Fixer-Uppers: Using Restaurant Consultants
Some chefs use what they learn to open additional restaurants, but others put their knowledge to work as part-time consultants.
By Lisa Bertagnoli, Special to R&I -- Restaurants & Institutions, 1/1/2008
 Cheryl Lewis brings her knowledge of New England restaurants and diners to bear in her work as a consultant. |
To date, she has helped a small bistro that struggled with menu and personnel issues, fixed up restaurants so their owners could sell them and opened a restaurant for a maker of specialty foods.
Lewis, who opened her first restaurant when she was in her early twenties, draws on her decades of experience to help clients. "I've owned several restaurants in a small city," says Lewis, who along with her business partner, Norine Kotts, has consulted since 2001. "I think I can relate to the small-business owner and the struggles that go along with [the job]."
For a fee, chef-consultants such as Lewis use their skills to help fellow restaurateurs create a new concept or fix an existing one. The work, they say, is somewhat of a balancing act: Consultants must aid other restaurants without taking too much time or energy from their own establishments or cannibalizing their operations' sales.
They also need to be expert restaurateurs-able to help novices and seasoned pros streamline operations. Getting food and labor costs in line, overhauling menus to meet the needs of a restaurant's key demographic groups and helping with staffing issues are all part of a day's work for chef-consultants.Being a successful consultant and restaurateur "starts with understanding what the core customer is," says Jonathan Fox, who owns Chicago-based consulting firm 3Sixty Dining Intelligence, as well La Madia, an upscale pizzeria in Chicago. "Everything we do builds on creating an experience for that target customer."
KEY DEMOGRAPHICS
Because demographics are so important, most chef-consultants stick to geographic areas they know best when choosing consulting projects.
 Consultant Jonathan Fox owns pizzeria La Madia. |
The reason? "They had a budget-minded menu, and that's a high-minded clientele there," Schaudel says. He suggested that the company add more glamorous, higherpriced menu items and hire cooks capable of producing such a menu. The approach worked; the catering company is thriving.
The catering company also opened a restaurant-a move Schaudel counseled against. That, he says, is one of the downfalls of consulting: "People pay you and they don't listen to you."
Schaudel has also helped create restaurants to fit a certain clientele. For Singh Hospitality Group, a restaurant company with several Long Island properties, he drew up plans for a trendy steak-and-seafood restaurant on the South Shore.
| What To Expect When You’re Expecting a Consultant The red on the P&L statement is scary, so you’ve made a call to a restaurant consultant. Now what? Restaurateur (Ivy Award-winner City Tavern in Philadelphia) and longtime consultant Walter Staib of Philadelphia-based Concepts by Staib Ltd. offers a few tips, starting with the most important one: Don’t wait until a restaurant is in trouble to call a consultant. “The best time to do it is when you’re up, not down,” says Staib, noting that a consultant can help improve a profitable restaurant, not just shore up one that’s hurting. Here are more of Staib’s insights and tips on what to expect from a consultant: • You get what you pay for. “I’m not cheap, but I’m good,” Staib says, and the same goes for all consultants. The more experience a consultant has, the better he or she will be able to understand your situation and help improve it. • Listen to your consultant. “You don’t have to agree with a consultant,” Staib says, “but if you hire a consultant, listen to him.” Staib told one client, a wealthy West Palm Beach wannabe restaurateur, to redo a kitchen completely to serve an upscale Continental menu. The owner didn’t listen, and Staib declined to work with him further. The restaurant ended up closing after only three weeks in business. • Tell staff to listen as well. Staff should be told to pay close attention to consultants, to “be a sponge and absorb what they can,” Staib says. Staff buy-in is key because “people support what they help to create.” • Don’t expect overnight miracles. Consultants’ work, which can include staff retraining and operational controls such as a revision of purchasing practices, can take weeks to pay off. Still, Staib says, you could expect to see results in three months. • Hope for the best; prepare for the worst. If a restaurant has suffered a hit to its reputation, a rebound could take a year or more—if a rebound happens at all. “You may need a total concept change,” Staib says. |
The South Shore doesn't have quite as tony a reputation as the North Shore, explains Dave Salony, corporate executive chef for Singh. The South Shore "is more a high-end blue-collar worker," Salony says.
However, he recalls, Schaudel pointed out that restaurant check averages on the South Shore were close to those found on the North Shore. With that fact in mind, Singh Hospitality opened Thom Thom, a 120-seat steak-and-sushi restaurant that has a check average of about $40 per person. The restaurant, which opened in 2004, "blew the doors off the South Shore," Salony says. "Tom proved the point that (South Shore residents) have a desire and need for fine food, creative food."
