elephantwalktalk

Majoring in Restaurant Week

Who would have thought a city-wide restaurant event could be so complicated?

Devra's First's Boston Globe piece entitled "Bargains on the menu - and a side of jitters" made me think harder about this than I ever had before.

On the face of it, it's simple: For two weeks beginning last Sunday, more 220 Greater Boston restaurants offer three-course prix-fixe menus for $20.09 at lunch and $33.09 at dinner. What's so complicated about that? Well, let's begin with some technical aspects:

• It's called "Restaurant Week" but runs for two weeks. [If you think that's confusing, New York's Restaurant Week started on January 18th and is still going...officially!]
• While lots of restaurants are participating, many are not
• Not every participating restaurant is offering both lunch and dinner menus
• The official dates of the event's two weeks exclude Saturdays, but many restaurants choose to include them [Saturday is the busiest day/night of the week for most restaurants; I think the organizers didn't want participating restaurants to be forced to do anything that would hurt them - such as serve a menu that would drive sales DOWN on a busy night.]
• Some restaurants choose to extend the event to run the entire month of March

But that short list is Algebra 1 compared with the calculus each restaurant and diner must work through to reach a go/no-go decision:

• For expensive and generally busy restaurants, Restaurant Week can create a real bargain if you're the guest- a full meal for what they might normally charge for an entrée. But for the expensive restaurateur, offering a prix-fixe menu at this price will COST them money since their regular check average can be much higher. I believe this is at the root of why a number of high end restaurants do not participate.
• I heard that in past years some high end restaurants that did participate chose to limit the number of seats they allocated to Restaurant Week diners, requiring all other guests to order from their regular menu. Not sure if that's the case this year or not.
• Menu engineering [yup, that's real industry terminology] strategy for the high end restaurant has to be pretty challenging to settle on: Does the expensive restaurant offer up a menu of the same quality with the same portion sizes for the lower price - therefore shrinking their margin but giving their guests something really special, or do they reduce costs by shrinking portions, streamlining recipes or using lower quality ingredients so that they can still make money at the lower price point?
• Lower end restaurants run into the opposite problem: What if the Restaurant Week pricing structure makes your restaurant MORE expensive than you normally are? Is the strategy to serve the same food at higher prices to cash in, or to reach higher, serving more elaborate preparations, with better ingredients, or perhaps larger portions, trying their best to impress?

As Richard, one of my partners often says: "Things that make you go 'Hmmmm...'"

At The Elephant Walk it was the process of deciding how to approach summer Restaurant Week last August that informed our new prix fixe strategy that we implemented last fall when faced the value challenge head on and lowered our prices. First and foremost, we decided that prix-fixe menus should be about value. So during Restaurant Week for the $33.09 dinner price we offer 4 courses instead of 3, with the option of skipping any course if it feels like too much food or money, and thereby lowering the price to $29.95.

Our regular dinner tasting menu runs $33.95 so the Restaurant Week tasting menu is very close to what we normally do [we change up the dishes to add some extra value and make it more interesting]. - At lunch during Restaurant Week we're confronted with the event requirement to charge MORE than we normally do so we add value by serving more costly preparations

So, after all that, what is a diner to do? - Certainly, no one needs my advice to find happiness, but if anyone were to ask I would tell them something along the same lines as what I tell our guests when pairing food with wine: Having food you like with wine you like will get you closest to a meal you'll love. - Ergo, during Restaurant Week, don't over think it [like I've just done above!]: Visit restaurants you like with people you enjoy and you'll almost certainly have a wonderful meal!

More than up to the Challenge...

This past Tuesday's Challenging Flavors dinner at The Elephant Walk in Waltham was a lot of fun. The spirited group dove right into all the dishes, which included plenty of pork belly, tamarind, shrimp paste and, of course, prahok. In fact, nothing daunted a soul, nothing until the durian served warm over sticky rice, that is!

It's always dangerous to generalize based on feedback from a self-selected group such as ours, but my biggest take-away from our guests is that flavors that once were extreme may be much closer now to the mainstream than even 10 years ago. Diners' palates have grown so experienced and sophisticated in the modern era of so many wonderful restaurants showcasing the full rainbow of global cuisines that there's not much people really don't like or can't handle. [Except maybe durian.... ;-)]

The wine component of the dinner was matched to the family-style presentation of the food: We offered 4 wines - 2 whites, 2 reds - up to the group to taste through in random fashion. Rather than the strict "this wine goes with that dish" traditional wine dinner format, we went free-form to acknowledge the fact that pairing Western wine with Eastern food is far from an exact science, or no science at all. As I suspected, personal choice ruled, with no obvious, perfect matches.

