Chef’s Roundtable – Unabridged
April 2010
by Christy Simo
Restaurant Forum recently sat down with some of Georgia’s top chefs to get a perspective on how chefs are finding new ways to attract diners while meeting reduced budgets and adapting to today’s technology-obsessed diner. Guests included Micah Willix, executive chef of Ecco; Riccardo Ullio, chef/owner of U Restaurants; Tom Harvey, executive chef of Murphy’s; Ron Horgan, executive chef for the Ansley Golf Club and president of the Atlanta chapter of the American Culinary Federation; Jonathan St. Hilaire, executive pastry chef for Concentrics Restaurants and owner of Bakeshop; and Jaime Adams, executive chef for Veni Vidi Vici. Thank you to Buckhead Beef for hosting the roundtable at their Atlanta culinary center.
What is your favorite item in the kitchen?
Adams: A wood-burning rotisserie. I wouldn’t know what to do without that thing. We cook six to eight ducks and six-eight chickens a day, and a small, whole pig (about 30 pounds) about every 3 days. And we do a lot of lamb. We get this good lamb from Pennsylvania, broken down into its primary cuts. We cook it on the rotisserie, with the legs together, the smaller cuts together.
Willix: I’m a simple person. I like the range. I have a wave-touch range I really love. It’s nice because it’s a continuous top, and you can put two pans on each eye. It’s like a favorite child.
Ullio: I don’t have a very special piece of equipment, but I’ve always been a big fan of a food mill. I think it’s far better for making sauce than a processor. It’s old school, but it’s nice.
Adams: I don’t do any immersion cooking, but I do do all my rotisserie stuff and braises, it’s really good to pack them in the bags and reheat them that way. I like to get them off the spit when they’re nice and hot, particularly when it’s a lamb or pig. It’s great to get them off the spit, press them, and then put it into the bags.
St. Hilaire: [A sous vide machine] is good for fruit too. You can press melon and put it in there. We used to do that with watermelon. You press it and put it in there, and it comes out just a deep red. Then we infuse it with a vanilla-mint syrup. Then we just take it out and grill it and use it as part of a dessert. We cut the cubes up, but also when it shrinks, it’s just this deep rich red color. Some of the other melons do that too. And if you crank it up high enough, you can cook up figs, or anything that you can press down and do a nice block. With the figs, you can cut it up and lay it out, and do a homemade fig Newton. But you need that machine to press it all down.
Diners are holding their dollars closer now, and they want more value. Have you made any adjustments to your menus to accommodate that while also increasing your margins?
Adams: Absolutely. Otherwise you don’t survive. We’ve changed mostly the type of stuff we’ve carried. There’s no more super expensive steaks. Lobster we haven’t had in the building in I don’t know how long, except for Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve. But the expensive fish, things like Halibut and sea bass, I don’t even touch that stuff any more. You’re always looking for lesser-known stuff that’s inexpensive, and then you use your experience to make taste good.
Adams: I sell more trout than just about any fish. It’s fairly mild, and all sorts of people will like it. It just flies out of the restaurant. It’s not on the menu, but I just use it for specials. It’s just the go to. We also do a $29 fixed price menu, three courses, for the last couple of years. We just rotate things in and out of that format for specials. And that’s 50% of our business.
Willix: I think like everybody else, we’re just trying to buy a lot of byproduct stuff. With fish, if it’s a byproduct fish, then we’ll buy that. I try to keep two kinds of fish on the menu at all times. I can usually have two fish that are uncommon, because nobody really has a go-to fish. We sell a lot of cod and a lot of arctic char, things like that. Arctic char is a fish that’s really inexpensive all year round. The same with meats. We don’t sell any luxurious cuts. We try to use everything. Every time we buy something we figure out what we can do with the waste. We either make sausage or meatballs, or make a sauce out of it. We use everything we possibly can. Last year we changed our menu from being composed main plates. We took the whole entrée section and broke that down into a la cart. That actually drove our check average up a little bit because what happened was you take a $29 plate and you break it down and sell the vegetables for $6 and the main dish for $25, you’re making more money off of people who usually order two sides.
