Work record / Operating / Greensleeves Steakhouse / Questions answered
Greensleeves Steakhouse: questions answered
What people ask me about Greensleeves Steakhouse, and my answers. The project itself has its own page.
What did you have to protect before agreeing to the lease extension?
What we owned was the business, the brands, the equipment, the bars and the stock. The building was not ours. It was leased, so every dollar into the room went onto somebody else's property. A renovation is worth only as much time as you have left to earn it back, and a landlord with a burned, dark building wants to extend before you spend, much less so after. So the lease came before the first drawing was approved. Then we phased the work. The old staff had a room to return to immediately. The piano bar upstairs, the patio, the rooftop and the cigar lounge each opened when its turn came, and the restaurant kept earning the whole time.
What did you track each week to know the turnaround was working?
Food and labor, on a single weekly clock. Plenty of restaurants watch labor weekly and food cost monthly, so the kitchen finds out it lost money long after the fact. We tied both to the purchasing cycle, so a bad week was visible while we could still fix it inside the pay period. The hardest decision did not come out of those numbers. We went through several chefs, and each fixed a few dishes, but the room still ran differently on the nights I was away. The floor was the problem, not the plate, and things turned when we backed a general manager who owned the slow Tuesday.
When did an operating view change a construction decision?
In the kitchen. It had to be finished well before the rest of the space, since we needed to start training staff, and training ran far longer than I expected. We cycled through three or four chefs. So we walled the kitchen off from the construction to keep it clean and worked around it. That was awkward for the workflow, but it was essential.
How did you decide whether a guest complaint meant changing the food, as opposed to service or execution?
We asked the staff, and we talked with the kitchen at length. Some complaints were about the food. Others were about a difficult guest, and taste is subjective. Mostly it came down to a great deal of conversation with the team.
What did the former staff know about the guest experience that a new team would have struggled to learn?
They knew every regular by name, and they held the town's memory of the room from before it shut. Neither can be bought. If I had replaced them, half of what we paid for would have gone out the door. The trust on opening day was real, and it was theirs, not mine.