Like Common People

And while I'm at it .... Partly because I have to thank Seamus for his observations yesterday and partly because there is a whole lot more to be said, this is by way of a follow-up to yesterday's piece. Furniture, that was one thing Seamus mentioned, so it's a reasonable starting-point. You see, you get these owners of restaurants (and bars, and indeed other places) who have these "visions". Visions of style very often before substance. Now there is nothing wrong with these visions per se. It is only right to have an idea of the sort of restaurant it will be, and the furniture is all part of the marketing and the overall image in any event; having shoddy seats or peeling paint is not a great "advert" for a restaurant after all. But one does wonder at times if not too much attention, time and indeed money is not lavished on a look, when the investment might be better made on more nitty-gritty things, like getting the food right. Moreover, these "visions" - how do the restaurant owners who have them know that these visions will work? They don't is probably the answer. There is in all this too much of being product-led, rather than maybe concentrating on what the great unwashed really want and are prepared to pay hard cash for - restaurant fanfare for the common man.

Want to know the most successful restaurant, bar, shop business in the northern area of Mallorca? Take a guess. The answer will have some reaching for the garlic and a cross. Grupo Boulevard. They of the Dakota Tex-Mex restaurants, Gran Cafés and O'Hara's Irish Bar. Ok, we know they're not short of a euro or two, but where has that euro or two come from? Blue-sky visions of some heavenly restaurant and one chef tortuously slaving over every dish made by hand? I don't think so.

I do wonder a bit if three Dakotas in Puerto Pollensa are really needed, the latest being the conversion of Mestral, barely the throw of a bowl of chili sauce from the other one on the prom. But there again what the Dakotas are about is branding. I have a sneaking suspicion they have been learning from the book of McDonald's. One of the reasons for McDonald's success was the sheer number of the outlets, not necessarily in different towns or in different streets, but in the same street in the same town. Another, and I don't know that Boulevard adhere to this principle, but my guess is that they are not a million miles away from it, was the very standardisation of the McDonald's offer. This afforded lower costs of production.

That some people might hate Boulevard and hate what they're doing is frankly irrelevant. They have worked out a formula that strikes a chord with the punter, and - I am guessing but suspect I'm not far wrong - have supported this with a business system that keeps costs down. Let's stress that. Business system. It's like football. Some bemoan the fact that it is now a business, but the Uniteds of this world coin the rewards of sound business, while there is still a yearning for the old days of the local patron and the cloth cap - and not a lot of money.

Of course there is room for the individual restaurant, the style restaurant, but even with these there is hard-nosed business practice at play. One of the most interesting and intelligent people I know in Alcúdia runs a restaurant in the port. He was telling me how he hedges purchases, how he made a killing on pineapples bought at an agreed (lower) price a year ahead, how he handles his meat buying. Fascinating stuff. His restaurant is nothing fancy but by God it works. And he knows about marketing.

It's the whole nine yards when it comes to the restaurant or bar (or any other) business here. Production systems, purchasing, marketing, the whole lot. You don't have to have been to business school to run a restaurant, so long as sense comes before style and so long as the restaurant or bar is what the common man really wants - oh, and spending a shedload on fancy seating that no one puts their bum on.


QUIZ: Yesterday - "The Logical Song", Supertramp. Today's title - who?

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