Ullio: We really haven’t changed anything, but we’ve never really had that many expensive cuts of meat on the menu. We have a veal chop and we have a rib-eye steak. Those are our two high-dollar items. But we have a lot of pasta. I think we’ve always been a value-driven restaurant anyway. So we have a lot of pasta on the menu and a lot of risotto on the menu. If you’re just going to drink a glass of wine, you can go and eat for under $40. But you can also order the veal chop and order a bottle of wine for $400 at Sotto Sotto. So we really haven’t had too many changes. We don’t do a whole lot to the menu anyway, because any time we do, people seem to get angry. We have a pretty loyal customer following that always wants the same thing, so anytime we change the menu seasonally, we still get a dozen or so people who are like “Where’s this, we came for this!” And I tell them, “We took it off the menu, try this, and they say, No, we want that!” So we haven’t changed hardly anything at all.
You mentioned seasonal – does your menu rotate?
Ullio: It rotates around six, seven times a year, usually twice a season. But we don’t change it a whole lot. Now this time I’m going to keep one of our winter items on because everybody loves it. We sell so much of it and so many people request it that I think I’m going to leave it on. Because I hate to lose any business right now, you know? I think that for me it’s come to the fact that it’s not so much price driven as that you have to keep people happy. I think that people are just much pickier. And you can’t afford to piss anybody off. Now I think it’s much, much more crucial to make everybody happy. When they used to go out four times a week, now they go out once or twice. So now they’re really looking forward to it because they’ve been eating ramen noodles in front of the television the rest of the time if they can’t cook themselves. So when they go out, they’re going to be like “We’re going to go to Sotto Sotto. I love it there. Well get the veal chop, because we really, really like it.” So they go there and they get the veal chop, and maybe it’s overcooked. Before it was like, oh well, it’s overcooked, but the last time I had it, it was really good. But now it really makes a huge difference in their mind that the veal chop was overcooked. They’re going to talk to everybody, they’re going to go on Yelp and say their veal chop was overcooked. People are stressed because of their money, so there’s a much more emphasis towards customer satisfaction.
Harvey: People seem to feel like they have more riding on everything, including their cheeseburger on Tuesday. They’re just putting more emotion into every little thing. I came to Murphy’s five months ago after being at one.midtown kitchen for three years, and at Murphy’s looking at year to year, our check average is up significantly. Our wine education program has gotten so good that our PCAs have risen a lot. So our main focus is being sure we’re keeping our cover counts covered. You can’t always look at sales. One thing Pano taught me while working at Buckhead Life is that when you talk about numbers at Buckhead Life, when they ask you “what did you do last night?”, it’s really not about sales. The cover counts are always the thing. We can always work on check average, as long as people are coming into the restaurant. That’s what we were always worried about. So we’ve been very fortunate that Murphy’s has a very strong brunch business, which helps you a lot in terms of costs. Every frittata you sell drives food costs in a good direction. So we really try to be sure we’re putting more on the plate. We’ve increased portions a little bit if we’ve felt like people were leaving a little bit hungry. And as we’ve given more and more, the alternative cuts become more important. Our No. 1 seller right now remains the brisket. That’s a great thing to have as a No. 1 seller, because you can make money on brisket. It’s hard to make money on grouper. And when you’re No. 2 seller is grouper, right now the moratorium is on it, but those prices climb all year, and who knows what’s going to happen when fuel costs go back up. It was really bad two years ago. But executing the slow cooking has always saved us a lot in every restaurant I’ve worked at. Things like brisket and some of your second cuts – if you do them well, and you get one or two of those into your Top 5, it gives you some room to give away things like nice fish and to not have to go higher. The species like triggerfish and some of the nice stuff coming out of the Carolinas, we’re able to promote to the customers that these fisheries are —rather than grouper and snapper and what’s in the gulf, where we’re trying to come back from decades of overfishing—these fisheries are being run right now so there’s never going to be a sustainability issue. And people are really into that. Just like “farm-to-table” is no longer a novelty. People are thinking about farm-to -able in the grocery store. That wasn’t going on 10 years ago. And sustainability—they’re teaching it to little kids in school, and kids are coming in wanting the sustainable fish. It’s become a part of our life more every day.
