mind when we travel is, “Where should we eat?” Deciding on the right restaurant becomes an essential part of our travel plans and it’s surprising to realize that just about everything that makes up a modern restaurant — street floor access, a receptionist, seating, the wait staff, the kitchen in the back, and a written invoice — was developed in Paris during a 50-year period starting in 1765. In this program, Burt travels around and looks at how these basic elements come together these days, when someone decides to open a restaurant.

This program is about how restaurants get made and surprisingly most of the elements that make our restaurants have been around for over 200 years Street floor access receptionists follow me on thank you side by side tables weight staff sir kitchens in the back and a written invoice almost everything that makes up

The modern restaurant was developed in Paris during a 55-year period between 1765 and 1820 all this stuff is over 200 years old for centuries there had been in and taverns along the road where you could stop in and get something to eat or drink and in Paris there was something

Called the tabot which means the host table big room giant communal table everybody ate the same food drank the same same wine and paid the same bill but you never knew who you were going to sit next to could be somebody quite Charming or somebody who was quite

Revolting and I mean revolting not just in the sense that they want to kill the king and women were not allowed there was some people who wanted to eat out but in a more controlled environment and they began saying that eating in a tabot was unhealthy and that if you wanted to

Have a good and safe meal you should eat in something new called a restaurant the word restaurant was used to describe a broth made with chicken or beef and served in a clean and hygienic environment eventually the shops where the soup was being served took the name

Of the soup and became known as a restaurant shortly after the French Revolution of 1789 in an area of Paris known as the P Royale a group of restaurants opened and offered a bigger selection of foods you could eat at your own table with your own Pals the restaurant was evolving

From a place associated with good health to a place associated with good times and women were always Welcome within 20 years Paris was packed with restaurants that were almost precisely what we see to today and these days we see them throughout the world you see them in Hong Kong you see them in Japan you see them in Italy and you see them in Chicago where we are

Today and in terms of making a living this is not an easy business I have to tell you a restaurant is a very tricky investment more than half of them go under within the first 6 months fact were your accountant I’d have to strongly advise you against you

Would huh well you’re not my accountant no I mean if I were your accountant I told you I took you out here no I’m just saying that it’s very very tricky business this program is about how a restaurant is developed from the original idea to opening night the foods

The drinks the interior design the training of the staff all of it but it’s also about how restaurants change from gener generation to generation within the same family starting in the early 1980s I began reporting for a major television news network now these were the good old

Days before fake news you were forced to go out and actually report about something that was happening one of my first reports was about a guy named Rich Melman Richard spent about 10 years building a restaurant company in Chicago called us entertain you that’s L TT u c and Rich was the head

Lettuce his first restaurant opened in 1971 it was a hip Burger Joint geared to Young singles with rock music and good food it was designed to appeal to various tastes by offering vegetarian and microbiotic Foods alongside hamburgers overstuffed sandwiches milkshakes and Chicago’s first salad bar it was called RJ Grunts and became one

Of the hottest restaurants in Chicago since then Rich and his let us entertain you Partners have opened almost 300 restaurants representing over 70 different concepts these days Rich points out that he doesn’t always have a good sense of what the younger customer wants but he’s lucky to have three children and a wife

Who are kind enough to let him know what’s going on now interview with melman’s take one love it that was great nailed it show business I sat down with Rich and his sons RJ and Jarrett and His Daughter Molly to find out how a restaurant gets started and how things have changed from

One generation to the next RJ is the president of let us Entertain You Jared and his sister Molly are Partners as you’d expect RJ Jared and Molly have very different personalities but somehow they pull it all together and I can’t think of a more successful restaurant family in the

Country I I think maybe the most important thing is that you have some experience and you have the money a lot of people jump into it have maybe one of the two it’s real difficult when you only have one of the two when you say experience what do you mean if you came

To me and you had never been in the restaurant business and tell me that you want to get into the restaurant business I’d probably say to you well get a job in restaurants and see if you like it like a waiter or a bus board doesn’t matter kitchen any of those things would

Be good I think you have to meet restaurant people you have to meet people that um can show you how to do a particular job job in your generation same story different yeah we meet people all the time that apply for their first job in the business what I think one of

The questions we ask is what makes you think you’ll enjoy this and uh that’s the first uh step I think finding out if you like the business but there’s there’s no substitute even today for just going in and trying it we we have interns every summer and our biggest

Thing for them we say figure out if you have a if you figure out that you love the restaurant business it’s a good summer if you figure out you don’t love the restaurant business it’s a good summer it’s a business that’s a little bit like show business and it looks sort

Of maybe more glamorous from the outside than it is on the inside and so um I think experience will tell you if it really is for you it’s sort of a different Rhythm it’s a different schedule than a lot of other jobs so um yeah experience really uh is crucial the

Restaurant business unlike creating a tech company or creating a lot of things that are starting now is that it requires a lot of capital to build it you have to build the restaurant and you don’t even know if it’s going to work after it’s built so there’s a tremendous

