Does your restaurant need reinvention or a megaphone?

Your restaurant might be doing everything right in this economy, but still, no one’s coming in. So don’t reinvent, just get the word out.

I just took one of those quickie polls from the NRA’s daily newsletter. The question was “How would you reinvent your restaurant?” (for you non-industry types who have somehow picked up this column, this should tell you which NRA we’re talking about), and there were four choices: lower prices, focus on food quality, improve customer service, and become more child-friendly. There were no buttons for the two obvious choices, “all of the above” and “arson,” which shows how deadline-driven writing can limit an article’s scope.

My choice was the food focus, of course. This was entirely self-serving; I get hired to focus on food and not to make connect-the-dots placemats, much as I love them. The poll results were predictable: service came first (anyone who has ever eaten in a restaurant will tell you that great food can taste mediocre if the service is lousy), food second, lower prices third, and our next generation barely made it onto the chart. Thus we look to the future. There is some analogy in here with clear-cutting and fossil fuels, but let it pass.

What surprised me was the way this poll was phrased. The assumption is that your restaurant needs reinventing, given the choppy economic waters in which we sail, and the inability to know whether there’s a typhoon in our near future. Patch the leaks, they say; trim the sails. Provide the sailors with a clear course, inspirational speeches from the captain, and incentives (rum, cat-o’-nine-tails, etc.), and we’ll weather any storm. What they didn’t address was the travel agent who books the passengers.

It is entirely possible that your restaurant is just fine, according to these choices in the poll. Good food served well at reasonable prices to all ages—and yet business is flat or down. I would suggest that reinvention would be less useful than a megaphone.

At the tag-end of my wasted youth I was the chef of a new restaurant which planned to open with a pretty high price point. It was required to have a hamburger, so we decided to make the best hamburger possible and charge accordingly. The plate had only four ingredients: burger, bun, fries, pickles. The pickles were made in-house by the sous chef (who became known as Sally the Pickle Lady), the fries we cut and blanched ourselves, the bun we bought parbaked from Boudin Sourdough Bakery and finished baking daily.

And the burger, like the buns, had a San Francisco connection. When I worked in North Beach, it seems the Italians had trouble pronouncing “80-20.” Instead of buying ground beef, twice a week they would buy a chuck, and drag the whole hundred-some pound forequarter over to the grinder. It was a little labor-intensive, but it did make a heck of a burger.

So we did the same thing—I had carefully hired a guy for our opening crew who had meatcutting experience—and our product was fabulous. Very simple, yet each element was as good as it could possibly be. We sold two or three a day. A week later I was buying 80-20, and I let the meatcutter go.

You see, the damn thing was not designed to showcase a chef’s ego, it was supposed to be a marketing tool. Look at how much care we put in to even the simplest things, hey? We have the utmost respect for the burger we serve you, look at the trouble we take. We even make your pickles! Well, if no one was going to shout about it, I sure as hell was not going to go to all that bother. A signature piece like that isn’t art for sale in a gallery, it’s graffiti on a boxcar that will spend the next year on a siding in the Nevada desert. The boss explained to me that the best advertising was word-of-mouth—I was left wondering what we were doing to get those words into those mouths.

There are limits to what the good reinvention can do if no one is going to hear about it. With each diner going out less often, the key to survival is to expand the pool of potential butts in seats. To invert a tired cliché: Yes, you have to walk the walk, but it does no good if you don’t talk the talk.