Have you seen that in your restaurants as well – are people asking where their produce or meat is coming from?
Horgan: No. I’m at a country club so our demographics are totally different. But we push the full range of menu, from your basic chicken fingers and steamed broccoli for the kids to fillet, and they want prime New York strip. So we have to serve that. But the benefit that we have is they pay every month their dues. So I have a higher food cost I’m sure than anybody here. So that’s where the offset goes for me. I’m always shopping, talking with the fish guys about what’s good, what I need to stay away from, but I’m not being driven that way yet. That’s kind of my feel on that.
Willix: We don’t have a lot of guests who care. I think there’s an elevated level of pride in the service staff and the cooks who know that that’s what they’re doing. And then I think they sell that to guests. Guests aren’t coming in and asking “Is fish sustainable, is this fish organic? We don’t put it on the menu. We kind of leave it up to the servers to promote that if they want to. And it seems like those items that we do put on the menu, they definitely push a lot harder. But I don’t think we have anybody asking for it.
St. Hilaire: Not really. I guess that’s the lucky thing I have. A 50 lb. bag of sugar costs me $14, $16. My price point is completely backwards from restaurants. We use a lot of eggs, sugar, butter. My chocolate I had to change. We were using Varona chocolate, but now we don’t really use Varona, we’re trying some new chocolates from all over the place. There are more and more chocolates coming up that are really, really good. It’s a vicious cycle of the big chocolate companies buying the smaller one, so it kind of helps with the cost a little bit. But I’ve definitely found myself going even away from Cacao Barry to other ones that I think are much better. I spend a good amount on honey because we use it and it’s such a great flavor. I buy a 35-gallon tub from Francos and it’s $250.
Harvey: Really good honey’s worth the money.
St. Hilaire: And it is really good honey. You can tell the difference. Especially if you’re doing a Panna Cotta, it’s right there. But overall, we use the organic flour and we get some stuff out of North Carolina. Right now it’s wintertime for us, so the produce is at a minimum. We’re kind of waiting for springtime so we have all the fresh fruit.
So you do rotate your menu items seasonally?
St. Hilaire: Yea, we change everything. It’s probably changing every day. Our Danishes change every day. We’ve got a nutella croissant on, we’ve had pistachio croissants on, hazelnut, it’s always changing up every day depending on what we want to do. The desserts, the jars, we’re just always changing, every day. I hate seeing the same stuff all the time. Being open now for a few months, people are coming back asking where are the espresso buttercreams, so we’re starting to get that, which is nice. You start to realize what you need to keep on. Our breads have kind of stayed the same, but we’ve forced the envelope making baguettes, parmesan breads, and some other interesting rye breads just to see what people really will enjoy. But price-point wise, I find people are enjoying more bakery-style bread, just great artisanal breads rather than going to the store and buying that crappy baguette. They don’t mind coming in and paying $2 on a fresh baguette. It’s a better product.
Ullio: It’s more about value than it is price, and value is all about the perception. Harvey: Yea, we don’t sell more specials because the specials are cheaper. We sell more specials because the servers are behind it and it looks great and it tastes great. They know if you can get one on the table, the rest of their section is going to order it. We always call it the domino test at the bar. At lunch at the bar, if you have a good special and one sells at the bar, then four more—our bar is always full at lunch—you see it go right down the bar. If you have a great special, you can sell it to the whole bar.
How has social media such as Twitter and Facebook affected your job?
Willix: You model your restaurant as your home, and you want to bring people in and show them a sense of hospitality. Then they don’t want to tell you what’s wrong or how you can improve your meal or their experience. They just go home and complain about it behind your back. We can’t do anything to improve that (experience) in retrospect. I could have done a lot for you, but you didn’t say “Hey, this is overcooked.” They’d rather go home and complain about it as soon as they can.
Ullio: We use Open Table as a weekly guide to how well the restaurant is on it. Yelp is a much younger demographic, but Open Table is your regular diner, someone who dines out all the time, so we read Open Table religiously. Open Table is actually very useful. The people on Open Table are a lot more fair.
