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The Wisdom of Joyce Goldstein

Joyce Goldstein is a restaurant consultant, food scholar, and true culinary icon. The James Beard Foundation named her Best Chef: California in 1994 and also included her in the Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America. She worked as a chef of the Café at Chez Panisse; was the founder and director of the California Street Cooking School, San Francisco’s first international cooking school; and co-founded Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, which aims to advance the voices of women across the industry.

But Goldstein is probably best known as the chef-owner of the groundbreaking Mediterranean restaurant Square One in San Francisco – and for the 28 highly acclaimed cookbooks she’s authored.

Goldstein was recently honored by Women Chefs and Restaurateurs. so we took the opportunity to talk to her – as well as to some of her admirers – to glean these pearls of wisdom on leadership, work, and life.

First and foremost, be present. “There’s such an emphasis on getting famous that some chefs are not at their restaurant enough,” says Goldstein. “There’s an obsession with PR and getting your name out. Opening multiple places and not bonding with staff and customers is a mistake.”

There’s no substitute for hard work. Amaryll Schwertner, chef owner Boulettes Larder & Boulibar says, “At the restaurant Joyce was a mother, dedicated to the work. Kitchens are demanding environments; having examples of women continuing their work and the complexities of similar home circumstances, was an important experience.”

Focus on relationships. Regulars are a boon to any business. “Being a neighborhood restaurant keeps you afloat,” says Goldstein. “The lemmings come and go. You have to bond with your staff and regular customers. Build a team and make them feel appreciated.

If your staff is happy, your customers are happy. When you try out new people, have them trail and if the staff doesn’t like them—don’t hire them!”

Mentor by setting an example. “Show up, teach, deal with diverse personalities, keep a balance of opinions, let staff know you support them,” Goldstein advises. “Set an example.”

Keep learning, keep educating. “A good chef educates both the front and the back of the house.” At Square One, Goldstein kept a lending library of books and made sure staff had the opportunity to taste new dishes. “It all comes down to education. People need to feel confident. Encourage people to take classes – it will also increase their sense of worth.”

Give honest feedback. “You can’t love everybody’s food but you can be constructive in your feedback,” Goldstein says. “Everybody is working hard.” Before Mat Schuster opened his restaurant Canela Bistro & Wine Bar Goldstein came in and critiqued the menu. “It meant a lot to me.” Shelley Lindgren, wine director and owner of A16, adds, “Joyce is always a straight shooter, and this has been a guiding light for me.”

Give credit and acknowledge your staff. “If someone has contributed to a dish, give them credit at staff briefings,” said Goldstein. “It’s a way of showing respect for your staff. When someone’s recipe goes in a book, it would be good to give credit there, too.”

Keep your cool. “Have patience, don’t lose your temper in public, take people on a walk outside the restaurant if you have to, discuss things,” Golstein says. “When you lose your temper, you lose your credibility. Also, she warns against bad-mouthing others: “Words have power. It comes back to bite you if you say something negative.”

Advocate for simplicity and taste. Food writer and Tablehopper founder Marcia Gagliardi says, “Joyce has always been an advocate for pure taste, full and authentic flavor, and soulful cuisine—no tricks, no muddled flavors, no tweezer food.” Adds David Nayfeld, chef co-owner Che Fico and Che Fico Alimentari, “Joyce is a purist and classicist in the sense that she tries to put as little embellishment or interpretation on dishes as possible and does them in the way she believes is the most straightforward.”

Become an expert. Goldstein has rigorously studied Jewish food history and the culinary revolution of California. “She is a detail oriented person and an expert at taste making and at food history,” says Elizabeth Falkner, consulting chef and Women Chefs and Restaurateurs board president. Schwertner adds, “Joyce is disciplined and deeply referenced. It was this aspect of her work which influenced me the most.”

Stay connected to the industry. Nicole Krasinski, chef and co-owner at State Bird Provisions and The Progress, says, “Watching how Joyce has stayed connected to the food industry though all its shifts and changes has been a great inspiration. Having her perspective and wisdom as a groundbreaking woman in the kitchen has helped keep me pushing forward.”

