A quick look at the World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2017.

We met our friends from the Dimmi and discussed some of the issues with the aggregator model as opposed to those who want to tell the story of their own Restaurant.

Many Restaurants are taking control of their marketing and their story and using the Free Online Restaurant Booking System (FORBS) and the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system (FROLO).

We talk about our plans to help a Restaurant that is kicking in $10,000 a month to keep their Restaurant going and how we are going to help them.

Congratulations to 11 Madison Park, the World’s Best Restaurant for 2017.

We discuss why you may not want to be in the World’s 50 Best, but you may want to be the best parent to your kids, and how your Restaurant needs to support that.

1. Hard work – it is important to be doing the right work.  Too many people work too hard at the wrong type of work.
2. Team work – building a great team and getting them working to help you is really important.
3. Purpose – your purpose, that is what gives you passion, you need to maintain your passion for a long time, that purpose does it.
4. Leadership – Getting the team to work towards your purpose.
5. Technical excellence – FOH (front of house), BOH (back of house) – you need to be working towards excellence in all of the parts of your Restaurant.
6. Always learning – Ana Ros is self-taught. She didn’t plan to be a chef and has taught herself the skills to be the Best Female chef.  That is an amazing story and should be inspiring to all restaurant owners.
7. Persistence – Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana took a long time before it became popular.  You need to persist, knowing that you are on the right path.
8. Innovation – We look at the role of innovation and the importance of failing and the easiest way that you can experiment with innovation and creativity.

Have a listen to Chef’s Table on Netflix, a great series telling amazing stories of these amazing Chefs.


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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Hey, it’s James from Marketing4Restaurants and welcome to Episode 42 of Secret Sauce Restaurant Marketing podcast: Seven Lessons for your Restaurant from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

Hey, hey, everyone! Welcome back. Super excited to be doing this podcast today because last night I was lucky enough to attend the World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards last night. So, there was little old me with the luminaries of the industry, Heston Blumenthal, Gaggan Anand, Ana Ros, Grant Achatz, Ben Shewry –a whole group of people having a great time. Super exciting party, the food was amazing, the alcohol was great and flowing. Just really great to sort of rub shoulders with the movers and shakers in the industry. What I want to do is pull out a range of things that I think every restaurant can be doing a little bit better so that you can start to be running the business that you want.

 

 

Marketing4Restaurants and Dimmi at The World’s 50 Best Restaurants

Before we get into that, though, we had an interesting conversation with our friends from Dimmi.  We met up with the guys from Dimmi there and we had a little bit of a philosophical discussion, let’s call it about business models. The Dimmi model, of course, is an aggregator model. For bookings you’ve got Open Table, probably the biggest player in that space. Quandoo, Dimmi in Australia; the guys who are taking bookings online. So, they’ll have a little widget that you can put on your website. In the online ordering space you got aggregators as well, you’ve got Just Eat, Eat24, Menulog in Australia, Delivery Hero, they’ll have an app where you can go and you can find a whole heap of restaurants and you can pick one and either make a booking or get an online order. Now, I said that I thought the aggregator model was a little bit old because of the fact that restaurants now want to tell their own story and they want to deal directly with their customers. And more importantly, the technology is there to enable you to do that. That’s the awesome thing about the web, the technology is free and available for you to be able to do that.

Now, the guys at Dimmi, being an aggregator, of course they were saying that the aggregator model is much better and that restaurants don’t want to be able to tell their own story, they don’t need to be able to tell their own story because the aggregator can do that. Now, I thought, “Wow! That’s interesting.” I can’t see how you can create a great value proposition and I can’t see how you can run a great marketing campaign when you’re relying on an aggregator to tell your story. So, I thought, you know what today I’m going to try a little experiment. I’m going to download the Dimmi app and I’m going to see what happens. So, I downloaded the app and it asked for my location so I put that in and right at the top of the list there was a restaurant that is offering a deal. There is a 50% off coupon there. Now, in the past we ran a blog article ” Is Dimmi becoming Groupon by Stealth.” I think it’s very insidious, when people are driven to these apps and the first thing that is driven to them is a 50% off coupon. Now, obviously, Dimmi gets paid when everyone makes a booking.

