Fancy Food Show Recap / Restaurant Design / Wine Tasting

Class started with a discussion of the Fancy Food Show. The main issue attendees have is that it's really two shows in one. Some of the vendors there are showing off a product to sell to restaurants and food services right now, while others are there to find a distributor so they can sell at some point down the line. One of my classmates, who helps run a large family restaurant, spent a lot of time sampling wines, and when he found one that blew his mind, it turned out the wine is not available in this country yet, that they need a distributor to get them through the extensive legal hurdle of importation.

While the restaurant show during the winter was more about equipment, hardware and stuff, this show was all about the look, taste and marketability of food stuffs. Fellow students marvelled at sheer quantity in certain food categories -- how many soy-based vinaigrettes do people need? Why are there so many flavored cheddars? And how often does one have a craving for lemongrass water? The person working the booth for an Austrian sports drink (BIG on taurine, which rhymes with urine for a reason) admitted, when confronted, that it indeed did taste like ass.

We introduced ourselves to restaurant design. One has to take into consideration level of concept (fast food/pub, casual, luxury) and location (urban, non-urban) to really determine how many square feet per customer one will need to provide. Urban fast food, 8squft no prob, non-urban luxury, you can start at 25 sqft and go up. Based on the size and concept, one can work out budgets for monthly rent as well as how much it will cost to build out.

Building out a restaurant depends on a variety of factors, whether it's a raw space or an old restaurant, depends on what equipment is needed to cook everything on the menu, and, well, real estate markets.

At the restaurant I've been working at, the build out was from raw space, and quite ornate. As time has gone on, the corners cut came into strong contrast. For example, there is a stage for a piano and there has been live music played...but no more. The neighbors in the condo upstairs complained. Why did they hear it enough to complain? Because no sound proofing was installed between the ceiling and the bottom of the floor foundation of the apartments directly above. To install sound proofing after the fact would be a huge job that would shut the restaurant down, so the music is out.

The final part of the class was a wine tasting, preceded by a short documentary about the history of Burgundy, home of the vineyards that make the most expensive wines in the world. The monks of the medieval ages owned all the land and studied it, tailoring the wine to the soil. When Napoleon came in and took the land away, it got broken up into many different plots with many different owners. Unlike some regions, the local government decided instead of trying to make a standardized, blended product to stand in for the region, in Burgundy only one grape would be planted everywhere (pinot noir), and each vineyard would have a product which reflected it's own soil. Now the wines of the region can be priced out practically by where the vineyard lays in the valley. Towards the top, the good whites, the middle the good reds, and the bottom the 2ndary reds where the drainage isn't too hot.

The tasting was a wide variety of whites, from a tepid young pinot grigio to a sweet, thick Sauternes. Richard clearly gets off on this stuff, and the class ran 30 minutes long for the first time.

Fancy Food Show

What I ate, between 10-11:30am this morning: various chocolates, cookies, small moz and tomato panini, brownies, 5 shots of various Manhattan Special products, 2 little cheese cake cups, a bit of duck sausage, 2 little wedges of Batali pizza, some things I forget...

Spent the morning at the Fancy Food Show at Jacob Javits, officially on school business for the second year, but I hope to be able to swing this every year -- all the new products, some established products, different countries showing off their culture, all on overload, most wanting you to taste a sample or talk about what they do.

Highlights: Manhattan Special had a booth, a company really hard to wrangle as a product buyer at the restaurant. I had some words with them, they promise to make some calls. Low and behold they have a whole line of different sodas, but I would of never known because no one ever tried to sell me on them.

Then there was the Metromint people from last year, which was quite shocking -- various mint-flavored mildly-sweetened waters. I almost barfed last year when I tried it, because I thought I was drinking someones toothpaste backwash. I was sure they would be out of business by now.

Batali's brand was hawking a new pizza sauce, which tasted exactly like a thousand other jarred sauces. They were making pizzas on soft pita-like shells and baking them in a toaster oven. The only good thing about the sample is that it was heavy on the sauce, usually shitty pizza is heavy on the cheese.

In other pizza-related things there, there was a booth for a horrible nightmare some company is trying to bring to the freezer aisle:

Pizza in a cone, baked in your microwave in a box that keeps it upright. In the literature, one of the selling points is "acceptable taste and aroma", I kid you not. Yikes!

It was nice to see a booth/pavilion for Fage yogurt, what I call the "good" yogurt. I was happy to see it, and felt compelled to take a picture not because I'm a huge fan, but because it's one of the few foods me and B eat and love (though she eats the crappy fat-free version), and I remember when I was wooing her, we'd go food shopping in her neighborhood, like a trial run as a real couple. When ever we'd go, we'd always end up buying some Fage, and also talking about the prices of the stuff in various markets in the neighborhood. The foundation of my marriage was cemented thanks to Fage!

