9.2023 Edition

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Editor: Justin Khanna​

Hey Reader,

For new subscribers, you’ve caught me right in the middle of a series of newsletters all about your business’s values. You can get caught up, including a framework for doing this with your business, here.

It’s my pleasure to introduce the first of Repertoire’s values: Fixing

I’ll explain the genesis of this decision by rewinding to 2021, where I read the writing of famed investor, Josh Wolfe. He laid out this framework that really struck me, discussing the push and pull between two mentalities: “Stay + Fix” vs “Escape + Flee”.

To set the scene: considering we’ve seen massive capacity increases with technology in recent years, we have options now. On the flip side, it’s led to some pretty disheartening attitudes:

• Upset with the current financial system? Don’t “Stay + Fix”, instead “Escape + Flee” to crypto.
• Disagree with the direction the environment is heading? Don’t “Stay + Fix”, instead “Escape + Flee” to Mars.

And my favorite he brought up…

• Don’t like the fact that the current education system is “failing its intended purpose to create opportunity for young scholars + level an uneven playing field”? Don’t “Stay + Fix”, instead “Escape + Flee” to avoid the job market entirely (or write off “education” as a pursuit that’s not worth while).

That tweet thread shook me to my core. It was exactly what I was feeling coming off of over a decade of working in restaurants and events.

The hospitality industry is what I love.

It would feel like a gut punch if I woke up tomorrow and there were no more restaurants to experience.

No more line cooks to connect with and nerd out about their setups.

No more somms curating great lists and supporting quality producers.

No more beautiful rooms in cities with inspiring ambiance.

However, it’s not all rosy.

Since taking a step back and being out of restaurants for 5 years, I can objectively say that things aren’t setup in a sustainable way. I needed this time to learn. It’s also not lost on me that, from the outside, it looks like I’ve smashed the “Escape + Flee” button on the hospitality industry.

If I’m being incredibly honest, every attempt I’ve made to “Escape + Flee” has led to a hollow place. From pop-ups, to private events, to consulting, to making content creation my “main thing”…none of it compares to dedicated time and energy to helping the hospitality industry thrive. That’s why I launched Repertoire.

We’ll be following this “Stay + Fix” mentality with our products because it’s the right thing to do. It’s building on what the generation before us helped establish.

It’s what Louis Saulnier wrote about in Le Repertoire de La Cuisine (the book that inspired our name). He shared in the introduction: “Since this book is particularly for practitioners, it is in their mutual interest to keep the Author and Publishers informed of details of new creations or local recipes which have not so far been included so that every new edition of Le Répertoire may be made even more comprehensive than the last.”

To us, it’s not a strategy of “burn everything down and start again” that’s become popular rhetoric to spout. We believe in working hard to create and curate solutions to pave a path forward.

Alright, that’s the “why” behind this value, let’s talk about the “how”.

In order to be good at Fixing something, you have to understand it.

Someone starting a car mechanic or IT business without any experience in those industries is going to have a hard time getting started. Not to mention the rude awakening they’ll experience when they start interacting with customers that become upset in discovering that there’s no domain expertise underneath the product/service.

This value influences our hiring decisions - everyone on the team right now has experience in hospitality and has the ability to empathize with you folks.

It also puts practical pressure on our products.

You’ve probably had the experience of getting-gifted or being-advertised-to-by a product that thinks it’s solving a problem. But after spending 5 minutes with it or actually putting it in a real-world situation, it breaks, backfires or makes things even worse. Don’t even get me started on price-to-value discrepancies (Exhibit A: average cost of one semester at culinary school = $16,528)

In order to truly earn the kudos of “fixing” a problem, our products have to work. Instead of claiming to be “innovative” or “revolutionary”, we’re in a season of being relentlessly practical, and you folks that have taken courses like Total Station Domination feel the difference.

Having this in the back of our mind also makes sure that we avoid the trap of being “all talk and no action”. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of great progress starts with “just bringing awareness to xyz problem”. But I get frustrated when that’s where it ends, and Repertoire is my expression of structured action.

Finally, valuing Fixing implies a non-zero level of change.

Instead, we’ll tilt our head to the side and say “is that really the best way?” It’s the fuzzy grey area between “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “Start from Scratch”.