What they are doing is they are trying to drive people to make a booking and they are not overly fussy when the booking is made. They just want to see a truckload of bookings–that’s how they make their money. There’s nothing wrong with that. We always say you should be using as many aggregators as you can because if they’re bringing in new customers to you, then that’s well and good. What you want to be doing, though, is you want to be building up your own database of your own customers.

 

 

There’s a couple of issues with the aggregator model, one, it costs the restaurants. So very few people are driving around in their Ferraris. Probably a few of the guys from last night. But 99.99% of restaurant owners aren’t driving Ferraris, they’re working really hard and they’re not making a significant return, the kind of return that they should be making. So, you want to be cutting costs there. The other thing that is really, really insidious is that sometimes you get the email address from the aggregator. Sometimes even if you do get the email address, they are building their database about each and every one of the users.  How often do they eat? Where do they eat? What it is that they like to eat? Which makes it easier for them to run marketing campaigns on behalf of restaurants. Lastly, of course, they’re deal-driven. The big differentiator because of the fact that that there’s no story being told about a restaurant. You can say, “Oh, I want to see all of the Indian restaurants.”

The only thing that comes up is the differentiation by price. That is the last thing that you want to differentiate on, you want to be talking about quality, you want to be talking about your story, you want to be talking about the experience that you generate not, “And, ah, by the way you can have a 50% off coupon if you come tonight. “That is crazy talk. It’s a race to the bottom. It makes hospitality incredibly unsustainable, because we all know what the cost structures are for a restaurant. The only people who are making money out of that kind of deals are the people who are charging $200 a head knowing that they’re only providing a $100 worth of service. They know that they’ll get people who are going to go in and get a coupon for a $200 meal pay $100 for it. It’s only the people who marked it up. It’s very hard to create value out of that business model.

So, have a think about that. I would like to think that how I put my arguments fairly eloquently, about how important it is for a restaurant to be able to tell their own story ‘cause that’s where there’s that differentiation, that’s where there’s a value, that’s where you can make a little bit of profit. I’ve said it quite a few times: If you’re not getting the email address of someone who’s made an order with you or made a booking then and it’s going to an aggregator. You may as well let you compare to just let someone come in a just cook in your kitchen because you’ve given the whole game away. If you’re not building your database, if you’re building someone else’s, that’s just crazy talk and it’s absolutely madness to be paying for the privilege to do that.

 

 

Free Online Restaurant Booking System for the Best Restaurants

So, the exciting thing is, that if you want to take bookings online there’s a free online restaurant booking system and that is going gangbusters and it’s interesting looking at our figures. More and more of our customers are coming from overseas so we are now in, I think, 10 countries, we had a signup in Norway last night and they’ve put the widget up on their own website. Which is super exciting. So, it’s awesome to welcome a Norwegian restaurant to the Marketing4Restaurants family. And, of course, that thing goes on my list of places to visit. Hooray! I don’t know when that’s going to be but Hooray!

If you want to take orders online then there’s the free restaurant online ordering system and we can’t win and so the growth is always little bit up and down with that week on week it’s 30% so we’ve had a few big restaurants come on online recently absolutely gangbusters growth with that. Other online booking providers usually charge $1or $2 a booking. For online ordering, there are people who are paying 13%. We’re talking about one restaurant which will probably save $13,000 a year by using our free restaurant online ordering system.

