Marketing Your Chef
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It’s one of the great mysteries of restaurant life. An owner seeks a highly qualified chef to take the restaurant to the next level. The owner pays the chef a boatload of money, and not unexpectedly, the restaurant is better than ever. The place even has the potential to go way beyond the next level. Things are happening and you’ve got to love that winning feeling.
But wait a minute - the owner is pretending that that talented chef isn’t even there. Go to the web site and check the “About Us” and read the menu. Not one word about the chef. What am I missing in this picture?
My guess is that the owner is fearful that the chef is already planning his or her next move. The fear factor has taken over, and the owner is reluctant to promote someone that won’t be there for the long haul. Or perhaps the owner is worried that over time, the restaurant will be unable to afford the new-found talent.
This is a tough business that is now more difficult than ever. You made the decision to pay the money and it’s working. So tell the world about it! You acquired a major asset and you are afraid to allow it to really happen.
Maybe it’s time to get a dog, or perhaps look for something else to do.
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Comments
excllent resturants means;excellent service, staff+excellent chef=excellent resturant,motivation,loyality,didacation,and other qualifications of personal touch means succeful food and beverage operation,execellent staff is the first element of charactristices of hospitality,but excellent owner is important element in improvement hospitality industry in his resturant,thus excellent staff and excellent chef are not enough to be excellent resturant,owner whom have not suitable jobknowledge in etiquette business,hospitality skills,hospitality philosophy,art of kitchen,and others factor of hospitality science,it will be difficult to manage successful food and beverage service operation
Ya know? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. This happens, you can’t control it no matter how good your relationship with your chef is - ownership stake or not - if they want to leave for what they perceive as greener pastures, they will. Why wouldn’t they want to try and better their position in life and why would you want to keep someone back from personal and professional growth?
We see this all the time with our clients too but we focus on marketing the historical food culture from each restaurant - and if you have the right agreements you can still utilize the celebrity of past relationships.
You can sit and wring your hands about the situation all day but at the end of it you have to have a plan that keeps the business growing and your nerves out of the equation.
As for the previous comments, giving the chef an ownership stake is situational and can be a good thing but not always so. And while the chef can be the owner, it’s not necessary for the owner to always be the chef and in some instances I would absolutely not recommend it.
As a publicist working with restaurants, I have seen this
happen so many times. There’s real substance behind the fear that the chef will leave. I worked for one place where
even I couldn’t keep track of who this week’s chef was. Funny thing was, they were all great. If you are going to
publicize the chef, give him a part interest in the business. Better yet, the owner should also be the chef.