In the News / Break Even / Cash Flow Statement

In the news rolled along nicely. Dave was excited about this French restaurant, Relais de Venise, famous for a menu that has only one dish - steak frites (which reminds me of the original concept of Kentucky Fried Chicken) They're opening a new location in NYC, and we're all a bit skeptical that it will make it here. How often do you have 4 people going out to dinner together who ALL want steak frites?

L.I. Jenni was featured in this week's LI Newsday in a feature about the best places in L.I. to get iced coffee. Spice Market, a monstrous and pretentious restaurant in the Meat Packing district, went from 3 to 1 star in a recent review in the NY Times. In optimistic news, in the "Off the Menu" section of Dining in the paper, there were no closings listed.

Since the bebe, I grabbed one quick meal at McDonalds and one quick meal at Burger King, and was impressed by how superior the former one was (but still not that good over all.) Unsurprisingly, fo the best half decade, McD's has been clobbering King, and the horrible ad campaigns that BK has been waging has not helped. Recently, a smutty BK ad from the Hong Kong market has been making it's way around the internet, which certainly doesn't help their case.

As bizarre as the gross burgers of McD's and BK are, you can always get stranger over seas. Most beverages don't involve meat and animal product, but it doesn't have to be like that....Swine placenta soda from Japan, Eel essence flavored beverages, garnishes of penis, etc...

The next part of class was working out a P&L statement and calculating various cost percents and break even points.

Dave, while working on his business plan, tracked down a quote from a contractor who is installing a restaurant kitchen from scratch. Going through the $400K item by item comparing to prices on the internet, the whole thing was outrageously padded. If one were to just buy the stuff themselves, it would probably knock a solid $100K off the bill.

The last thing we looked at was a cash flow statement: where the cash comes from, and where it goes. Pre-opening, cash comes from personal funds, loans, investors, etc, because there is no income from the business. As you move across time across the statement, business income is accounted for, but the outflow is, too. It shows in stark detail why many restaurants fail: the outflow overwhelms the inflow early on because it takes a few months minimum to get to a point where you can start paying off the debts. If you don't have a reserve to get you through the opening months, don't bother.

Break Even Point / Bar Design

To be perfectly honest, I wasn't very awake in class today. The first part of the day was spent manipulating the break even point, to see what information can be gleaned out of the equation.

A straight break-even statement will show you how much business you need to do to neither lose or make money, but if you have investors who want a return on investment (ROI), you can do a break-even calculation that doesn't go for zero, but goes for a dollar amount that would be an attractive ROI for investors.

The second part of the class was a discussion of the physical design and equipment needs of a bar. Behind the bar you need a lot more than just booze. Storage both dry and cold, compartment sinks, ice (various forms depending on the biz), glassware, tap systems, beverage guns, trash areas, all arranged in a way for maximum flow and hygiene. Various equipment, from blenders and mixers to bar spoons and muddlers all make up the specialized tool of the bartender, which in a serious bar can be regarded as a "liquid chef".

We spent some time looking at business plans of past classes, which all had a wide variety in the choices of information given and level of design, but all the competent ones had a minimum level of financial reports .

Break Even Point, Budget, Spirits

We started the morning off with odds n' ends. Dave visited a new restaurant in his neighborhood in New Jersey. An 8000 square foot casual Italian eatery took 5 years to open, spent 600K for it's liquor license. There are only 7 liquor licenses in the whole town, so while the disadvantage of the license is the price, it also limits the competition.

Maria's bar and restaurant in Queens had an unruly table on Father's Day, with a group of 3 kids at a 6-top running wild, upsetting many customers in the room. Thing is, the adults at the table were regulars of the last 15 years, Maria had gone to the woman's wedding, and other customers were yelling at them to control their kids. Not an easy spot.

Val and her husband went to Blue Hill and experienced some extremely over the top good service. When a piece of beet skin on a salad appeared to maybe be a bug, they took the salad back and brought out another app on the house. Then the waiter asked if the chef could change the vegetable component of their entree to match their wine, and THEN gave the a complimentary desert to smooth out the beet incident at the beginning of the meal.

On the other hand, Liz is working in a large Italian eatery by Yankee Stadium. A customer and his girlfriend/mother left their table after paying and the bussers cleaned the table, but then returned because he left his grillz (gold teeth) in a napkin. The manager basically said tough titties, but feel free to go through out garbage. The guy proceeded to pick through a few barrels of trash for an hour until he found the grills, but cursing and being loud and disorderly the entire time.

We looked at wine and beer last week, and today was a brief discussion of distilled spirits. Start with a sugar or starch and ferment. Something sugary like grapes becomes wine, grain becomes beer. Then distill by heating, which makes the alcohol evaporate first. It's captured, cooled, and collected.