The one wine surprise to me was that the darker and more concentrated Toro - made with tempranillo - was much preferred over the brighter and fruitier Beaujolais-Villages - made with gamay. No question the Toro was the more elegant wine but what I didn't expect was that it would find such favor with our guests in the context of an unusual meal. To me, that's robust support for this truism I personally adhere to: "Have wine you like with food you like and very likely you're going to have a meal you like." - Tuesday's Challenging Flavors dinner was a good meal indeed.

Challenging Flavors

One of the things we've been doing in recent months is trying to align our self-perception with that of our customers. Our first step down that path was recognizing that most people view us as Asian restaurants first, and not fine-dining. And since most people expect non-sushi Asian restaurants to be inexpensive, we realized that we needed to lower our prices and did so in October.

Tomorrow night's "Challenging Flavors" dinner at The Elephant Walk in Waltham is another step in the direction of seeing ourselves as others see us.  While perennial Elephant Walk favorites like Poulet à la Citronnelle, Loc Lac, and Khar Saiko are authentic Cambodian dishes, they offer fairly mainstream flavors - very approachable for the vast majority of our clientele.

Most of our Cambodian menu consists of more approachable dishes for one simple, sound business reason: People like them and rarely send them back. For a vocal minority in the dining public, however, our playing it safe has been tantamount to a betrayal of sorts.

As you probably already know, there are relatively few Cambodian restaurants in this country, and precious few with a national profile such as ours. So when some people come to The Elephant Walk and find that prahok - a fermented and salted fish paste that is Cambodian cuisine's one truly unique ingredient - has only a bit part in our play, they feel let down and really slam us for it.

Those critics make a fair point. As a more mainstream Cambodian restaurant concept, it makes good business sense for us to emphasize the flavors that we've learned our clientele wants, and avoid serving those flavors they've taught us they'd rather not try again! But what about that vocal minority that craves the rustic intensity of prahok, bitter melon, shrimp paste, tamarind, and durian? What about their needs? One answer is our Challenging Flavors dinner tomorrow night in Waltham.

It is a small irony that our Cambodian, chef-owners, Nyep and Nadsa - who are mother and daughter - themselves prefer the more challenging flavors of their cuisine even as their customers do not. So they're pretty excited about tomorrow night!

Predictably, there's still some space available if you want throw your palate for a loop. But if you want to have this experience but can't make it tomorrow, don't worry: "Challenging Flavors" is a very special theme dinner we are sure to host again soon!

Time flies...

Hello again... It doesn't FEEL like four months but it has indeed been four months since my last post...a cardinal sin in the blogosphere. Can't - won't - let THAT happen again!

It's been a busy time. Since early November, among other things, we've remodeled our Cambridge restaurant, really warming things up there. [And we now serve Sunday brunch and lunch Monday-Friday in all three restaurants.]

We've also been adjusting to the new economic reality confronting just about everyone: people simply have less money to spend.

There are marketing "experts" who counsel lying about how things are going ["never let them see you sweat"] when things aren't going great. And in my experience most small business owners really prefer not to tell the truth when times are tough. I prefer to respect people's intelligence [don't kid yourself: most people already know how things are going!], and I especially want to "keep it real," which in this case means having conversations about the truth of the matter rather than what I hope I can make them think. We all stand to gain the most out of what we share with one another when we share honestly, and earn each other's trust.

So, how are WE doing? Sales are definitely off a bit. The fall was off significantly with December particularly slow due to businesses reigning in their holiday celebrations, and that butal three-day snowstorm the weekend before Christmas was no help at all! But, as they were only a little slower than last year, both January and February provided us with a bit of encouragement.

Someone told me in the early 90s that restaurants are leading economic indicators, one of the first things people cut our of their budgets when the begin to worry about their economic well-being, and one of the first things they add back in when they begin to feel better. So what are our restaurants telling us? That the worst is over, but we've not turned the corner just yet.

Yes, like most businesses, non-profits and governments great and small, we have had to make some changes to the way we run our business to feel sure we're going to be serving you - and serving you well - for the long haul. I'll be exploring some of those things in future posts.

But for the moment, let me just thank you for reading, and for continuing to support The Elephant Walk with your patronage and your feedback. We are here for you, and because of you. Thank you indeed.