Amount that goes into it so without knowing the pitfalls of what could happen in building a restaurant it be really difficult you know there are thousands of questions simple little things that come up in terms of a day-to-day running of a restaurant or building of a restaurant when you have

No experience they they become a big burden you know simple things that you might know the answer to if you’ve work for a couple years you just don’t know I remember when I was building this restaurant I thought I had some sense of what a restaurant was because I’ve been

A restaurant reviewer for 15 years I thought well I know how this works and I thought GE it’s it’s a shame that those people have to work on the line back there and it’s so hot so why don’t we air condition the area and we did and we

Never served a hot bowl of soup until we ripped it all out I meant well yeah I definitely meant well I love it Molly made a key point the happiness of the staff is essential day after day it’s the kitchen staff that prepares the food they check the

Ingredients as they arrive they get everything ready to cook and they do the cooking a year ago I learned that people who wash the dishes and the pots are critical without them the place closes down and it’s the weight staff that comes in contact with the customers the

Overall happiness of the staff is essential to the making of a successful restaurant after you’ve got the general idea you start working on the food 100% if I’m not excited about the food I can’t do the restaurant it it’s as simple as that I I want to get

Goosebumps when I try something I want to know what we’re going to be famous for before we ever open that Door with SK with Chate with skeleton it’s [Applause] great they have a test kitchen where they work through the recipes that are going to go on the menu take a bik and jump in I’m in on the side yeah like yeah the idea isn’t how many items we could make it’s

How many items we could make great and often we will work on an item and we’ll eat eight things and just one will make the cut but that one’s going to be a good one um that’s excellent you got the day we were there they were working on a recipe for Dutch

Baby a Dutch baby is basically a pancake batter that is poured into a sauté pan and baked in the oven for about 20 minutes it should come out light and fluffy and crispy but that wasn’t happening it was too soft to make the finished dish more interesting they had

Added blueberries to the batter but during the baking the blueberries were giving off liquid which was preventing the pancake from getting crispy once the problem was spotted and the blueberries taken out of the batter everything worked fine so they started working on an interesting way to serve the

Blueberries on the side and this was all baking yes try it with the last minute under a broiler half minute oh interesting because what it does is it crisps this Edge and it dries this out a little bit okay I only know this from all of the ones I screwed up I thought

Okay sure Kevin Brown has been responsible for the development of over 100 of the lettu US Entertain You restaurants throughout the United States priority you’ve got your priorities in line and I appreciate he clearly has the right management skills to make a successful restaurant so here’s some of the stuff you need to

Know as it is with almost every business you need a performer a performer is a business plan and everybody gets very focused rightfully so on the food and the service but putting together a good business plan which talks about okay how many square feet do I have and then how

Many seats can I get in that Square fet how many how many Four Tops how many Deuces how big’s the bar going to be how much bar do I want then you start to look at your sales mix well do I want to serve a lot of alcohol am I going to

Have a big wine list all this has a bearing on cost it has a bearing on storage and then from there you understand how many seats am I going to have in the restaurant and it all again you started with your menu and your menu determines how much labor you’re going

To need in the kitchen and then the menu and the dining room layout determines how much front of the house labor you’re going to need so there you you can start figuring out your check average you can start figuring out your turnover how often is that going to turn over and

Then doing the menu and doing your check average then you know what kind of food cost and liquor cost and wine cost you’re going to have based on profitability I always look at as we fly in parallel lines when we’re creating a restaurant there’s always this excitement and tension and fun about the

Test kitchen rolling but in parallel lines we’re working on website design graphic design financials implications Staffing training education you know we we talked about the fantasy and the reality of our business the dreams in the fantasy before you open the restaurant about I’m going to serve

Great food it’s really going to be an exciting environment I’m going to meet a lot of cool people I’m going to really entertain my friends well uh the reality is you’re running a business you have to please a lot of people you would be surprised how seldom a person comes

Comes back to a restaurant you have to constantly be attracting new guests um there is so much business to run when the restaurant’s not running that I think people underestimate the amount of hours and time it takes to run payroll order food keep the sanitation standards up making sure your all your licensing

All your financials are keeping up takes a lot of work takes a lot of people to help you and that costs money so the fantasy of everybody walking around a dining room and saying this is the greatest thing in the world is can that can exist but then there is the next day

Where you actually have to run the business to make sure you can continue to do that for Saturdays to come and it’s also essential to be consistent definitely has to be consistent you have to do that day in and day out you know what people sometimes think that when they open the

Restaurant okay I’ve done it what you have to realize in this business is you have to continue to improve your business every day I mean you really have to start thinking what can I do to make make this place better restaurants don’t get tired the owners do and I

Think you just have to make sure you keep keep that in mind you just need to keep driving the business every day you have to come into the restaurant and ask yourself what can I do to make our restaurant better it’s the key to success we just broke down

Every item I think the tomatoes come from uh a farm that’s about 90 Mi west of here we’re actually going to visit tomorrow every day we worked on this Pro program I would see RJ come in and ask Jared what can we do to make our lettuce

