Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005
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IN THE CLOSING DAYS OF 2016, restaurateurs and fi ne-dining enthusiasts alike may have spit out their coffee when they stum- bled on a Thrillist article entitled, "There's a Massive Restaurant Industry Bubble, and It's About to Burst," in which the author offers several examples of restaurants that, despite increasing revenue and even Michelin stars, found themselves faced with rising rent and labor costs that ultimately forced them out of business. It turns out that when the number of restaurants in a city doubles or triples, the best staff are able to command a higher hourly wage, and landlords get hip to a restaurant's success quickly enough that the rent might also double or triple, sometimes within a year. The Thrillist article did, however, have a bit of good news buried in it: Quick-service restaurants (QSRs) would likely be the benefi - ciaries of the restaurant tumult, as a trend toward less dining-in would likely mean takeout orders (yep, coffee), and short visits might stabilize, if not grow. While there will always be business fundamentals such as rent and labor costs which are beyond the owner's control, smart business owners will continue to fi nd ways to differentiate them- selves and innovate. They steer in directions that not only provide an improved customer experience, but also a way to streamline the responsibilities of their best team members to allow them to focus on what they do exceptionally well, and on what they love doing. Certainly, one would expect that customer interaction is one of these areas of focus. If half or most of the time a QSR employee is interacting with a customer is spent taking dictation— in other words, taking an order—is he or she adding value? Are they building a relationship, or are they just moving names and numbers from the customer's brain to a sales slip? Is it inevitable that restaurants respond to the cash crunch by employing robots, as Robot Coffee has done at San Francisco's Metreon entertain- ment complex? One way in which QSRs differentiate themselves already is the broad array of technologies that facilitate ordering. Some of these technologies, including ordering apps such as ChowNow, are analogous to the way patrons have phoned or faxed in their orders in the past. Others, such as kiosks, remove the role of human order-taker altogether, to the extent that a tablet is all that sits between the customer and the kitchen. In the Beginning Restaurants didn't always take your order. Some scholars on the subject believe that the fi rst menu was a B.C. clay tablet written in Sumerian, listing "a proper meal for the gods." While street food served from carts dates back to ancient Rome, one of the earliest reported restaurants was opened by Beauvilliers in Paris in 1782. Though other such establishments had begun to appear in Paris for several decades prior, Beauvilliers introduced "the novelty of listing the dishes available on a menu and serving them at small individual tables during fi xed hours." ( Larousse Gastronomique , 1999) As with any enterprise, the introduction of a differentiator not only fuels competition, but imitators as well, and menus with multiple options took root, thus necessitating the role of the server as someone who would relay the diner's choices to the chef. From this need to take multiple customers' orders arose the use of servers' shorthand. All manner of abbreviations ("chx" is chicken, "CFC" is chicken fried chicken, "dr" is Dr. Pepper, and so on) are employed to increase the speed of taking down an order, making order shorthand an art unto itself. Some of the technologies at play in restaurants stem from the idea that an order still needs to be given directly to a human being. While American ingenuity put drive-up windows on restau- rants to connect customers with servers, and in some cases put roller skates on servers, Korean restaurants have offered a novel solution for this for decades. Many Korean restaurants (and not just in Korea, but in the U.S. and presumably other places, as well) employ a little tweak on the concept of the service bell that sits on the hotel registration counter: The call bell, as it's known, sits on each table, and often resembles a doorbell. Each call bell is asso- ciated with a number, shared by the table to which it's attached. In or near the kitchen is a board or display, and when the call bell is pressed by the customer, the table number is displayed, and the Article by Andy Freivogel • Illustration by Alabaster Pizzo Service and Efficiency in a Digital World May I Take Your Order? May I Take Your Order? 97 www.baristamagazine.com