No matter the source, at this point all distilled spirits are clear and neutral. They can be blended to make the product the same over large runs, or left to be unique. The spirit can now be aged in something like wood barrels for color and flavor (whiskey), or left alone (vodka), or infused with flavors (gin) or infused and sweetened (liqueur).

Next up was a practice example of a profit and loss statement with some predictions of the coming year, and we had to make the budget based on those predictions. A budget, after all, is just a profit & loss statement that is projected into the the future.

The balance of the class was dedicated to reviewing the concept of the break-even point, where you leave the land of loss and enter the utopia of profit. Remember there are two kinds of costs: fixed and variable. A fixed cost like rent is paid and then it is done -- it is independent of sales. A variable cost is incurred by sales. If there are no sales, there are no variable costs. But if you sell a burger, and it costs $2 to make, if you sell one or 10,000, it's still $2 a burger. So if you reach your break even point and you sell a burger for $5, your profit ain't $5. Sure, your fixed costs are done, but your variable costs are with you. So that first $5 burger after your break even point means a profit of $3.

Balance Sheet / Beer

Class started with In the News, beginning with a classmate who never speaks, was totally unprepared, and makes one wonder why she bothers. The New York Times had an interesting article on how the recession is making stupid people with too much money "down-scale" their weddings, though they're still spending a whole hell of a lot, just on burgers n' shit instead of canapes and caviar. Another good article on the Shinn Estate of the Northfork -- only 8 years old and producing good quality wine, the fact of which runs counter to Richard's outline of setting up a new vineyard (which seems near to impossible to get a good wine out of a vineyard within 8 years).

So two gals dined and dashed from an IHOP, then promptly crashed their car into said restaurant. The father of one of the girls were befuddled, due to the fact she had $200 in her pocket...

Next up, we were given some numbers and we constructed a balance sheet, slotting items into current or fixed assets, short or long term liabilities, then figuring out the owner equity, no biggie. I can see the appeal of being an accountant -- figures are both reassuring facts, but at the same time by the way you arrange and make them interact, you can make them tell very different stories. And by the same measure, figures that seem to say very little can say a whole heck of a lot with a little bit of poking and prodding. What I'm learning: I'm definitely going to have to hire an accountant when I have my own biz.



Back into alcohol today's topic was liquid bread, a.k.a. beer. We reviewed the steps of brewing beer, then watched a film clip f a show I actually watch at home - the "Making Beer" episode of Modern Marvels. Malt is barley soaked in water to slightly sprout it, before roasting. Only in the U.S. are "adjuncts" allowed in addition to malt: corn, rice and cheaper grains that give a lighter product....and a different taste. In Europe, add these grains and you can't call it beer legally.

Funny, sake is called rice wine here in the U.S.....for tax reasons related to it's alcohol content. In truth, it is technically rice beer, as it is brewed, but without malt, with rice taking on the starring role.

The Balance Sheet / Wine History

Back to school! Everyone was very sweet and curious about Ediebird, and I get the impression I didn't miss too much. The rest of the class gave menu presentations (I do regret missing Zach's "Cheesequake" concept...), Marc Murphy gave a lecture, and Richard went into details of a financial statement.

Today we looked at the basics of the balance sheet. A profit & loss statement is a summary of the past. A budget is a prediction of the future. A balance sheet is a snap shot of where a business is at at a singular moment in time. Typically done at the end of the fiscal year, the balance sheet has two main categories: Assets and Liabilities. Assets can be current (cash or easily turned into cash) and fixed (things that typically last longer than a year, like equipment and furniture.) Liabilities are either short term (need to be paid soon, like pay roll, rent, inventory invoices) and long term (loans and mortgages)

A third category is owner equity -- what the biz owns outright. Assets = Liability + Owner Equity. The total value of a business, everything that it is, is adding up everything that is owned by the business and everything that is owned by the bank or lenders.

Richard, whose passion is wine, got into the nitty gritty of wine history, much of which I had already heard when I took a 7-class wine course with him last year. The first wine is thought to have been made in what is now Georgia (in Eastern Europe). The grape varieties of Europe have always made better wine than American grapes, but a mite in the American soil killed off most European grapes in the 1850s, only saved by grafting old world vines to new world root stock. The U.S. had it's own natural disaster with Prohibition, with many old, mature vineyards being torn up for other crops. Richard ran through all the steps and choices it takes to start a vineyard -- not a simple or cheap task. It could easily be 10 years before the first bottle of wine can be brought to market from a new vineyard. That's a pretty steep entry cost!

We watched a film from the 1980s about the origins of wine. They showed an old Georgian farmer who still makes wine like they did 1000s of years ago. Pluck grapes, step on them, put them in clay cisterns, put them in the cold ground with a cover and let 'em ferment. After a month or so, take out and drink, that's it. Looked dirty-funky, but probably fun.