Adams: It’s like the two sides of the Food Network. The Food Network has elevated us all, but it’s also made everybody a critic. Everybody’s an expert.
Ullio: If you filter through it, you can get some general trends.
Harvey: It’s great for us, because when I got to Murphy’s, one thing I wanted to address is that if we’re a busy, lunch sandwich place, our grilled chicken sandwich should be a standout. It should be our signature thing, not sort of an afterthought. So we worked on it and changed the specs for it. And I tell you, when you go onto Open Table and you see two comments in one week that they loved the grilled chicken sandwich, then you know. It gives you something you can show to the cooks and servers to show that we’re gaining ground here. Open Table is probably the most useful because you see it quick. You come out of Valentine’s weekend and by Wednesday you’ve got three or four reviews of people who ate there for Valentine’s Day. And you know if you hit it right. Then we’ll go and put it in our logbook for next year. We watch the websites religiously. Twitter is the one that’s different to me. I always tell my servers, it’s one thing when people have a good enough or a bad enough experience in a restaurant, they’re actually going to go home and take the time to fire up their computer and put a comment down. With Twitter, you don’t even get the cooling-off period. They’ll tweet it at the table, while they’re still there. The feedback is so immediate now. It used to be that just getting to a computer, at least there was some sort of delay there. But now if anything’s wrong, there are people who really are looking forward to getting it out there on Twitter.
St. Hilaire: But sometimes it’s good in a positive way. Sometimes my server will come back and say “they’re tweeting” and I’m like, “tweeting about what?” And he says, “She really likes the chocolate caramel tart.”
Harvey: I’d say the immediacy of Twitter has made it a whole different game. We have a long-term server who handles our Facebook and Twitter stuff. Anybody who runs verbal specials, you’ll hear from customers “This is a great special. Why isn’t it on the menu?” And our new answer to servers is “Tell them to become a follower on Facebook and Twitter and they’ll know when it will be on again.” I’ve had good response, so that’s our automatic answer now. Don’t come into the kitchen and ask me why it’s not on the menu. Don’t come ask me when it’s going to be on again. Tell them to follow us on Facebook or Twitter. You have a constructive answer. I always tell our servers if you really don’t know fine, but our goal is, be prepared enough that you don’t have to leave a guest’s question hanging. Be confident and speak a certain way. It may be a matter of massaging a guest through it, then come ask after service so next time you’ll be more ready. But anytime they have to come off the floor to ask a question, you’re setting up the server. The guest is already thinking, “Oh, the server is not really an expert.”
Adams: We have the servers line up three or four times a week and tell them never leave the table with question. Now if they’re asking for white asparagus and it’s January, go ahead and say no. Do anything but leave the table. Because as soon as you leave that table, you’re giving up some confidence in you. They just want to know if they can switch out the potatoes for the asparagus. Say yes to them. So it’s a big deal.
Harvey: The vast majority of what we get is good feedback. If someone has a bad experience, we’ll try to track them down and invite them back. We just want to invite them back in and turn a bad experience into a new good one.
Horgan: We have internal email that goes to all the members, and they can contact us through that. We’re a captive audience, so it’s a lot more one-on-one communication. If somebody is not happy, they don’t go home, they get comped right then. Thankfully that doesn’t happen too often but sometimes it does.
How do you choose your center of the plate options?
Willix: Most of it depends on what fish looks good that week. Ninety percent of our specials are based on me talking to the fish guy that week. What’s he got that we can get a good enough price on to do a big enough portion and put some nice stuff on the plate with it.
Horgan: I’ll rotate between lamb, veal and pork for our meats, because if I tried to sell lamb every week, they’d just get burned out. I also have a lot of the same clientele. We have 1,400 members, but we don’t have 1,400 clients that come in and eat. I have maybe 150 families who use it regularly – a couple times a week. So when I do a menu, it’s for 3 months. But then the specials, I typically use three fish.
Adams: What I always try to look at when we’re deciding what to put on the plate is if it’s something that people are wanting, and how are we going to package it to make it appealing to people. The people who are paying to come in deserve our skills to make stuff that they’re going to want. We have to package it in a way that’s appealing to the broad public. If we don’t, we’re not doing anything for anybody.