The “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” folks might say: Escoffier’s brigade system is “the best” way to setup your kitchen, learning about chicken stock or dicing an onion is the “ideal” starting point for your culinary education, every business structure should operate at a 20-25% food cost, training happens once in your career and it’s called a “Hospitality Management Program” or “Culinary School Degree”.

The “Start from scratch” folks might value: Zero organizational structure, scraping the idea of a brick and mortar because everything is online, advising against pursuing any formalized training, avoiding management or partnership in any shape or form, etc.

We think they’re both missing benefits from one another, and we’ll use our own biases and perspectives to blend the two.

Alright, let’s land this plane. To summarize, our first value is Fixing.

• It influences our hiring decisions when we screen for folks that have domain expertise and the ability to empathize and understand the hospitality industry. You can’t fix something if you don’t understand it.
• It dictates the relentlessly practical and accessible products we create and the free content we share. It’s not a fix if your solution doesn’t improve things.
• It inspires us to look at the status quo and ensure we’re progressing while also iterating on what currently exists. We’ll leverage leading research, industry pros, and technology to bring change to life.

I shared this in a recent video, but the goal is have restaurants someday.

It’ll be a restaurant group that’s powered by Repertoire’s structured principles. And if we can manage to make real hospitality education available to everyone, we’ll also make sure thousands of you folks can build, impact and profit, too.

Next week, I’ll dig into our second value. I’d love to hear any questions you have that might influence how I lay these out.

Shoutout to the folks that have been using their referral link to share the newsletter and get more positive and progress-focused readers on the list - we’re working on some pretty sweet rewards, so if you wanna build up your count, share your unique link with 1 person today! 🙏 (find yours at the bottom of this email!)

Top Hits 💥

​When Did Hospitality Get So Hostile?​

HOSTILITY AND HOSPITALITY: how faint the line between them. The Latin hostis once meant “guest,” then became, through some shadowy slippage of language, the word for “enemy” — an etymological twist that might make some smile grimly, particularly those of us who have worked in restaurants as part of the so-called hospitality industry.

For how else are we to think of the guests who flex their power from the moment they stalk into the dining room; who frown at the table they’re led to, aggrieved at the imagined underestimation of their status, and insist on moving to another, often identical table; who try to meddle with the kitchen, demanding that the chef subtract and substitute ingredients, to the point of creating entirely new dishes; who wrinkle their noses at a perfectly fine bottle of wine and declare it corked, just to pull rank on the sommelier; who snap their fingers at servers, leer, sneer or scream, “You can’t do your job,” a line attributed to the actor and late-night host James Corden last fall over a flubbed order at the downtown Manhattan brasserie Balthazar; who tip stingily or not at all, ignoring the fact that, in the United States, the federal minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13 an hour; or who book a table and then don’t bother to show up, as happens with as many as 28 percent of all reservations, according to a 2021 survey by YouGov and OpenTable, and which can cost a small restaurant hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars, if not an entire night’s profit?

Our Take: This piece was a weird read, if I’m being honest. It flows like a combination of saved tweets, pasted text from Wikipedia, and dot points from the author’s notes as she watched The Menu. In fact, it lands where many takes like this arrive at: a paradox.

These writers point to “low wages” as the reason behind these problems, but actively make it more difficult for restaurants to raise prices when they scoff at the price of a tasting menu in the next paragraph. Do we want higher wages, or lower prices?

It’s apparently ridiculous for guests to ask for substitutions on dishes, but it’s also inexcusable for a restaurant to not allow every-dietary-restriction-under-the-sun to be accommodated.

They’ll say that it’s frowned upon for a restaurant to charge a booking deposit or have guests pre-pay for a reservation, and also share a stat about the 28% of all reservations being no-shows. Should that just continue to happen? Is the restaurant overstepping or is the guest?

She wrote that it’s horrible that guests ask for levels of service that are “outside the norm”, and also complain that guests expect to be “served” instead of “engage”. Should they just sit quietly in their seats, or should they participate in their experience?

…which is it?

To all of these questions, I often see this type of writer arguing for both. It’s virtue signaling, confidently spinning around, cyclically sharing the same points without really getting anywhere. There’s often no practical plan for implementation of change, nor a boots-on-the-ground understanding of how hospitality businesses actually work.

Is there room for improvement in our industry? Absolutely. But taking singular happenstance and individual stories (we’ve all got ‘em) and using violent language (rage, arena, tyrant, hostile) to broad-brush the entire industry is, IMO, irresponsible, and it’s why I wanted to write about this story.

