Feeling The Restaurant

This past week I was in London and noticed a little Tapas restaurant around the corner from my hotel which seemed to be pretty busy. On my second try to have dinner there I was able to get a single seat at the bar. I started wondering why the restaurant was so busy given it wasn’t particularly fashionable, nor were all of the patrons Spanish.

It got me thinking about two things: what made me feel that way and how good it felt. The first thing I noticed was that it felt Spanish, not contrived Spanish, but real. It was lacking fancy millwork and it was not what, on a cold London day, would try to transport me to Costa del So. It was just a plain and simple bar top with lots of Miro and Picasso prints on the walls. The other factor was the great Spanish music. Most of all I felt comfortable.

There were no canned introductions, the menu was authentic and not dumbed down for commercial convenience, and the people who worked there even let me speak Spanish. Overall, as I walked around the corner to my hotel with its two empty dining rooms (one offering a free bottle of wine if two people ordered dinner) I was struck again by the power of a genuine experience as compared to a beige restaurant experience which tries to simply provide sustenance.

I probably say this too often, but I continually run into situations where owners or operators worry about the “guest experience” as if it were a made-for-TV movie. Our guests today don’t think about their restaurant experiences nearly as much as they feel them. Yes, we can try to understand the various “holes” in the market, but the truth is that patrons of bars and restaurants may not have a cogitative sense of a restaurant’s layout, but they understand and feel what is real and genuine.

Several years ago a number of small, but charming restaurants sprouted in a downtown alley in San Francisco. They were very successful — not because the food was great, but because their style and humanness was genuine and they were so unlike many of the other “high styled” restaurants in San Francisco. 

The city at one point tried to close them down as they were operating with storefront patios in the alley and partially blocking it. A funny thing happened, the people spoke up and the city recognized that not only did they have an attraction but that in fact this alley gave its financial district some character.

Character is like a big nose, “perfect” frequently can be found in its uniqueness.