Ullio: You have to run it like a business. It’s all about the numbers, and it’s all about the people coming in and eating, and eating again.
Horgan: And integrity. You can have integrity with the simple things.
How do you think the celebritization of chefs and the popularity of the Food Network has affected your job?
Harvey: Harvey: I can’t believe how interesting people think my job is. I’m just amazed, because to me it’s a commercial art, but it’s a blue-collar profession. It’s a skilled trade. There’s nothing mystical about it. If you’re putting in the hours and doing a good job, you make a product that people want. It’s different because it nourishes you and sustains you, but when you do it your whole life, it just seems remarkable that people think it is. It’s just what I do. And that’s a product of television.
Ullio: I think it has something to do with the fact that the general public can’t cook. In Italy, when you tell people you’re a chef, they’re like, “Oh, ok. That’s great.” Because they can cook. All families cook. Cooking is centered within the family, and most people eat good family meals. So what you have is this big mystique. It’s kind of like being a musician. It’s something that most people can’t do here. In a lot of places, cooking is part of life. Where as here, it’s not. A part of life is opening a TV dinner or opening a box and dumping it in water.
Horgan: It’s just our culture. It’s like farm to table. That’s been going on since the beginning of time. It’s a big thing over the past couple of years and now it’s becoming a way of life again. People are learning how to cook and eat again. But you can earn more money now. If you are willing to put in the time and the effort and get a couple of breaks, then you can get into a position that is worthy to be called a chef.
Adams: The celebricizing of chefs and how that’s affected my life the most is the expectations of the cooks that are coming up the ranks. They get this idea in their head that they’re going to go to culinary school right out of high school. I see these people all the time. They come out of school thinking that they can come out a chef. It’s on TV and it’s glamorous, but they don’t know the first thing about what it takes to get that food on that plate and make that person happy who’s buying it.
Ullio: Look at American culture. America has always been the land of dreams. It’s always been the land of fads and the City of Angels. It’s always been “go to America and the streets are paved with gold.” Yea, but you’re going to have to work to get that gold. Everybody has a dream, and everybody wants to be glamorous. And now the dream has come to the culinary industry. Next thing you know it will be the farmers.
Harvey: There’s no doubt that you have kids that are smart, who 20 years ago their parents would have put their foot down and never allowed them to be in this business, and now it’s respectable. There are people coming into the restaurant business now who would have never before considered it a career choice. That’s a good thing. And it’s not just in the kitchen, but also for the front of the house. You’re getting people who could be more successful in more traditional white-collar business roles who are coming into restaurant management, and that’s a blessing to us. Because you’re only as good as your GM. It’s as simple as that. You think about opening a restaurant as a chef, the first thing you’re thinking is who is going to be the GM of this place? Because you know you gotta have somebody who’s going to run it the right way. That caliber of people being in the business might even be more important than the number of cooks. I’d love to see general managers and restaurant managers get a little bit more famous just because it elevates the number of people and the kind of people who do it.
Adams: I always tell the parents of these kids who come to me thinking about going to culinary school, get them graduated from high school, get them working in a restaurant. The best restaurant they can get into as a puppy out of school—peeling potatoes, washing dishes—get them into that restaurant. Because they’re going to realize one of two things. One, this is the coolest place I’ve ever been. I want to do what that guy’s doing, and if I work really hard I’m going to learn how to cook stuff, but right now I’m happy doing potatoes and the salads. Or you’re going to find “Oh my god, what in the world was I thinking? I will go to college.” A lot of parents come in and say their kid wants to be a chef, and they ask what’s the best school? And I say work in a restaurant right now, and by the time you finish high school, you already know if you want to pursue it.
Ullio: There’s a lot more to the restaurant business than just cooking. There are a lot of people who open a restaurant and they don’t understand anything about finances and they get investors. And guess what, 10 years later, they haven’t made a dime. Because you have a 25% rate of return plus you gave away 70% equity in your business, so you’re just as broke as when you started. And you’ve been working 90 hours a week for 10 years.
