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I was in college I wasn't enjoying a being college.
I wanted to be pretty much anywhere else but school,
which I don't think is unusual for a nineteen year old.
And I went down to New Orleans with a friend of mine,
cuz we both like to eat, we both like food
and we went to a bunch of restaurants down there
and in one of them, I was asked by a French chef
why was I in the restaurant? I told him how much I liked it
and he said "Oh you should go to France
and cook with great French chefs!"
And I said "Ya, that sounds fun."
My Name is Andy Pforzhiemer.
I'm the owner of Barcelona restaurants,
a group of seven wine and tapas bars
in Connecticut and Atlanta.
I came back to school and thought
you know I'd really much rather be doing that
than doing what I'm doing now and I wrote to the chef
and made up my mind, I was just gonna go to France and
throw myself on his doorstep and say "Teach me."
I was a waiter, 23, 24
I decided I want to be and restaurant management.
And I picked a restaurant in New York City, Tribeca Grill.
And at the time, Air Tran was running this deal, if you were
under 25 or something,
you could fly for $80 to New York from Atlanta.
You just show up and fly.
So, I flew up there for an interview,
they had a management training program
that I wanted to be part of.
And they wouldn't hire me.
My name's Scott.
I'm the COO for Barcelona Restaurant Group.
And I ended up flying up on that $80 ticket, I think six times.
Just showing up, and I kept coming.
It ended up working out.
So, we spend a lot of time talking about warm fuzzy things,
emotions, things we try to convey to guests.
This is technical skill.
This is your ability to do your job.
The last two months it sucked.
You're for not putting in like 150 lbs. of inventory
that I can't sell you...
That's a 2 month, that's a 2 month period.
How much is suckling pig per pound?
I'm not sure.
How much does one weigh?
It varies from 25 lbs. to 30 lbs.
How much does the average suckling pig cost you?
To come in the door?
About $75-100.
Scott, how much does suckling pig cost?
-$160.
-Thank you.
Alright?
Are you saying I'm not keeping track of my prices?
I'm saying you don't know what your prices are
and that's why you have a 29% food cost.
It's not fair that you can throw numbers at me right now
and say that I don't watch my food costs.
I just asked you how much a pig costs
when it comes in the the door.
There's only three reasons costs are high.
That's for the past two months,
because my last six months were the lowest in the company.
I can be difficult to work for.
I am very interested in having other people's opinions
thrown at me.
I like managers who talk back.
I like people who self start.
We'll tell them when we hire people,
"Look this is your restaurant,
when people walk in the door, I don't want them looking for me,
I want them looking for you."
"If the place does well, you get all the credit,
if the place does badly, it's your fault."
They have to be very, very comfortable
with taking complete ownership.
Some of our best managers come from
very highly regulated, large restaurant companies
where they were told how to answer the phone and how to
set a table and how to greet a guest
and it's all in giant books that they have to memorize.
We don't do that.
We attempt to hire grownups.
We give some basic guidelines as to what our philosophy is
and what our beliefs are, but we have to trust them to work
within those confines and make the right choice.
And they might not always make the choice that I would make,
sometimes they make a better one.
To give them a correct answer to every question
I think is impossible and I think it doesn't work.
I think, in fact your actually limiting
your ability to get better.
We as a company have gotten better
not because Andy's a genius,
not because Sasha's a genius, not because I'm a genius.
We've gotten better because we've brought in
more brain power,
more creativity, and we've allowed people to use it.
And the more you try and, the more you try and define that
the more you limit it.
Restaurants in general are not run terribly professionally,
and so we work hard to inject some professionalism
into the restaurant industry.
I always get in trouble for saying this,
most literature including things written
by people I have a lot of respect for,
tend to, I think fetishize the relationship with the employee
as in, if you take care of your employees then they'll be happy
and they'll turn around and take care of your customers.
I don't believe that.
We are here for the customers,
we're here for the customer experience.
Everything else is secondary to that.
If it makes the manager's life miserable, I don't care.
If it makes the waiter's life miserable, I don't care,
if it makes the chef miserable, I don't care,
if it makes me miserable, I don't care.
It's a job. It's work.
It is work sometimes to smile,
it is work sometimes to have somebody yelling at you
because they weren't seated fast enough
or their steak was cooked wrong,
and pat them on the back and say,
you know it was our fault all do everything I can.
Yeah, that's work.
It's not always fun.
But we're not here to have fun.
We're here so other people can have fun.
That's our job.
I think the people who stick around
definitely are happy to be here.
I think a lot of them have come from good companies,
but maybe companies that didn't focus so much on achievement
and focus on taking care of the guests,
and focus on doing something that's just satisfying.
That's why they're in this business.
You're certainly not in this business to get rich.
So, if we can empower them to make the guests happy,
they're going to make money,
the vibe in the restaurant is going to be a ton of fun,
so everybody is going to enjoy the shift,
and they are going to be proud of what they've done
and they are happy.
It's a byproduct.
If I'm running around trying to make them happy,
to make the guests happy,
it's just not gonna work.