Demographic due diligence

A velvety cream of cantaloupe cold soup for the summer menu? Sounds perfect. Except if your restaurant is located in a town that’s shrouded constantly in heavy, cold fog.

I just read an article about cold soups, a subject which awakens a couple of ancient memories. First was making 15 gallons of gazpacho for the Uptown Art Fair (hint: buy your tomatoes diced. Experiential learning is overrated). A few years before that was a velvety cream of cantaloupe with vermouth and crème fraiche.

Dam’me, what a lovely soup that was. I made it during a summer when I was the one-man show at the Café Maisonnette, a 28-seat restaurant in the Richmond district of San Francisco. One cook, one waitress (two on weekends), two burners and a hot top. It was an elegant little joint, and the food was terrific, which is pretty easy to do when the culinary staff’s opinions are always unanimous. I served my soup on a sweltering August night when the temperature reached almost 60 degrees and the fog was lying on the sidewalks like cold mashed potatoes. Which brings us to the subject of market research.

If you know anything about San Francisco, a tiny alarm might have gone off when you saw the words ‘Richmond district’. My wife and I looked at an apartment there when we first moved to California, and I was ambivalent about the place—I didn’t think the front windows would get much sun. The landlady politely told me that in this part of town, that was really not a consideration: Summer is when you put on two sweaters and drink hot toddies. If the weather report says, “late evening and early morning coastal fog,” as it does approximately five days out of four, the “coast” is the Richmond, and early morning blends seamlessly into late evening without a crack of sky showing through.

And though I went there five afternoons a week, I lived in Oakland. It was generally 30 degrees warmer there, and a cold soup could seem like a nice idea. My walk to the bus stop was warm and fragrant, passing through a park where I would pick nasturtiums for garnishes, and stopping at the rosemary hedge that flavored our lamb. I’d be thinking about my menu the whole way into town, and emerge on a wind-whipped dune filled with icicle plants and trees whose branches were frozen in permanent retreat from the ocean wind. I sold two soups that night.

There is comfort, though, in knowing that I’m not alone in my ignorance. I had some students do a site-selection exercise once to find appropriate places to put their various theoretical restaurants, and then justify them in terms of sales and rent. They had to pick a location, call a realtor and get square footage costs, develop a menu and project the sales—it was nasty. And while they all made their numbers add up to a profit (after some remedial lessons in foodcosts, admittedly), not all of them were thinking of their markets. You and I might not, for instance, think a neighborhood of small houses and large trucks was aching for a fine-dining vegetarian restaurant. Or that a $6 check average could pay the lease at a table-service place in Uptown.

And so a market justification was required to bring the menu and ambience into congruence with the location. This is something that most bankers should do instinctively, and which allowed me to hand out grades with bankerly stinginess. They got off easy, though; they were allowed to revise their marketing plan before it went into the final project. Revision once a place is up and running is a little tougher.

Knowing all this, I don’t know how we still occasionally manage to snooker ourselves. Some places just look too good to pass up, I guess, and some menus just seem perfect for them–but perfection is in the eyes of the accountant, an evaluation that takes place at some distance from the first bloom of enthusiasm. Somebody has to be willing to buy that food, after all, and they have homes and lives and habits and friends, and you need to fit your restaurant in there somewhere. So a bit of advice: if you’ve got the menu you want, find the spot for it. If you’ve got the spot, find the menu for it. If you want both, do your demographic due diligence and be prepared to open your wallet.