Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Nick Kokonas
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's actually true. So this is a good way to show how in any business you ask the right questions. So one of the questions that we wanted to answer was that we ask the question, well when in your life do you feel like something's new? The older you get the fewer new experiences that you have. And so when you have one you kind of crave that. You're like wow that was really cool. At the same time you become more closed to them as you get older. It's natural I think. We were like, how do you become more childlike? What is a way to make an adult feel like a kid again? A number of the dishes at Alinea came out of that question. One was the balloon dessert. It's like an edible balloon. When you're a kid you get a helium balloon and literally you could play with that thing for hours. It's like magical. It floats. That's really cool. We sorted out how to make an edible helium balloon. It's so simple. It's just like a taffy. It's nothing crazy delicious. But it's wildly fun because you feel like a kid again. How in the word does a Michelin star restaurant give you a floating balloon and then make a mess of yourself while you eat it? We were asking that question. And I remember going to a museum where everything was really big. So they had like a table so that if you were a 5'10" adult and you sat down at a table you would physically feel like you were when you were three. The plates were big, the chairs were big, the counter was really high. I don't even remember where it was but it really stuck in my mind. And I said like, "Well, we should make everything giant to make you feel literally small again." And so I came up with this idea of a table plate. Literally a plate the size of a table. And we made a couple up. It was very Willy Wonka and Alice in Wonderland and all that. Had giant forks knives and stuff. It was really stupid. But as soon as you actually did that it was kind of like, well you're going to hit someone in the head with this 80-pound plate and where are you going to store it and wash it? There's practical considerations. In the midst of all that I would talk to Grant at the pass in the kitchen and he would be plating things and I would be watching him do the saucing and the plating and all that. And occasionally I'd pick up a spoon and I'd do a plate. He'd fix it.
· Nick Kokonas, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I see what he's doing and yet I can't replicate it even though it looks simple. There was a brush stroke there born of thousands and thousands and thousands of repetition. I know what it should look like. It's just like painting. And I went back to that Picasso documentary and I was kind of like, "We should send the chefs into the dining room. Everyone wants to see the chefs anyway. And we should just have them plate on this giant plate." So it's kind of killing two birds with one stone there. The idea went away for like four or five months after the big plates because it didn't work. And just thought it was dead and then Martin Kastner at Crucial Detail was like, "Well, why does it need to be a rigid plate? You could use a different substance." And we were looking for gray latex. He found it at a sex shop in Paris. Rolls of gray latex. On the internet. Like he wasn't strolling about the sex shops in the Paris. We figured out ... We called them and were like, "Who manufactures this for you?" And they were like, "What are you into?" And we're like, "We're using it for food." [00:00:00] S0: Table food art.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Nick Kokonas
[00:00:00] S0: Table food art. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the story of how that came to be. But I think that encapsulates a lot of our thinking. That was a six or seven-month project and then we figured out how to do it once and we would do one table a night. And we would go, there's no way we could do this for every table. And then four weeks later we were doing it 30 times a night. It's a magical thing. Like Netflix Chef's Table had that on billboards in Los Angeles promoting the show. So for me it's a really weird thing because it came out of this process of three or four or five people talking about how do I make you feel like a kid again? And clearly it stuck out in your mind as a new weird, fun experience which is really what we're shooting for. [00:00:00] S0: Just to pour evidence on the pile, I still tell people about that all the time. And it's interesting to me how often businesses seem to want to go down the fairway and sort of not be risky and how incredibly boring but also how bad a business decision that is. Because if it was just a lava cake or something I wouldn't talk about it.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Nick Kokonas
[00:00:00] S0: Just to pour evidence on the pile, I still tell people about that all the time. And it's interesting to me how often businesses seem to want to go down the fairway and sort of not be risky and how incredibly boring but also how bad a business decision that is. Because if it was just a lava cake or something I wouldn't talk about it. [00:00:00] S1: There is an important distinction here and that is this. People have copied that now. Anything good gets copied. And if you google up restaurants in South America and Asia that are copying it, they don't copy it well. They'll literally just take a bunch of food and dump it on a table. No, no, no, no. If you're going to try to do this very risky kind of potentially polarizing thing, you have to make it elegant and beautiful too. Execution ... The ideas are great. I tell people all the time. You can have all the great ideas in the world. If you do not execute them at a high level it's going to fall flat. Grant, when we first opened, wanted to show movement in food and he had this little bacon on a wire thing and stuff. And now there's a bunch of steakhouses that put thick steakhouse bacon on a clothes pin. Our thing may have been dumb, and we only did it for four months, but they didn't really get the point of it. It looked beautiful at least. And now they've got clothes pins holding bacon on a wire. You have to figure out the core of why it's special and that's a tricky thing to do a lot of times.