Road to Extraordinary: Bringing People to the Table with Dan Simons of Farmers Restaurant Group (Part 2)

Last week, I shared the first part of my interview with Dan Simons, founder and co-owner of Farmers Restaurant Group. We covered some of the early influences in his hospitality career, as well as Dan’s learnings from his first restaurant venture. It was so clear to me that for Dan, being around a table matters, relationships matter, and food matters.

Our conversation continues here with Dan sharing how he built the huge success that is Farmers Restaurant Group, what qualities he looks for in his team, and what it takes to create an authentic experience for diners.

Building Farmers Restaurant Group

Winston: You have talked about how you, in some ways, tried to impose your values on the diners and you thought you knew what they wanted. What have you learned since and applied to Farmers Restaurant Group?

Dan: The first restaurant we owned that failed was in the suburbs outside of Dallas. We saw a couple of really successful, iconic fried chicken places in the suburbs outside of Dallas. We ate at a few of them, and we were like, “Wow. We can use better chicken, better oil. We can used fresh green beans. We can use real iced tea instead of Lipton iced tea. Why don’t we take this whole iconic soul food approach, and really chef it up?” That was our thought, and then we opened and that customer just didn’t care. That customer knows themselves best. They know what they want.

They tasted the iced tea and they were like, “This is funny.” They looked at the green beans, and they’re like, “Why are they so green?”

We ended up giving an improved (in our own opinion) product to an audience that didn’t want it and weren’t asking for it. We didn’t understand them. We thought we knew better. What we realized was, we’re doing some good stuff. Who would want it? Because we wanted to be authentic to us, too.

In the end, I didn’t want to run a restaurant that would’ve been successful in that location; I had moved back to D.C. and was starting a family. Applying our lessons learned, we focused on D.C. and opened our first Founding Farmers on the corner of 20th and Pennsylvania. The cornbread recipe is the same. Fried chicken recipe is the same. The iced tea is the same. We ended up really taking a look at why we wanted to do this. The planet matters. Quality matters. What’s in Lipton iced tea scares me. And, I thought people should know. But, that’s only useful if there’s enough people who think like that. I learned that I didn’t want to just choose a message that worked with an audience. Mike and I had the chance to partner with real farmers and create an authentic platform for the messages that mattered to all of us, and I was confident that what mattered to us would matter to people in D.C.

Winston: What are some easy things that someone should be thinking about when they’re opening restaurants?

Dan: I do try to step inside the guest and wear all their senses, seeing through their eyes, hearing through their ears, and cue in on the aromas, the sights, the sounds, the smells, and that kind of sixth-sense vibe. You’ve just got to sit in every single seat. That’s how I work a dining room as well. Observing them, where are they? What are they not doing? Who’s cold? Who’s got to put a sweater on? What plates are wiped clean and what food or drink isn’t being finished? Because if you ask a restaurant manager, how’s it feel in here? Their answer is always: too hot. They’re running around. It is how the guest feels that matters, not how the manager or restaurateur feel.

So I know what our main touch points are, the physical touch points. The way the menu feels in their hands. I think things should be spotless. It just matters, right? “And so, to me [Dan looks at and picks up a silver sugar packet holder with a barely noticeable fingerprint smudge] this isn’t spotlessly clean, and I find that just a total failure. So I think those touch points, if it’s supposed to sparkle, it needs to the sparkle. If it’s supposed to be spotless it needs to be spotless. And we teach our team, everything matters. No detail is too small. But the toilet paper needs to roll over the top. That’s the way toilet paper’s built.” [I nod furiously in agreement].

Winston: You were ahead of the curve on a lot of that messaging and the farm-to-table narrative, and everything associated. How did it come to you, or was it just a value-based thing that you always had?

Dan: That was a little bit of luck, because we got introduced to the North Dakota Farmers Union and formed a partnership with them. This is and was a farmer-owned business, which then became so much of the story.