One of the pieces of advice that we always give is, if you’re using a third-party aggregator, make a booking or make an order through that system yourself and see what sort of emails  you receive from them. We had someone in our office earlier this week, who used to run quite a successful restaurant, they’re now chipping in $10,000 a month. Oh, my god! how stressful would that be? Having to kick in, working all those hours, working just  really, really hard and having to kick in $10,000 for the privilege of doing it. That’s absolutely madness. The interesting thing is that they started taking bookings online with Quandoo. Now, I’m not saying Quandoo has caused them to lose $10,000 a month but they’re not giving the email addresses. They themselves have admitted that it’s harder to make people come back so they’re seeing less and less repeat customers. The customers that they are getting love the place. Not repeat customers but people who are making bookings online. What they’re worried about is that those customers are then getting offers from other restaurants in the area through Quandoo and they’re going to other places.  Particularly, as I saw it, just the first restaurant in the Dimmi app 50% off coupon. How much worse can that food be? How less exciting can that food be, if it’s 50% off? If it’s 75% as good and I know it’s hard to be empirical about these things but I can either go out twice or I can save my money. You need to think about this.

When we sat down with him, we went through the website, I think this one thing that so many restaurants need to do is have a look at your website. So we’re building the number of websites. What we’re doing is just ramping up all the time. Our packages start at a $1,000–and that’s Australian. So we’re doing a few in the US now because our dollar is so poor it’s quite a good value for them in the US. It’s all about telling that story. So, the photos that they got are great. The food looks amazing, we’re going to do some awesome SEO (See : Episode 2: SEO for Restaurant Websites) so that Google really understands what it is that they do. Then we’re going to help them tell that story. Lastly, we’re then going to start looking at some online marketing campaigns. We’re thinking about some Facebook campaigns (See: Episode 27 Emergency Facebook Marketing for your Restaurant) these cost at $10,000 dollars in the hole. So how do you fix that? Now, I’m assuming that their food costs are at 25%, so let’s just say that we’re going to cover the food costs entirely. I know there are other costs in there but these are just back-of-the-envelope type stuff: $10,000 dollars a month, that’s $13.333 a month in revenue that we’ve got to bring in. That’s $3,076 dollars a week in revenue that we’ve got to bring in. Those guys are only open five nights a week, so we’ve got to bring in $615 a night which, let’s say the average seat is worth $50 dollars, that’s 12 and a half-ish seats. The average booking is three and a half seats per booking. So, we’re looking at having to bring in three and a half bookings every day.

Now, when you say that you’re $10,000 dollars in the hole, you think, “Holy cow! That’s a massive amount.” When you think it’s only extra three and a half bookings a night. That’s imminently doable particularly with a website that works, getting the great SEO in we’ll probably double the traffic that they’re getting right now. They’ve got some really interesting niches that they target and I know. I know that we’re getting some customers in there, customers who will convert to being regular customers pretty easily.  Because we’re going to get the right customers in and were going to be able to tell that story so that they will become regular customers but on top of that we’re going to run a Facebook campaign (See : Episode 28 – Advanced Facebook Marketing campaigns Part I – Segmenting). I’m pretty confident that we’re going to be able to turn this around really, really, really quickly.

 

 

2017 World’s Best Restaurants

So, we got a little bit away from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. Okay, let’s break it down into it. First off, really big congratulations to Eleven Madison Park, super exciting for them to be the World’s number 1 and we’ll talk about this through the podcast. Now, I know what you’re probably thinking, “I don’t want to be in the World’s Best 50 Restaurants list.” That is entirely a rationally and sane thing to think for the vast majority of restaurant owners and chefs. It is absolutely a massive commitment to start the journey towards being the on World’s 50 Best Restaurants and just talking to some of the chefs last night, the commitment that it takes, all of the work that they need to put in, it’s absolutely massive. I think that less than .01% of people listening would want to be in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, but and this is a really big but, 99.99% of the people who are listening want to be the best at something. And these are the important bests.  They might want to be the best dad that they can be for their kids or mum.  They might want to run the best restaurant in their town. The best restaurant in their state, they might want to run the best pizza restaurant in the area. There are a lot of bests out there. It doesn’t have to be the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. If it is the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, that’s super exciting. But I think you’ve got to bring it back down to the personal level and so many things come down to what it is that you’re trying to achieve.