Just Like Gordon? How does real-life consulting compare to "Kitchen Nightmares," the Fox television series featuring Scottish-born chef-restaurateur Gordon Ramsay? Consultants weigh in on reality-show consulting versus real consulting:• "A lot of [real-life consulting] is tedious, analyzing the bits and pieces." -Cheryl Lewis, Scarborough, Maine • "It's extremely similar, but without all the screaming." -John Tunney, Tunneyvision, Huntington, N.Y. • "He's a little hard to listen to.it's a little bizarre." -Thomas Schaudel, Jamesport, N.Y. • "There are some common threads." -Jonathan Fox, 3Sixty Dining Intelligence, Chicago |
Along similar lines, Jonathan Fox used demographics to help a client improve pricing. The client owned a "comfortable, very approachable" restaurant in an affluent neighborhood. However, the wine list gave customers no opportunity to splurge. Fox suggested adding several higher-priced wines by the glass for those customers. Fox suggested that another client narrow the price gap between menu specials and regular menu items. While menu entrees such as pastas, pizza and roast chicken were priced at around $16, specials such as lobster and surf-and turf were priced at $26 and up. "They weren't selling a lot of them," Fox says. He advised the client to offer specials similar to regularly featured fare-or offer smaller, more reasonably priced portions of fancier dishes such as lobster.
After he completes a consulting project, Fox suggests strongly that clients collect customer feedback to keep menus and service targeted to a core clientele. "Research firms, marketing firms . you can use a lot of different resources," he says. At La Madia, Fox's Chicago pizzeria, a card in the check presenter solicits from customers such simple information as how they heard about the restaurant and what suggestions they would offer for making the dining experience at La Madia better. "Fifty percent give us feedback, and 20% give us contact info," Fox says.
HELPING WITHOUT HARMING
One potentially tricky aspect of consulting is helping other restaurateurs improve their numbers without sabotaging sales at the consultant's operations. Schaudel, however, hasn't encountered problems in this regard. "It's not a zero-sum game," he says. "People have opened places down the block from me, and it hasn't hurt."
 John Tunney operates American Roadside Burgers. |
"I wouldn't help anybody with Mexican," says Tunney, who plans to take Besito, which will soon have four units up and running, public next year.
Fox, for his part, prefers to consult to restaurants not in his backyard. Fox has worked with restaurant clients in Colorado and Washington, D.C.; 3Sixty currently consults to two hotel companies in Chicago and has a management contract with La Madia.
Fox says his current situation doesn't preclude him from consulting in Chicago. "I've always been a believer that good competition breeds better execution by others," he says.
Indeed, consultants say that their work with other operations isn't entirely altruistic; it makes them better restaurateurs, too. "You don't live in a vacuum," Tunney says. "Most chefs work 60, 70 hours a week-they don't get out to restaurants," he says. As a consultant, "you are able to see a lot of different places."
When a Consultant Calls Solo Bistro, a 50-seat restaurant in Bath, Maine, opened in June 2005. After a good summer, owners Will and Pia Neilson faced a seasonal slowdown, and being new restaurateurs, they weren't quite sure what to do. "We wanted to talk to someone who would give us an informed, thirdparty view of what we had done right and wrong and how to improve," says Will Neilson, a former corporate lawyer.The Neilsons knew Cheryl Lewis and Norine Kotts from a gourmet food store the latter business duo had owned and operated, and they hired Lewis and Kotts to do a full assessment of Solo Bistro. The consultants spent about five days at the restaurant observing staff, studying the P&L and inspecting storage spaces. Here are three suggestions they made, and the results: Add a burger. Solo Bistro is a "unique" restaurant in a blue-collar community that thrives on familiar foods. "We consciously don't play to market expectations," Will Neilson says. Adding a $12 burger to both lunch and dinner menus (Solo has since discontinued lunch service) helped position the restaurant as a place for familiar foods as well as exotic treats. Although not a huge seller, the burger "has gotten fixed in people's minds as something that's really good," he says. Consolidate the cooler. After analyzing the restaurant's limited cold-storage spaces, Lewis and Kotts suggested moving some items, including several wines, to dry storage. The two also established a stocking rotation for the restaurant and reorganized the cooler. "It made our operations more efficient," Neilson says. Consolidate the cooks. Solo Bistro opened with three chefs, each of whom gave the Neilsons advice regarding the menu. "It was hard for us to assess what they were really telling us," Will Neilson says. Lewis and Kotts helped Neilson navigate the kitchen's "political intricacies," and he eventually decided to let two of the chefs go. The remaining chef, Esau Crosby, is Solo Bistro's executive chef. Was the investment (in the low thousands of dollars) in Lewis and Kotts' work worth it? Yes, Neilson says. In addition to doling out practical advice, the consultants helped the Neilsons understand how long it would take for Solo to turn a profit. "The experience was eye-opening," Will Neilson says. "We needed someone to talk to that we could trust to give us an unbiased view." |
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