We weren’t even focused on using the “farm-to-table” phrase. We were thinking and talking about being farmer-owned: Who gets the profit? Vertical integration. Supply chain. Because every restaurant is some-kind-of-farm to table. The thing is, what farm? Who owns that farm? How do they operate that farm? And then who owns the restaurant? Ours is much more of an economic model, about where the value of the equity and the profits go.

Winston: Rank food, service, value, and ambience. And briefly why number one is one and why number four is number four.

Dan: For me, there’s a word missing, because the number one thing is essentially the overall recipe – the experience.

I can love a restaurant where I’m not blown away by the drinks. I’m not blown away by the food. The service may not be perfect, but the server is perfect. So I would probably put service first. But it’s really about the server, and them taking responsibility to create my experience. Timeliness for me is vital in an experience, absolutely vital.

Food, beverage, ambience: one of these three can be enough to get me to come back. The only thing that matters in a restaurant is if people want to come back and do come back. That’s it. The normal diner isn’t just inspired by, “That was the best cocktail I’ve ever had.” And then you say to them, “How often do you go back?” “Well, I haven’t been back.” “That’s the best burger I’ve ever had.” “Are you there once a week?” “No, because…” There’s a whole bunch of other ingredients in the only recipe that matters: do the guests return and do they recommend the restaurant to their friends.

[Read more…]

Road to Extraordinary: Bringing People to the Table with Dan Simons of Farmers Restaurant Group

You never forget your first… interview.

That’s why asking Farmers Restaurant Group founder and co-owner Dan Simons to be my guinea pig was a no brainer. I’m inspired not only by the group’s mission of serving responsibly sourced, made-from-scratch dishes, but also Dan’s commitment to helping others. Dan’s version of paying it forward takes many forms – he mentors the next generation as a lecturer at The George Washington University; co-founded VSAG, a consultancy to help aspiring restaurateurs; and founded Our Last Straw .which led the effort to eliminate single-use plastic straws in the D.C. metropolitan region. Thanks to Dan, countless people have taken the pledge to #StopSucking and skip the straw.

Farmers Restaurant Group opened their first location, Founding Farmers, in Washington D.C. in 2008 under Dan and Michael Vucurevich’s leadership. Today, more than 47,000 family farmers own the group of 7 restaurants, providing the ingredients for cooking and baking dishes from scratch, in house, every day.

Dan suggested we meet over lunch at Founding Farmers. He must know someone there (probably helps to be the owner) because we snagged a reservation even though Founding Farmers has been one of the most booked restaurants on OpenTable in recent years.

Now onto the interview. I’m confident you’ll find his words of wisdom don’t suck.

Lessons from The Family Table

Winston: So obviously I’ve read your LinkedIn profile and I know you, so I know a bit about your path from Cheesecake Factory and Eatzi’s. But what’s not on the resume that led you to hospitality?

Dan: I think for me it’s really about the family that I was raised in. Going out to eat was a huge treat – maybe once or twice a year. We mostly cooked at home. My mom’s a good cook, and food was important.

My parents were immigrants, and they grew up in London, so they were young during World War II. Family mealtimes really mattered, times were tough, and while some foods were rationed, there was still comfort in being together. Portions were specific and to this day, my mom is like, “okay if there’s six of us, three potatoes each, 18 potatoes,” and she cooks 18 potatoes. She puts on heaping piles of butter, because butter was rationed during the war, and I think even to this day she enjoys the extravagance of extra butter. Family time mattered, food mattered, being around the table mattered, noticing the food mattered.

I’m lucky – I grew up in a really awesome family, and my mom still lives in the same house I was raised in. We still say, “let’s round table it,” and sit around that same kitchen table to talk things through. I think some of the most important decisions in any of our lives – the biggest moments and the biggest tears and all of that – happen around the table.

So I think that drew me to restaurants because I love the food, I like the drinks, but it is really all about what happens around the table. Because to me, hospitality is the background that allows the foreground, and the foreground is the people around the table. [Read more…]

Kevin Boehm & Donnie Madia on Competition, Vulnerability, and the Inaugural Welcome Conference Chicago

Six years ago, Will Guidara and Anthony Rudolf introduced the Welcome Conference, a one-day forum held in New York City for ideas and exchange about hospitality. Since its beginning, restaurateurs and operators have traveled from all over the country for the event, which features both industry legends (think Drew Nieporent and Richard Melman) to expert voices outside the restaurant world who have something to say about taking care of people.

