PETER KELLY ON HOSPITALITY

a Valley Table interview

Issue 49 (March-May 10)

[Copyright © 2010, The Valley Table]

At the age 23, Peter Kelly launched Xaviar's--the first of his revered, groundbreaking Hudson Valley restaurants. Twenty eight years later his restaurants continue to set the competitive bar for culinary excellence. The philosophy that serves as the foundation of his success? Hospitality.

The origin of the word restaurant is restaurateur (French)--"to restore." You stop, eat and restore yourself. That's really the definition of hospitality: getting people comfortable. That's what we do. That's what hospitality is.

Anybody who's in this industry for any length of time understands that if you're going to open a restaurant, food has to be a given, whatever level you choose. And then it's all about hospitality, about making people relax at the table. If they don't relax, they will pick you apart. It doesn't matter what level you're at.

Years ago, there was a restaurant in Carmel. When you arrived, the maitre d' was in white tie and tails and he greeted you--the Chairman of the Board--and took you into the Phoenician Room to have cocktails and little canapes. Then you'd sit and have your champagne cocktail and they would take your order there. A half hour later they would escort you into the dining room and your first course would be plated and on the table, ready for you. After dinner, you got up again and moved to another drawing room to have coffee and desserts there. That was really something.

It's changing. Now we're in a situation where most restaurants are directed by the kitchen. So you have great food, but you may not have a back on your chair, or you may not have a napkin that's appropriate to dinner, or even a table cloth, for that matter.

You put in balance the food, the wine, the service. If the service is too precious or too overbearing or too solicitous, it's, like, ok, enough. Service should be seen and not heard, really.

I encourage the waiters to give some of their personality--not all of it, just a little. Just give them a taste, that's enough. The guests, if they want more, will engage you for more. But, are the guests there entertaining, or on business or romancing their spouse or friend? They probably want to be left more alone.

We train them to read the guests. That's a really important piece. We walk through it every day in our pre-meal meeting: which guests are coming, who they are (if we know)--this guy is the chairman of the American Express group, he's going to go here; these people are celebrating their fiftieth anniversary; these people got married at one of our restaurants some years ago. Having a little bit of knowledge about you before you arrive is important.

We track a lot--our system is Open Table. We know where guests live because the telephone number tells us. We know how often they dine here. Some of that we try to share with the captains--if the guest has been a regular customer, this is the type of wine they order regularly. It gives us a little information to work with.

Hospitality is a team sport: Good food served with thoughtful care and consistency. As in any team sport, the players may be born with talent, but they still must learn the rules.

My personal philosophy, particularly for the front of the house, is you don't hire waiters, you have to make waiters. It's a bit more of a challenge to take somebody who's never worked in a restaurant industry and turn them into a great waiter--it takes time to learn all the things you need to know--but in the end, what you have is a person who's really committed to what you do.

For me, what undermines hospitality is staff that is less than motivated to work, staff that gets complacent. You're always trying to do something new, whether it's at the back of the house or in front of the house. People return to a restaurant to have the same experience they had the last time. And they also want to have something new every time they come. Now, of course that's not 100 percent possible. But, they love the duck there and so if you change the duck it's going to be, "Oh, we drove all the way from California and now you don't have it." You have to do things slowly, and there are some things you may never be able to remove from the list. It just happens--you don't know what it is, you don't know how it's going to be, but it happens.

When you empower your staff, both front of the house and back of the house to have a part of it and part of the success. They recognize that what they do leads to the success of the restaurant.

People like Danny Meyer really rang the bells of not only guests and the population but industry people to say, look how important this is. I remember in the early '80s going to France and looking at the restaurants and saying, "There's nothing like this in America." The foods there were just a little bit better, but the service was so much more advanced and trained. You were paying for it, but there is great value in training a staff.

Running a company whose restaurants are known for their hospitality and superior service can be a double-edged sword.

