Hans-Sachs-Straße - Emirates.com

• UNderStANd FiNANCiAl
arithmetic, a P & L account,
and how important it is
to use your cash wisely,
i.e. to pay your small and
independent suppliers as
soon as you can.
• iNSPire, leAd FroM
the front and communicate.
Be there, even if you’re
not that competent. An
Australian restaurateur
summed this up when he
said a restaurateur must
‘loiter with intent’.
• APPreCiAte thAt the
two most important pieces
of paper in any restaurant
are not the menu and the
wine list as every TV
show maintains they
are but the lease and the
alcohol license.
taurants in Shanghai and Beijing.
While many cities have been revived
by the achievements of these restaurateurs,
another aspect of our rapidly
changing lives seems to be ensuring
that the skills of the restaurateur will
continue to be in demand.
Restaurants make up one particular
aspect of the retail industry, but they
share, with only the health and beauty
segment, a great advantage over all the
others and that is that their sales are impervious
to the internet. While online
purchases force the closure of what were
once regarded as seemingly impregnable
high street names as customers switch to
buying on line, this is something that cannot
be replicated for restaurants. If you
want a pre-theatre drink, lunch or dinner
at a new restaurant that has been well reviewed,
then the only option is to go out
physically to enjoy them. Restaurants cannot
be experienced via cyberspace.
And as restaurants have come to
play a greater role in our lives than ever
before, as rents rise and we cook less,
despite the growing number of cookery
books, the honourable profession of the
restaurateur has been boosted by two
other developments.
The first is that the restaurant business
harbours very few secrets. Selling
prices on the menu are, by law, on pub-
96
OpeN skIes / maRch 2013
The front page of every
newspaper carries enough
shocks and surprises. We
have reached a point where
we no longer want them on
the plate
lic display, and there are very few variables
in the main cost elements of rent,
wages or buying the essential food and
drink. It is a business with a distinctly
low-cost entry point, however much
money may subsequently be spent on
the final design.
And, as a result of spending so much
of their working lives in such a transparent
business, restaurateurs are remarkably
frank and generous with their
advice. What struck me most forcibly in
conducting my interviews with these
restaurateurs was quite how open and
willing they were to talk about their
successes and their far more painful
failures. And it transpires that even the
most seemingly successful restaurateur
has had to close at least one restaurant,
with one describing it as, “the most
costly but the most didactic experience
of my career.”
Many of the aspects of the openness
of the restaurateur’s profession
BiG PlAYerS / Drew Nieporent
and Jean-Claude Vrinat