The number of times I’ve talked to people talked about how their family life has suffered because of the fact that they own a restaurant. I think that is something that really needs to be addressed. If you’re running an ordinary restaurant then you’re probably working really hard. When you get home to your kids you’re too tired to be a parent and that’s if you get to see them. Because if you’re open for dinner you won’t be home before they go to bed, and you’ll still be asleep before they go to school. You may really, really see the kids on your rare day off, but you’ll just be too tired to actually do any parenting. I think that is a tragedy. I talk about it because I hear it so often.

 

 

Best Female Chef at the World’s 50 Best Restaurants

In Sydney this week, Dominique Crenn from Atelier Crenn in San Francisco was asked a question, “Do you think that you’ve had to sacrifice being a female to be the World’s Best Female Chef?” So, she was names the Best Female Chef for 2016.  In 2017, it was Ana Ros, who had a really interesting answer to that. She pointed out the fact that everyone actually makes these decisions and it often gets talked about among female chefs. The interesting thing is that no one actually recognizes the sacrifice that men make as a father. Women talk about it a lot more and I don’t think that men actually like to talk openly about it. Parents, whether they’re male or female, make huge sacrifices when they’re working in a restaurant. She pointed that out, she said then to the person who asked that question, “I hope that you’re making those choices, too.” It was interesting. She then asked the speaker if he knew that she had kids or if he just assumed. That she’s actually got twin daughters, and she then said, “I hope that if you have kids that you stay home so that your wife can go out and be a badass woman.” And so, this is one of the things the conversation about why there are so few female chefs in the industry. I think, definitely a career wholeheartedly that the question needs to be changed. It needs to be changed for everyone, though we need to recognize the fact that people are making massive sacrifices. And that’s why, I think, so many people just want to be able to run a restaurant where they can work on normal hours and get that work-life balance right for them. That might be what it is that you’re aiming to do.

 

 

The Seven Lessons for your Restaurant from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants

So let’s start breaking down the seven things that I think you can take from the stories of the World’s 50 Best Chefs, that you can then package up in your restaurant.

 

 

Lesson Number One from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants : Work Hard

The first one is: Work hard. It is hard work to do what it is that you’re trying to do. now that’s obvious, right?  All of them work ridiculously hard it’s just plainly obvious for everyone. Now the thing is I talk to restaurant owners all the time and most restaurant owners, most, 95% of them are working really, really, really hard they’re working really, really long hours. So, this is one of those things that you’re already doing. You are already working really hard you are already doing one of the things that makes these guys the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

You’re working really hard, so what is it that you want to achieve, is it the right work? Are you doing the right work? How many people are working in the business, not on the business? How many people have systematized their restaurant so that they have got more time to be doing the important things that are actually going to help them build the restaurant that they want? That’s the first thing I want you to think about what it is that you actually do. I’m not saying that, that’s an easy thing to do. At Marketing4Restaurants, this is one of the things that I struggle with there’s a lot of things that I do.  I’m trying to cut back my hours as well. Team, I’m with you on this I’m working really long hours but I am now really focusing on, let’s start delegating, let’s start mentoring our team. These are the things that we want.

 

 

Lesson Number Two from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants : Teamwork

The second thing is you have to build a team that’s going to work. Teamwork. That is what is going to enable you to work really hard on your restaurant, not in the restaurant. Hire the right people. Fire the wrong people. Hire that attitude, train for abilities. All of those things. The restaurant that came in this week, they spent the first 18 months of the restaurant’s life getting the team right. They had people who were not helping and were making things worse. They had to get rid of those people and it’s not easy to just go and sack everyone. It’s tricky to do that. That process definitely takes time and you need to work towards it. You need to understand that you got to get a team that’s going to work with you.

