Restaurants and Institutions

Stu Stein

Two Kinds of Chefs
January 16, 2008

I hate to generalize, but in my 18 years in the biz, I’ve known two kinds of chefs: those who love to do functions, large parties and catering, and those who don’t. Most of my career has been spent in smallish, usually owner-operated, fine-dining restaurants and boutique hotels with little-to-no banquet space, so you guess which category I fall under.

Being an owner-operator myself, though, I have a choice to make when it comes to the eternal restaurant question: Do you take a large party and give up a-la-carte seating and/or possibly close for that private function, or do you turn it down and concentrate on regular business? I certainly expected the question to come up during the peak holiday season, but this dilemma reared its head more often than I would have imagined for a 60-seat restaurant.

So, how do you decide what to do? I’m sure there are project-management techniques like PERT (program evaluation and review technique) or GANTT charts to help, but my rule of thumb is generally to take larger parties in sizes up to about half of my dining room.

We’ve figured out a few interesting tricks I wasn’t sure my dining room could pull off. The wine room, as we like to call it (r.) can be converted from high-top lounge tables to either a nice, long, single 12-top or two or three four-tops. Second, the back half of my dining room—from the side door to the back of the room (below)—can be converted into semi-private dinning space.

How do we do this? First, we purchased a number of extra chairs so we could move tables and seating around. Second, we purchased square, outdoor tables that work beautifully as additional indoor tables when they are covered in tablecloths. And third, we purchased a few banquet-style, collapsible tables for just such a purpose. Add to that the fact that my dining room is basically one large rectangle, which makes moving, repositioning and adding tables extremely easy to do on the fly.

During the holidays, we used the wine room in both configurations and the back ”private” dining room for events including a 25-person buffet; a 30-person, sit-down lunch party; and a multicourse wine dinner on a Friday night.

So, what is the moral of our little tale? Plan, plan, plan—and then be flexible, creative and lucky. I’d rather be a little too busy then turn down the opportunity to show my guests how accommodating we can be for them.

Now if I could only find a mathematician to design an equation to accurately predict exactly how many covers I will do each night and exactly how many of what items they will eat ...

And the journey continues.

Cheers!

Stu

Posted by Stu Stein on January 16, 2008 | Comments (2)