The St. Louis Cut ribs served by Smoque BBQ.Smoque BBQ
Earlier this month, Kevin Alexander, a writer for Thrillist, made a confession. He was convinced that his rave review of Stanich's restaurant in Portland, Oregon, had put it out of business.
In May, 2017, Alexander declared that Stanich's served the best burger in America. Of the "Nick's" cheeseburger with onions, he wrote, "This burger is a national treasure. This burger at an old mom-and-pop sports bar that's been sitting in a random Oregon neighborhood since 1949 is the best burger in America."
This past January, Stanich's closed for what was supposed to be a two-week deep cleaning, and hasn't reopened since. In his confessional, Alexander wrote of his guilt that customers descended on the small joint, overwhelming Stanich's staff, which was mostly family members, and paralyzing operations.
"I feel like I've done a bad thing," he said.
Well, as a business journalist, I beg to differ. I've found that the number of restaurants who appreciate a good mention far exceed those who've been harmed by publicity. I can't tell you the number of emails, phone calls, hugs and kisses I've gotten after I've written about a place, helping it break through to get some attention.
And those who didn't like my stories tell me, too, sometimes profanely.
But I wondered how a restaurant owner in a similar position might feel, so I put the question to Barry Sorkin, co-owner of Smoque BBQ in Chicago.
First, some background. Smoque opened in late 2006, and was discovered almost immediately by the Chicago food media. Six months later, Guy Fieri featured Smoque's Texas style barbeque on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I watched the segment, and subsequently wrote about Smoque for The New York Times.
In 2012, Smoque got a Michelin Bib nod as one of Chicago's best-value restaurants, and the accolades have continued. But there's a rub, no pun intended, to the praise, Sorkin says.
"Publicity alone won’t kill a restaurant in most cases," he says. "But I also think that what the writer is describing is real. The fact is, the onslaught of publicity nearly killed us and probably saved us from failure at the same time. And for quite a long time, we didn’t know which way it was going to go."
Sorkin says that when a small restaurant is showered with publicity, three things happen.
The need to revamp. 'To say that we were overwhelmed, doesn’t begin to describe how difficult it was when it actually happened," he says. "We needed to rapidly find a way to dramatically increase capacity and throughput."
Serving 10 people an hour requires different kinds of systems, processes, service models, and quality control measures than serving 200 people an hour, Sorkin says.
Likewise, cooking 12 briskets a day is a very different proposition than cooking 90. "It’s not just more manpower and more space. It took a different operation than the one we had initially built."
He says Smoque had to more than than triple its staff, reconfigure the service line, restructure purchasing, make quality controls and training more robust, find room for more refrigeration, dry storage, dishwashing, and other functions.
Plus, it had to design and implement everything while serving crowds of diners who were lining up out the door. "We were serving hundreds of guests each day by sheer brute force, and all the while we were losing money," he says.
While the restaurant was spending 120 hours a week coping with the volume, there was no time to focus on managing the business. "I was constantly being congratulated for how rich I was getting. And meantime, I was just watching our bank account get smaller and smaller," Sorkin says.
Great expectations. The great publicity meant every single meal had to meet diners' super sized expectations, which just put more stress on the fledgling operation.
"The fact is, restaurants succeed by exceeding customers’ expectations. And when you’re named best in the country, that becomes almost impossible to do," Sorkin says.
"The best you can hope is to meet that expectation. Really, what are the chances someone is going to walk into a place expecting the best burger in the country and leave saying, “Oh my God, it was even better than that!!”
He believes that if there is such a thing as a best burger in the country, it's only marginally better than the best burger most customers have eaten. And, if they're expecting a transcendental experience, "they’re going to be let down," he says.
Sorkin noticed that once Smoque won awards and landed on Best Of lists, that its Yelp reviews began to lose stars. Even if diners enjoyed their food, they still left disappointed. "You’d see phrases like 'It was good, but I don’t get the hype.' Or 'good but not worth the two-hour wait,'" he recalls.
Disappointed locals. Sorkin had only a few months to develop a local clientele before tourists and food critics began arriving at Smoque. The influx came faster than he anticipated. "Everyone wants to support the local neighborhood business. But when the local neighborhood bbq joint now has a tw-hour wait, it starts to feel like they no longer need your support," he says.
And what was a convenient place to pick up dinner or bring your family "is now decidedly inconvenient because of the crowds, and has brought traffic and parking and other inherent issues to your neighborhood streets." The local business that locals wanted to support "you now resent," he says.
Sorkin agrees with Alexander that for many restaurants, local business is their bread and butter. "The tourism is nice. But the reality is hype will die down, someone else is going to top the next list, and your status as a hotspot will fade," Sorkin says.
"You will have revamped your restaurant and likely expanded your expense structure to accommodate the surge that has now subsided. And the question once that happens is, 'Who still eats in your restaurant?'"
In the worst case, a restaurant could find itself post publicity wave with a broken operation, disappointed new customers, and resentful and former regular customers, he says.
But in all, Sorkin believes the early and constant spotlight made Smoque a better restaurant. He says Alexander shouldn't feel responsible for Stanich's downfall, and that the problems that resulted after ranking its burger the best in the country most likely existed before his article.
"Would it be open today if not for the list that the writer published? Maybe," Sorkin says."Does that make it the his fault? I don’t think so. And did he do anything wrong? Absolutely not. But I believe he is right to consider these things before he publishes his next list."
I'm taking Sorkin's advice, too.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelinemaynard/2018/11/25/can-a-critics-praise-kill-a-restaurant-an-owner-whos-been-there-weighs-in/ 2018-11-25 23:20:00Z
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