 

 

Lesson Number Three from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants : Have a Purpose

The third thing is you’ve got to have a purpose. Do you want this to be the best place that people can bring their family to?  Is it the fact that you want to take the food of your homeland and introduce people in your new country, your new chosen country to that food? Is it that you want to encourage people to be vegan? Is it that you want to cater for people who need gluten-free food? Is it that you want to celebrate great steaks? Is it that you love burgers and you want to celebrate “The Burger?” What’s the guiding light that you want to move towards? Too many people have lost that. Why was it you opened that restaurant? You just can’t get that beaten out of you, you’ve got to have a purpose and it’s really important because in those days when you’re down a chef and you’re down someone front of house and it’s super busy and the world is just super chaotic, half your deliveries didn’t come in; it’s that purpose that will help you to power on through the hard days. And that is what going to help your team power on through.

 

 

Lesson Number Four from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants: Leadership

The fourth thing is leadership. Leadership is really important because you need to communicate that purpose you need to invigorate people with that purpose. You need to get people to work towards that purpose. So, we spoke about restaurant leadership (See: Episode 40 – Restaurant Leadership – How to be a better leader in your Restaurant.) a couple of episodes ago. The definition is getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. The purpose is really exciting about that vision, BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal), whatever you want to call it. Why do people come to work in your restaurant? And you know what, it’s the hardest thing to do in the restaurant industry because a lot of people are on minimum wage. Super difficult to do because you can’t be paying mega bonuses to everyone if they do a good job. Not easy to do and we’ve talked about the culture a lot. Have a think about that. How are you going to be a better leader of your team?

 

Lesson Number Five from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants: Technical Excellence

The fifth point, technical excellence. Too many people accept substandard work, I think, you need to work really hard to stamp that out at every point in y our office its open plan. Someone will be on the phone and ask what was that about, why was it that something didn’t happen, what happened with our processes here or is someone not following the processes is there an issue with the processes. Because I want to be able to provide the best experience for everyone. Now, I accept failure because you can’t get it right all the time and the team knows that in some respect we build that in. But we’re all striving to provide the best kind of experience possible for everyone.

Will Guidara at Eleven Madison Park, he said that one of the things that makes their restaurant great is that you have got an amazing Chef (Chef Daniel Humm), his best friend, is the chef working really hard to lead a kitchen that is producing amazing food but their general manager who’s running front of house is working really hard to make sure that the food that everyone works in the kitchen, worked so hard to produce is presented in a way that is appropriate with the amount of work that’s gone into it. You don’t want to put all of that effort into producing amazing food only to have front of house drop the ball on that. And, likewise, it doesn’t matter how cheery, how engaging, how super excited front of house is, if the food is crap, the food is crap.  Your technical excellence across everything that you do. Technical excellence in your marketing, technical excellence in your accounting. How often are you doing stock control? Are you keeping track of inventory? Technical excellence across the broad range of disciplines that is required to run a restaurant.

 

 

Lesson Number Six from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants : Always Learning

Six, always learning. Now, I’m super keen to do a podcast with Ana Ros, she is the Best Female Chef for 2017 which is super exciting and I think it’s really important we get more gender diversity within the industry but I want to speak to Ana because she is the World’s Best Chef. She is self-taught. I think that is the most inspiring story. Now, she is an overachiever. So she’s an Olympian, she was planning on being a diplomat at the United Nations. Really, really high achieving but fell in love with a guy who’s the sommelier at Hisa Franko. His parents stepped away from the restaurant and left him to run it. He said, “Well, I’m a sommelier, I’ll do the sommelier work.” That left someone to run the kitchen and she said, “I’ll do it.” At the time, she was not prepared to be a cook, let alone a chef. She is now the World’s Best Female Chef.

I think that is absolutely amazing. Where is your commitment to continuing to learn? Because if she can do that, this was one of those things, I would be interested to know at what point was it that she thought she was going to create an amazing fine dining restaurant. How far down that journey did she get? How far down her journey was she going to get and where did that journey end? That is an amazing story. She is up against all of those people who’ve dreamed their lifelong dream to be a chef in their own fine dining restaurant, ranked in the World’s 50 Best. She was able to do that. I think that this is a really inspiring story. You should take from that the fact that whatever it is that you’ve got going on in your life, you can get better and better and better and the sky is the limit. I think that is super exciting.