Are there any trends that you are seeing or incorporating in your restaurants right now, or something you see that you think is on the verge of being big?
Adams: We’ve been farm to table for 25 years. We find the best ingredients, and we present them to people. Now the carrots and the celery and the onions are not necessarily going to come from the organic farmer, because they cost 50 times as much. But I’ve been using Elysian Fields lamb for 8 years now. We buy good meat and the best fish, and that’s all part of what we do. And now it’s called “farm to table.”
Willix: It’s a marketing ploy. Any good chef has been trying to source the best product. You can’t be a chef unless you source good product. You can’t make good food unless you source good product. So we source good product and we’ve been doing it forever. I think as far as trends go, if you’re trying to find the next trend, and you have a business, then you should just close it. Because finding the next trend means that’s one more thing that’s going to go up then come right back down.
Ullio: I think we’re going back to simplicity. Chefs that have their own farm—that’s something I want to look into. See if we can find some people that are farmers that are willing to partner up with you, and then you can ask them to grow produce for you according to season, and how much we’re going to use according to this and how to split up the acres. If you can spec that out, get what you want, it allows you to control more of your product.
Adams: I think the real trend that’s good for restaurants is just buying a little bit more locally produce wise. There are more people cropping up that are within a 100-mile radius that can provide a lot of stuff. That has a lot of value to us as operators as well as for our guests. Guests love it when we tell them that stuff. They don’t choose to come to our restaurant because of that, but they’ll choose to continue to come back.
Willix: It’s a good business practice too. We’ve cut out pretty much all of the big companies. We do as much local as we can with the smaller guys. It’s just better business. We can do better deals with them. We help them and they can help us. You’re always trying to build relationships with local farmers. I don’t think it’s so much that you can market it but you have a relationship with them. You know where it comes from. Going someplace and seeing how something is handled … you don’t always know where it was before it got to your kitchen. It’s nice to know, to be able to go and figure out what’s going on with that product. How is it being grown? How is it being handled? It’s almost inspiring or motivating to see something come up, and it’s a little bit more pressure on you to do the right thing with it.
Horgan: The only downside I see to the local and the organic is the pricing. I still find that the pricing is a little out of whack. It is getting better. It’s a selling point, but until I’m able to make it a selling point for me, I can put that on my menu and it wouldn’t affect anything.
Ullio: You’d be surprised though. If people knew, if you give it to them, then they’ll like it.
Harvey: One of the more positive things is that over the past couple of years, for us with the locally grown and small farmers, the problem has always been logistics. I used to have eight trucks a day coming down this road, and that’s not really helping the environment. But if the supply chain can get more consolidated, then you can really start to get results. That helps the pricing part too, because it’s not just about how it costs on the invoice. It’s also about how many times a day does this guy have to put his knife down to check in an order. We’re all about using fewer purveyors where we can. [Several companies have] seen this coming, and they’ve done a pretty good job of making it easier for us to use local products without having to rewrite the whole how you’re going to order and how you’re going to receive this stuff. And that’s been very positive to see. Certain companies are doing a great job and are doing it really well. It’s just more cost effective.
Have you seen any change in Georgia’s restaurant industry over the past 10 years, and what do you see in its future?
Adams: It’s gotten a lot more sophisticated in the last 10 years. We’ve become a much more important restaurant market. Ten years ago, we wouldn’t have been sitting around this table. There’s an environment here where people like to eat really well, and the good, ethical and strong operators will survive. They will continue to make great food with great service, and prosper. It’s great to be a part of this market, because it’s grown up so much over the past 20 years. Twenty years ago, there was nothing. The influx of all the people from all over the place has really helped each other get better and better and better. And that’s a great thing.
St. Hilaire: I moved down to Atlanta in 1999. Everyone was still serving big cakes. I had a couple nice meals at a coupleof places, but the pastry was definitely still lagging behind the food. It runs the gamut now, where 10 years ago it didn’t. It was just pie and big chocolate cake and crème brulee. Now you can really be more creative. You can really have fun using herbs and bacon, and spiciness in the ganaches and things like that. It’s definitely gone full circle in a way that’s only gotten better.
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