Donnie Madia and Kevin Boehm have occupied the audience and the stage at the Welcome Conference. Based in Chicago, they boast two of the most acclaimed restaurant groups not just in the Windy City, but nationwide: Donnie at One Off Hospitality (Blackbird, Avec, The Publican), and Kevin at Boka Restaurant Group (Boka, Girl and the Goat, Momotaro). Together, they were determined to bring the magic of the conference to Chicago – even if that meant putting aside their competitive spirits.

September 23rd marks the first-ever Welcome Conference outside of New York City, hosted by Donnie and Kevin in Chicago. As proud sponsors, we spoke to them all about the event – keep reading to learn why vulnerability matters, the power of friendship in the industry, and what makes Chicago hospitality unique.

You’ve both spoken at the Welcome Conference in previous years. Tell me about that experience.

Kevin: It’s a pretty magical experience, and I think that Will and Anthony and Brian had great intention on making the speaker experience be as compelling as the audience experience. They throw an incredible dinner the night before, they’re very thoughtful about the speaker guests that they get for everybody, and they create an environment where the people that are there in the audience are the best crowd ever. They’re dying to be entertained. Even on a big stage, at Lincoln Center, it feels like a great big hug on that stage.

Donnie: From the first conference that I went to, I noticed a shift in the middle and after. There was finally a venue for the front of the house to air their grievances or speak about business – what we’re going through, how we got through it, and a direction or path. We can do something different. We can make a difference by communicating with one another. This is a venue of communication. That’s the way I perceived it early on, and every year it’s gotten better and better and better. If we leave with something inspirational to bring back to our teams, that’s the overall goal.

We live in a chef-obsessed world. Here’s an opportunity for us to get together and make a difference for front-of-the-house people.

What were some of the most inspiring lessons or insights you took away from the NYC events?

Kevin: They curate a group of speakers that’s not just from the restaurant business. It’s pretty brilliant. One of the themes was conflict and change, and they brought in the head FBI negotiator to talk to us about how to resolve a situation that is elevated to a hysteric level. So beginning it with active listening, and then some sort of action to resolve it – all the things we encounter on a daily basis, but looking at it from a different viewpoint. In that same conference, they had a neuroscientist talk about the way we process words, and how we really need to think about the choices we make when we say words, because they affect people’s emotions.

Donnie: What I gathered in the last six years was the opportunity of allowing speakers to be vulnerable in an audience between 500 and 900 people. I remember Will’s father, Frank Guidara, gave this emotional speech about going through cancer and how he came out of it, as well as losing his wife to cancer. He talked about how he brought that to his army regiment training and how that was able to pull him through, by the lessons he learned and shared with his men.

I read that you approached Will and Anthony after the 2018 NYC conference. What made you want to take Welcome Conference to Chicago?

Kevin: Basically Donnie and I strong-armed them. [Laughs] Donnie and I had met for a cup of coffee, and we both talked about the fact that we loved going to Welcome Conference but really both wanted something like that to exist in our own city. What we didn’t want to do was step on their toes or look like followers. We wanted to go to those guys first out of respect. To our surprise and great happiness, they said that they would do it with us.

Donnie: When I was sitting there in year one, when I watched Will’s energy and Anthony’s energy on stage, and the emotion and how vulnerable they were to put their grievances and disdain behind them… We both felt the same way. Like, why do I dislike this man? Because he has more restaurants and staff members than I do? Is that really a reality for me and him, to exist in the same city that we both love and work in and raise our families in? It didn’t make sense.

Also what I felt was, man, they did it again. New York beat us to the punch. Silently, I believe there was a seed growing in both of our stomachs, going, we need to do this. Luckily enough, the four of us came together, and Kevin and I felt the same way that Will and Anthony felt. We put our grievances aside, and the rest is history.