I feel our restaurants have to be a little better all the time. Sometimes we're successful at it and sometimes we're not, but there is always an energy. To some degree you try to live up to what the media says about you, too.

I remember so well the first major review we got, sitting down with the staff and saying, "Now we have to be there." (I don't think we really were.) Not to take anything away from anybody, but the truth is, they got lucky--they could have been here on a different night and had a different experience. But now, it's really important because the guests who walk in the door now walk in with expectations. Before, they were surprised to get a good meal; now they expect more than just a good meal--they expect a good meal and a good experience.

A restaurant experience shouldn't be about going to church and genuflecting at the altar of a chef. It should be about the dining room chair. It should be about how you feel sitting in that chair. Did you relax? Are you getting your money's worth?

"Money's worth" is a funny thing. You spend $8 for a hamburger and you get your money's worth, and you can spend $80 for dinner and maybe get your money's worth. They're just two different experiences.

From Danny Meyer: "The road to success is paved by mistakes well handled." For some, one measure of successful hospitality is how well the disasters are managed.

The one area where guests are most vocal is when service isn't so great, so it has really made people take a hard look.

You start with "The customer is always right," knowing there are exceptions to every rule.

If somebody doesn't care for a dish--say they order sweetbreads and they really didn't know what they were, or maybe they just didn't like them. It's swooped away and it's replaced. There's no question: You didn't know what sweetbreads are. If someone comes in and orders steak well done and we're recommending that it not be served that way, they have to have it the way they want it, not the way I want it. We may suggest, for example, that we're doing a saddle of lamb and, really, it should be served rare to medium-rare. If somebody wants it medium-well, I would tell them it's not the same dish, maybe they'd want to order the rack of lamb instead of the saddle of lamb because there is so much less fat in the loin. If they want it, we give it to them.

When I'm with kitchen, dining room managers, my management style is [that] it is always our fault--it is never a wait person's or cook's or porter's. It always ultimately comes back to us because we either hired incorrectly or trained inappropriately. That's it: You either hired the wrong guy and you shouldn't have, or you didn't train him well enough. Either way, it's on us. You have to take responsibility for that as a manager and as part of the team to get the right person on the floor or in the kitchen and give them enough training.

Accidents always happen. A busboy will always drop a bucket of water on somebody's head--we hope that it doesn't happen but these things do happen. Nobody operates at 100 percent every day. What separates good restaurants from great restaurants is how they react to a problem.

Empowering the staff is what's critical. What happens normally is that the staff freezes.

When new people come in, they're given a handbook, they're given guidelines. We speak a little about what they know, try to assess what kind of skill level they're at, and then we start. If you're going to work the front of the house here, you have to work the kitchen first. You have to work as a runner, so you get to see the food. You see every plate that we serve, you see how it's done. You see how it's put down before you're touching anything, before you touch the micros or learn how to put in an order.

From there, you'll go with a waiter. We'll normally put you with a strong waiter who we think is a pretty good teacher, and you'll work with them for at least a few days. Then from there you'll pick up a station with just a couple of tables. We'll have a manager closely watching those tables with you so we can pick up the mistakes without having to have a big conversation at the table like, "Don't do this, don't do that."

Whether you serve from the right or left (yeah, I want it served from the right; I want it cleared from the left) is not the end-all. As a matter of fact, a lot of these new restaurants are about "Get the food on the table and be nice." And you know what? The "be nice" part is the important piece--a smile goes a long way. A smile forgives many, many things and that really goes back to hospitality.

I had a quote on my menu for 20 years, the first thing we put on our menu--"To our guests: Though eating is one of life's necessities, dining has always been one of its greatest pleasures. With an acute awareness of the multitude of choices you have in front of you, thank you for dining with us." It's a recognition they can go anywhere they want; they don't have to come to my restaurant. I think it's important we let them know that we appreciate it.

Food makes people visit a restaurant, but service makes them keep coming back. They will accept an overcooked steak, but they won't accept rude service. That's really what it's about.