Viewpoint: Atmospheric Pressures

It surprises me that restaurant atmosphere so often rates as lowest in importance in R&I's Consumers’ Choice in Chains study.

By Scott Hume, Editor-in-Chief -- Restaurants & Institutions, 9/15/2007

I’m way behind in my pleasure reading, but I finally got to "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (Back Bay Books, 2007), Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating analysis of those visceral, split-second judgments—good/bad, right/wrong, appealing/boring—we habitually make about people, places and all manner of things. His thesis is that snap judgments very often are more on-target than conclusions reached with the benefit of time or research.

Nowhere is the truth of his assertion more evident than in how we evaluate restaurants. From valet parking to the host station to a first glimpse of a dining room, we form a series of instinctive opinions that color our experiences. Posi-tive or negative, these first impressions can be partly reversed by the quality of a meal or service. Yet, more than once I’ve said of a restaurant experience, "My meal was so-so, but I really like the feel of the place."

That’s why it surprises me that consumers almost always rank atmosphere as the least important of the eight attributes used to rate restaurant brands for R&I’s Consumers’ Choice in Chains research. None of these eight elements of a dining experience is rated as unimportant, certainly, but atmosphere gets an average rating of 3.66 (on a scale from a low of 1 to 5), while food quality is at the top—as it should be—at 4.40.

But it puzzles me that consumers rate atmosphere’s importance as a below-average 3.57 in choosing a sandwich-menu restaurant. Panera Bread, which receives the highest overall score in the category, was among the pioneering fast-casual concepts that capitalized on consumer desire for a more-sophisticated décor than many traditional sandwich shops were providing.

The exceptions to atmosphere’s last-place ranking are in casual dining, where it ranks sixth, and in steakhouse and Italian chains, where consumers move atmosphere up to No. 7. That these three categories have the highest check averages likely isn’t coincidental: The higher the menu prices, the more I tend to ask and expect of a dining experience. Tom Colicchio understands this. The chef-owner of the high-end Craft and fast-casual ’wichcraft restaurants, Colicchio also is the head judge on Bravo’s culinary-competition series, "Top Chef." In a recent episode, Colicchio castigated contestant Dale Levitski for lighting vanilla-scented candles in a mock restaurant. The food was good, but the candles created a spa atmosphere that was simply all wrong, Colicchio insisted.

Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz for many years insisted that no food should be prepared in the chain’s coffeehouses. He wanted a coffee aroma to remain pervasive because he believed it to be important in creating Starbucks’ "third place" ambience. Yet consumers tell us that atmosphere is the least-important attribute when they evaluate coffee/snack chains.

My conclusion is that consumers underappreciate how numerous and important are our gut reactions to the look, feel and smell of a restaurant. As Gladwell explains, the reflexive, subjective evaluations we make not only take place in nanoseconds, they also can be so subconscious that we never fully recognize them. But they happen, in a blink.