Kevin: It’s tough when you’re competing for the same employees, maybe the same real estate deals, the same awards. It’s not exactly a fertile ground for friendship. Donnie and I, our corporate offices are basically right next to each other. We were two guys who had, in a lot of ways, the same life. We understood each other better than anybody did. And we were not friends.

It’s been great to become friends through this process of doing this together. It makes our hospitality that we give out on a nightly basis more legitimate if that hospitality goes through all the rest of our lives.There’s more we can do as friends than as fierce competitors. [Read more…]

Expand Your Brand: Experts Dish on Opening a Second Location

Your flagship restaurant is packed every night. Patrons post glowing reviews. Diners book reservations well in advance to score a Friday night table. Social media pages are brimming with gorgeous photos of food and ambience, drawing a lively crowd to dinner service.

It feels like the perfect time to open another location, and you know just the place. Now, all you have to do is duplicate your existing restaurant, right?

If only it were that easy.

Hospitality expansion is anything but a cookie-cutter process, and there is no magic wand. The road to expanding a restaurant brand is fraught with stumbling blocks, nightmarish tales of building code violations, restoration woes, and equipment and staffing challenges.

There is good news. Follow a few cues from the experts, and your expansion can be something to celebrate. We asked an architect, builder, chief operating officer, and trailblazing chef for their insight into expansion success. Here’s what they had to say.

Ask the Architect: Jeffrey Beers

Restaurants by Jeffrey Beers International share an instantly recognizable “it” factor. At heart, Beers is a true artist who grew up in a traveling family that exposed him to global flavors. He spent almost ten years with master architect I.M. Pei and a lifetime in the kitchens of the world’s best chefs. From Seoul to Dubai to Manhattan and everywhere in between, Beers’ passion for detail is legendary.

A few of Beers’ high-profile clients include the Four Seasons Hotel and Resort, Masaharu Morimoto, Gordon Ramsay (including Hell’s Kitchen in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas), Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Disney Hotels & Resorts, Dinex Group, Ritz-Carlton, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club. Beers is also a restaurant owner in his own right, and when it comes to expanding restaurant brands, he has seen it all.

“It raises the bar the moment you get into multiple locations, but if someone is wired for that and ready for the challenges, it is a great thing,” said Beers.

The architecture is a huge part of the equation, but restaurateurs and chefs might be surprised to learn that Beers believes the process should begin with considering the guest experience.

“In the culinary world, especially from chefs who have reputations that made a mark, they never forget that this is a consumer-based business,” said Beers.

It’s important to assess if an established brand in one location will fit into a different neighborhood and meet the consistent needs of diners. Beers says successful brands must include two critical business components and without one or the other, the risk of failure is high.

“I’ve seen many chefs go through this, and I strongly believe in apprenticing for someone who has developed a strong reputation, work ethic, and understands the business, and that means both food and service,” said Beers.

The other component that cannot be overstated is not to go it alone. “It’s remarkable what can come out of collaboration, especially in opening a second location and beyond because the restaurant brand is important, but each restaurant is a different space,” said Beers.

Measuring the popularity of the first location is not an accurate indicator for expansion where location is concerned. Beers says that’s because customer demographics at any new location will inherently be different than the first one. Again, it’s all about knowing your diner beyond what you put on the menu.

“Study your customers and cater the design accordingly — does the space need to be a little lighter or darker? Does it need to be more open? Should there be seating other than table seating? Should the bar be larger or smaller this time around? Pay strong attention to answering those types of questions and take cues from the architect,” said Beers. “Plan from how you enter to where your seating is and take into account the flow of the space all the way to the server and point-of-sale stations.”

Location has become as much about culture as brick and mortar. Chefs often wonder: is it smarter to try and duplicate a second location or to start anew with a fresh concept?

“Stylistically and design-wise, it has been helpful to me to understand the culture of the guests in that part of the world as well as what isn’t in that city — what works in Columbus may not work in Dallas,” said Beers. “You can invent something new, something innovative, but one has to be cognizant of what a customer in a given location wants in order to provide that experience.” [Read more…]

The Wisdom of Joyce Goldstein