Sharper juicier more fun to eat then Jared would ask Molly and Molly would consult with Rich good you like the patties and the texture yeah way better constant ongoing Improvement is an essential part of building and maintaining a successful restaurant if you’re watching this program and you’re thinking about

Opening a restaurant face the truth H kick on one Collision mat on one every customer is saying okay you want to entertain me go for it movies are easy restaurants are hard so now you have your idea and plan for the food next you need to figure out

How you are going to structure the space starts with the layout I think you spend a ton of time trying to get the floor plan right how do you know how many bars you’re going to need I think you work backwards a lot of time this was a great

Lesson that you taught us when we opened our first place we sort of had a goal in mind for sales and for you know the amount of liquor that we would sell and you pointed out that we didn’t have enough bars and you sort of said okay

What can a bartender ring in a night and um how many drinks can they make an hour you multiply that out and you sort of say okay we’re going to come up short and we ended up adding another bar two bars one downstairs one up and one down

So you’re working back from the numbers yeah yeah if you want to sell 2,000 cocktails a night you know you got to divide that by how many cocktails a bartender can make an hour and then you can know how many bartenders you need to make 2,000

Cocktails a night and how many will fit in a bar yeah and then now by the way now you not got to understand do you have enough storage space for all the glasswar well one thing that you have taught us is that 80% of the success of a restaurant

Happens before you open the door and we spend a tremendous amount of time planning even whether it’s 2 and 1/2 years out or 6 months out from idea to when it happens that so much goes into it um I think that understanding the size of the box that you need to have

For the restaurant to make it work is the most important thing if you said we’re going to do a quick service restaurant well why would you need 5,000 square ft you need 2,000 ft you know you get need to understand and we like I think locations to be a little bit

Undersized actually than uh than oversized reduces the stress for sure well it’s better to be a little bit too small than a little bit too big in terms of a restaurant just filling it having energy having people in the building we like friction we want it to feel

Good in between the two Melman Generations the Outlook of the customer has changed the guests who come in the restaurant today have more ownership and say about what we do 20 30 years ago people would come in and have a nice din and they’d give

Their comments to it but it wasn’t we we react to the guests now the guest wants they want their they want to have comment on it they want to talk about they want to have more control if there’s anything about the younger generation today they want controlability and they want

Shareability and they want the ability to interact next up is hiring and training the staff you know we talk about the success of a restaurant before we open the doors and I think it starts with the hiring hiring the right people but then

Um we spend a lot of time and a lot of we dedicate a lot of our attention to training our staff and training our team to uh to know the product you know I think the more they know about what they’re selling the more confident they’re going

To be at their tables but we teach them a lot of our culture um kind of just instilling that we care about them so that they care of our take care of our guests we’re really focusing now on continuing to develop the teams um um offering weekly wine classes and whiskey

Classes and food tastings um you know I think the more they’re excited about what they’re selling you can see it on the floor for us continuing education has really exploded I think such an emphasis on learning that if you’re here as a buser or a server wanting to learn

How to bartend and learn about spirits and take our class um max what do you think the difference between the two eyes are um the fruit set is in uh far different um you would think that the first one the rjo would be more of a cooler clment there’s a whole new

Different approach to advertising there’s uh tweaking the three dots menu doing some design for as poke advertising today’s changed a bit with Yelp and Trip Advisor and all the communication that’s out there social is social media is stronger today than advertising traditional print advertising is limited in its scale and scope

Uh right now your the best advertising you can do is what has always been the best advertising our business is word of mouth it’s just become a lot faster a lot more electronic and a lot more widespread there’s also been a significant change between Generations in terms of restaurant background music

I think prior to us getting into the restaurant business it really didn’t mean much in restaurants I was affected by Woodstock and so the music music was better than elevator music when we did our first restaurant but my knowledge and the sound systems and everything else connected with it is has gone

To different extremes the thing about music is that there is a stark difference in quality versus how the better quality it sounds the more comfortable it is for a guest too bad sounding systems you have to talk over they’re M muddled so the more clear it

Is at a lower volume actually the better it is for conversation so you can have a great sound system it really makes the guest experience nicer it’s a terrific business for an entrepreneur to get into for somebody who wants to own their own business it’s difficult as the business

Is it’s really a very satisfying business you have the ability to make a great product in a great environment with great employees and you have the chance to really serve people and please them and that’s really satisfying for me the idea that we can do our job and do

Our job well and make people excited or happy or satisfied makes me very satisfied so now you have some experience in the restaurant business an idea for your restaurant a plan for the food an indication of what to do about staff music and your bar and most important some idea of the

Economics do you want to get that’s part one of our series on the making of a restaurant in part two we’re going to look at a few other essential elements in the plan and the details behind the number of successful restaurants we’ll also meet one of the world’s most respected wine

Experts discover the secret of a very successful Tiki Bar and attend a Chicago barbecue that draws 40,000 serious eaters I hope you will join us for travels and traditions I’m Bert wolf ah but wait there’s more whenever we edit one of our programs we always end up with more good

Material than we can fit in interviews stories recipes so we decided to put them on our website ber wolf.com