To steel-man her argument, I agree with the take that: in many day-to-day dining interactions, both guests and staff can do better. It’s not as easy as just pointing to one party involved and saying “it’s their fault”.

What I don’t agree with is being confronted with ambiguity and just throwing up your hands to leave the conversation in limbo. These types of writers will justify their piece by proclaiming, “I talked about it, I started the conversation, I brought up what’s wrong with things” as if that’s worth applauding.

Due to my continued frustrated by the lack of proposed solutions and action items (that both parties can keep in mind), here’s what I’d like to suggest:

Guests can work to be more communicative, forthcoming with preferences, and ask for what they want instead of expecting mind-reading to happen. Learn some basic etiquette. Instead of snapping or whistling at your table’s captain, kindly say, “excuse me” - it’s not hard. If you make a reservation somewhere and there’s a cancellation window that the restaurant requests, set a reminder for yourself to call or email the restaurant if you need to cancel. Have dietary restrictions that will affect how things need to be prepared? Send that heads up, at least 24 hours in advance. Keep the number 3 in your mind whenever you see a menu item’s price. If a salad is $18, it’s not that you’re paying $18 for that salad…divide it by 3. You’re paying $6 for the salad, and $12 for being able to sit in a beautiful room, having the magical experience of just “saying words” and then having your food arrive, eat off of nice service ware, not have to do dishes, go shopping for the ingredients, or prepare the salad yourself. Factored into that $12 is a myriad of other benefits you get to experience that I didn’t list, including a little thing called “profit” that the small business will use to continue to stay open.

Staff can strive to also be more communicative, level-set better with variables like wait times, and ask thoughtful questions to guests instead of (you guessed it) expecting mind-reading to happen. I did a whole video on the monotonous settling that can happen in your day-to-day in restaurants, but it’s worth your time to treat every guest like it’s their one and only experience with you (it probably is). Acknowledge where your skill gaps are, and work to improve them through coaching, courses, or just more reps. When I finally felt like a hot-shot on the line, I was immediately humbled when I couldn’t describe a dish to a guest without getting all “knees-weak-palms-are-sweaty”. After 4-5 months of focused work on improving that skill, I was begging to run dishes to tables…especially critics and industry friends.

High-integrity management is also a super helpful third party in this conversation (side note: the fact that this author doesn’t mention the word management or leadership once in her piece, perfectly frames the “workers vs the elite” narrative that’s at play here).

Remember, I define integrity as simply having what you say and what you do match up. If you say you care about your team, that should be displayed regardless of the net worth or level of fame of the guest causing a problem.

For those that don’t know, I was the co-founder in a 6-figure/year event production company from 2018-2021. My business partner and I both agreed when we joined forces that there would be a zero-tolerance policy on disrespecting our team at our events.

I remember having to request that mis-behaved guests leave dinners, stepping in to calm down heated arguments, and saying “no” to outrageous client requests that we didn’t have capacity for (even at the expense of more revenue).

We would purposely reduce workload for team members so that they could have space to go above and beyond for guests instead of feeling like they were red-lining. Adopting that practice was in response to the ever-increasing water line that I would experience at restaurants where 110% all of a sudden became the new standard, and every day had to be that level of output going forward.

We would tell our team that it was okay to work at 70%, understanding that in a long 13-hour event day, you’d want to have gas in the tank to “push” when needed. We weren’t always perfect, but I still feel good about our principles, decision making and philosophy.

I say all of this to provide an additional perspective to a pretty gloomy article. It’s ripe with pessimism and complaining, and we don’t do that at Repertoire. We’re optimistic and curious about what opportunities are available in our incredible industry, and we hope you are too ❤️

​A Tasting Menu That Ends With Plenty of Leftovers​

“The last time I went to Contra, the Nordic-leaning tasting room on the Lower East Side, I overheard the women seated to my right discussing their $125 “carte blanche” menu. 'It’s a trendy place,' said one, gesturing to her dish, 'but this should be getting bigger per course.' Finally, she’d had enough and called over her server to say something: 'Excuse me, the portion for the cauliflower — we’re, like, really hungry.'