 

 

Lesson Number Seven from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants : Persistence

Seven: persistence! I think it’s really interesting, particularly whenever you’re doing something different, whenever you’re doing something new and the story of Massimo Buttora from Osteria Francescana. He was producing modern Italian food and it wasn’t well-received because of the fact that in Italy, the food is kind of sacred. It was the way that it has been cooked for generations and they didn’t want people messing with it. He was messing with it and he was doing it for three years and they were three long years. I’m not sure, but it sounded like there was a bit of a financial burden in there. It would be really tough doing that, working that hard and not getting any feedback that you are on the right track. Not until there was a car accident and it meant that there was a big traffic backlog and there was a food critic who was going through his town and thought, “I’ll stay overnight and I’ll visit Massimo’s restaurant.” He visited, really liked the meal and said, “This is the future of Italian cooking.” And that flipped the switch. Then it became popular. I think that it’s really interesting because this goes to the heart of what the role of the food critic is. A food critic can’t jump on every crazy thing that every chef is doing and say, “Wow! This is amazing. This is going to be the new thing.”

At some point, they need to recognize talent, genius and write the review about that. Until you build that dominant narrative, until you get that story out, you need to persist. That’s when you’re successful. So, Massimo was at that point, where he spent three years. Obviously, he was continuing to evolve but still doing a great job for those three years. It can be really difficult, when you’re not successful before you reach that point where you’re running a great restaurant now. Whether recognized by other people or not, whether you’re working through getting a great team. That’s one of the things that you’re going to do.

If you’re in the kitchen, what is your personal journey? How are you going to get to a point where you’re comfortable expressing what it is that you do? What is the addition to what you are doing now that is required to make you really great and how are you going to get there? Until you take that journey, you need to persist. How many people give up before their time has come? I think that’s one of those really, really important things to think about. Just that persistence so many chefs have got those stories about the time they were in a very dark place. Now, the World’s 50 Best Restaurants are made up of the 50 Best people running the 50 best restaurants now. Interesting thing is that is none of the people who gave up were at that awards night. If you give up you’re out of the game. you need to think about that.

 

Lesson Number Eight from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants : Innovation and Creativity

Now, the eight on the list: innovation. Restaurant innovation and creativity (See : Episode 37 – Restaurant Innovation and Creativity). I think that it is absolutely critical in everything that you do. What is it you’re trying to achieve with your restaurant? You’ve already thought about your goals, your own personal goals.  You need to be innovative because I think that far too many restaurants stand far too still for far too long and that really, really hurts them because people’s tastes change. The industry changes. Products change. There’s change going on all around you. If you’re not changing, it’s only going to hurt you. You look at the product, Grant Achatz with his helium balloon green apple taffy, a signature dish that everyone talks about. A lot of work went in there to create that.

Heston Blumenthal, he got the Diners Club award for a Lifetime Recognition Award for the work he has done where he has married up, history historical cooking techniques with his amazing technical excellence some to create some truly mind-blowing dishes. It’s interesting because they’re taking things from outside the kitchen to produce the product they serve up inside the restaurant. I know that Heston Blumenthal, he works with Derren Brown who’s a magician to do some of the things that he does. He also works with Charles Spence who’s a psychologist, who works on the psychological interplay between food and the way that it is presented. And the interesting example his bacon and egg ice cream, now it’s described as tasting a lot more bacon-y when people listen to the sound of bacon cooking.

 

It’s these little things where people are bringing all sorts of interesting things from outside of the restaurant:  whether it’s an experience like an art gallery, new product, new techniques, new cooking techniques, new ways of presenting the food to their customers that allows you to be innovative. And I think when we talked about persistence one of the things that we didn’t talk about was failure, and it’s really important to embrace failure. And I’ve said it before I think it’s really important: your specials board–that’s the perfect place to embrace failure. You can put something up on the specials board and if people who don’t like the way that it’s described they won’t order it, so change the description.