· Nick Kokonas, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: There is an important distinction here and that is this. People have copied that now. Anything good gets copied. And if you google up restaurants in South America and Asia that are copying it, they don't copy it well. They'll literally just take a bunch of food and dump it on a table. No, no, no, no. If you're going to try to do this very risky kind of potentially polarizing thing, you have to make it elegant and beautiful too. Execution ... The ideas are great. I tell people all the time. You can have all the great ideas in the world. If you do not execute them at a high level it's going to fall flat. Grant, when we first opened, wanted to show movement in food and he had this little bacon on a wire thing and stuff. And now there's a bunch of steakhouses that put thick steakhouse bacon on a clothes pin. Our thing may have been dumb, and we only did it for four months, but they didn't really get the point of it. It looked beautiful at least. And now they've got clothes pins holding bacon on a wire. You have to figure out the core of why it's special and that's a tricky thing to do a lot of times. [00:00:00] S0: Going back to the kind of way the business itself is run and the service delivered, you guys have been extremely innovative in things like ticketing, selling meals ahead of time, not at the restaurant. Things like dynamic pricing. Can you talk through how you arrived maybe at those two concepts at first and the impact that they had on the business once they were in place?
· Nick Kokonas
[00:00:00] S1: I had never spent a day working in a restaurant. And then even after we opened Alinea, my role was to coordinate. I was like the producer of a film. I found everybody, got them involved, worked with the architect, the interior designer, did all the permitting, the liquor license, the legal, all that sort of stuff. But I didn't actually work in a restaurant ever until the day we opened. And I certainly didn't intend on working at the restaurant. I expected that I would do the financials and the books and things like that. But I would also hand that off to the general manager, say, or things like that. About 18 months after we opened Grant was diagnosed with stage four cancer and at the time was given six months to live. He's 11 years cancer-free. That's a story in and of itself. But at that moment I went in to the restaurant, started going in every night for service. Not doing just the business side but really looking at the other aspects of it. I just would look around and be like why in the world do we have an empty table right now when we have 60 people on the wait list? Well, they just didn't show up. And of course I knew that when I went to other restaurants I'd have an 8:00 reservation and be told to wait at the bar for 45 minutes. And I started asking really, really basic questions. Why is it that I go to a restaurant, have an 8:00 reservation, and then am told to wait for 45 minutes? Is it because they're disorganized or so many people came? And it's like no, actually they lied to me and told me they had an 8:00 table when they knew that they didn't have one till 9:00. And why would they do that? Well, because if they told me 9:00 I would have gone to the restaurant down the street that lied to me and told me 8:00. And then conversely a lot of people lie to the restaurant. They would call Alinea back then and they would say like, "Hey we want a table for six on March 23rd." Say, "I'm really sorry, all we have is a table for four." They would say, "Okay, I'll take it." And then they'd show up with six people. Or worse, they'd want a table for two and they'd say, "Oh I'm sorry, we only have a table for six." "Okay, we'll take it and we'll just bring four friends." They show up as two. So all of a sudden you have two people sitting at a six top and you've just forgone $1,000 in revenue.