I cringed a bit as I bore witness to the ordeal since “large” portions are the last thing you’d expect to find at Contra, and you don’t want to overdo it when a meal might run eight or ten courses long. Then again, if dinner costs triple digits, you don’t want to leave hungry, and the preciousness of each two-bite plate might grow concerning after a while for more ravenous diners. Had I known about it at the time, I might have leaned over to tell this couple about Bird Dog, which has been open for a little over a year in the West Village and offers a $95 menu that is — and I mean this in the kindest possible terms — absolutely bonkers.”

Our Take: I’ll get off my soap box after the last article and share a funny lesson I had to learn 👇

At the last restaurant I was managing, we had a private dining room (PDR).

I was in charge of ensuring that the PDR menus were operationally efficient, low in food-cost, while still making sure they gave the guest something impressive.

There was one night where nearly the entire party (over 80% of guests) felt hungry at the end if their meal.

I got roasted by my head chef for not portioning well enough, and the menu I wrote for them had effectively no hunger-satiating starch on it (clearly the reverse of what this critic experienced at Bird Dog between the pastas, house-made Doritos and hush puppies).

The lesson I took away from that experience was to always serve main courses with mashed potatoes and a side of bread…just kidding - but use that advice carefully, because it’s very effective if you’re going for “quantity of takeaway boxes” as a metric you’re tracking 😉

In all seriousness, run the numbers for yourself. If you increase the portion size of your salad, order some additional squash so you’ll have backup portions on-hand, or have your pastry team make the pavlovas a smidge larger, how much are we talking here?

When I started doing private dinners, I was often surprised how just $40 was often the difference between me losing sleep that I’d get complaints about small portions and peace of mind 🧘 I was happy to pay more, and I saw it as an “insurance policy”, of sorts, to avoid that stomach-pit sensation of not having enough.

Said differently (and this always puts this argument to rest for me), have you ever heard someone happily exclaim at the end of a meal, “I’m so glad I’m still hungry!”

​How Chef Tae Strain Went from Cook to Executive Chef to Opening a Popup​

“What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve been given?

Understand what you want to say as a chef, and strive to cook food that is honest to you. Cooking is a marathon and there are endless distractions and obstacles that will make you question your goals, your ideals, your style. It is so important to remember why you got into food and what that connection is. Don’t burn the candle at both ends — you have to understand what your physical and emotional limits are, or you will burn out and lose perspective on the industry. This dialogue is very prevalent now, and it is so important to talk about improving the sustainability of the industry.”

Our Take: We love when chefs are interviewed and asked these personable questions because they give folks that are just starting out an insight into the greener side of the industry. We strive to achieve the same with all our Repertoire Podcast Interviews, because the more we talk, the more information we share, the more we grow as a whole, all together.

ICYMI 🙌

Just launched on our private hospitality professional community: Discounts & Bonuses 🎉 we work with some of our favorite brands to get members some great discounts (10% off & free sharpening at Korin, 15% off at Tilit, extended trials of software, more...) - not to mention, the Repertoire Pro Community features monthly Hotseat sessions for coaching, a Discord-esque real-time chat, focused spaces for discussions on topics like gear, menus and business, and so much more. Join today, and if you're already a member, peep the newly built out 🎁Discounts & Bonuses space!

🍄🧈 Rich and Silky Mushroom Butter - A quick recipe and taste test of an amazing element that originated from a pretty funny mistake...

🎙️ Ever heard of the 2-types of stages? A bonus episode on this topic just went live on both the podcast and on YouTube!

This Week, We Learned… 🧠

New York City’s Most Romantic Restaurants​

​Humble Ingredients Have These Five Chefs Seeing Stars on Their Menus

Vegan Chocolatier Lagusta Yearwood on Running Her Business​

Chick-fil-A tests Fried Cauliflower Sandwiches some cities across the US

Comment from you folks:

To Peep 👀

• Gestura just launched the Stando Tweezer in 2 colors featuring "a curved stand in the middle of the tool provides a wide surface area for finger placement and grip. The stand also keeps the tips elevated off the ground while not in use."...we covered a similar design ages ago, and we're stoked to see it's growing in popularity!
• Need extra storage for content you've been creating or files for your business? One of our favorite hard drives (in red 🔴) is 44% off right now in a 2TB capacity
• We found a sale on this line of Blue Steel pans (basically carbon steel that goes through a blue annealing process) that's made in collaboration with Ghetto Gastro (lowest price is $55.99)
• Now Serving in LA has a bunch of signed cookbooks, including this copy of Fäviken 📘

Quote I'm Pondering 💭

Thanks for reading, as always,

👊Justin​

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