If people order it but don’t like it, then change the recipe or maybe get rid of it. Maybe it’s not going to work. But you have the ability to rapidly iterate through menu items through your specials board. It is customer designed for innovation. You could be continually iterating through a menu that is going to change frequently which means that people are going to come back to the restaurant more often because they like your food and they know that there’s going to be new things there to taste. And if it fails, it fails. A lot of people are afraid of failure. You could embrace that across the entire spectrum of all of the things that you do.

Inspiration from the World’s Best Restaurants

So, not everyone got to go to the World’s 50 Best Restaurants announcement. We livestreamed a few of the interesting bits and pieces. If you didn’t, I highly recommend that you watch Chef’s Tables on Netflix. It’s a series of documentaries about some of the world’s most amazing chefs who get featured in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. I think that’s a great place to start to try and get some inspiration about how you can be more effective in the restaurant that you run.

A big shout out for the team of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants! It was a great event. I’ve been to a few awards events and that was one of the best ones I’ve ever been to, and it was just super exciting. The thing I love about hospitality is just how collegial it is. People were really happy to see other people’s success. You don’t see that in a lot of other industries. You don’t see someone get announced as number one and people were just so happy for them. In fact, I can’t think of another industry where you see that reaction. People were genuinely happy for the people who won awards on the night.

 

Summary of the Lessons for your Restaurant from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants

So just recapping, first off start off with what you want to achieve. If it’s not going to be listed in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants then what is it that you want to be best at? You’ve got to think about that and that’s an internal question, that’s a question for you to work out. I think it’s a big opportunity for everyone to step up to the plate as parents because parenting is probably the most important thing that all of us are going to do. But for everyone it’s all individual. So, how do you want to make your mark on the world? What is it that you want to achieve? And then start thinking about the hard work. Make sure that you’re doing the right work.

Teamwork, make sure that you’ve got the team working for you, make sure that they’re pushing in the right direction. Make sure you’ve got the right team behind you. Purpose: What’s the purpose of the restaurant? How does it align personal purpose, leadership? Think about your leadership at the end of the day, you’re responsible for it. That’s why you get paid the big money. Technical excellence, it does not matter what kind of restaurant it is. Food Trucks are a perfect example of this. you can see there are some food trucks out there where the food is just epic.  And it’s because they have that commitment to technical excellence. Whatever it is that they cook, they cook it exceedingly well in the limited confines of the equipment that they’ve got.

Always be learning. I don’t think anyone knows it all.  You can always be learning andthat’s one of the things that gives you an edge against all of the competition. Persistence, it is a long road the things that are worth it in life none of them get offered to you on a platter, well very rarely, you’ve got to work for it, you’ve got to persist until you’re there. Innovate, unleash your creativity. We did a podcast on creativity so there’s plenty of ideas in there it was a really popular podcast by the way. A lot of people were interested there were a lot of downloads. As a part of that, embrace failure. We all fail. Failing is a part of being awesome I think embrace it, be one with it know that it’s going to happen when you fail how are you going to deal with it.

That’s it. I hope you have the best week in your best little restaurant. Now, if you liked the podcast please leave a rating in iTunes it helps us spread the word out if you see one of our ads on Facebook please tag a mate in, another Chef, another restaurant owner who could do with listening with the podcasts. 108 countries now! it just keeps on getting bigger and bigger and bigger its super exciting. The thing I get really excited with is when someone signs up for a FROLO or FORBS in a far off country. Somewhere like Norway. Because for me that’s really exciting and I would love to go to Norway someday and I would like to make a booking using the free online booking system and go to someone’s restaurant in Norway. That would be epic. It’s probably a little way away yet, but we’re moving down that track. Hit us up on Facebook or LinkedIn we’re sharing more of our podcasts on LinkedIn now and we’re getting lots of LinkedIn requests which is awesome as well. That’s it, have the best week in your  best little restaurant.

Bye.

 

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