We were lucky to catch up with Kent Lewis recently and have shared our conversation below.
Kent, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s talk about innovation. What’s the most innovative thing you’ve done in your career?
Through equal parts of desperation, foresight and good luck, I handled the Covid shutdowns and restrictions that led my restaurant’s reopening to multiples of the revenue we were doing pre-Covid. I am not a public relations wizard, but three innovative approaches to solving the problem created a buzz that money could never pay for:
1. Because my high-end restaurant’s complex dishes don’t do well as “take-out,” I came up with a program called “finish-at-home” where my michelin-trianed chef would spend three days preparing a meal within 15 minutes of “finished.” Then guests would stand in line to pick up packages with all of the 90% completed parts of the dish, take the dishes home, watch an on-line video on how to complete the meal, and enjoy really complex, gourmet dinners at home with their families. We charged full-price for these meals with the guests’ understanding that the premium they were paying (they were using their labor to finish and serve the meal) was what funded our “staff meals,” which were simpler dinners we cooked and gave away for free to families who found themselves unemployed overnight (like 90% of all restaurant staff). Finish-at-Home guests were told that for every F-a-H meal we sold, we would donate a meal to someone in need (in truth, we donated more free meals than 1 to 1). The most amazing part of this story is this: We only had one line, so Finish-at-Home guests were standing with those in need. This created a microcosm of “community” that sometimes brought guests to tears – and always brought us to tears – while guests waited to pick up their food.
2. I created and hand-bulit “heated tables” and had a 1500 sf clear vinyl tarp built overseas so that people could enjoy the outdoors during Oregon’s months-long “outdoor dining only” restrictions. When our governor shut us down, she said that the state would allow outdoor seating as early as the hospitals could afford the risk. The idea of putting people in tents with walls and space heaters defeated the ventilation intent and would have people sucking poisonous fumes while umbrella dining in the wet, windy Oregon spring is an impractical joke. I reached out to an overseas company and had a 30′ x 50′ clear tarp made so that guests sitting under this giant thing wouldn’t feel claustrophobic and strung padded steel cables intermittantly from my building to a neighboring building to support the weight of the tarp, which kept about 45 guests dry at any one time. Then, I worked with a company in Malaysia who makes heated silicone pads for petroleum barrel warming to develop a 110-degree rubber pad I could mount to the bottom of all my outdoor tables and a 185-degree pad I could wrap around the center post (safe I promise). I had plastic tableclothes custom made that fit each table and hung to the gound with slits in them for the guests’ legs. So when the guest sat down, their legs were warm, their hands (on the table) were warm, their plates stayed warm, etc.
3. I spent some PPP money by hiriing out-of-work world-class musicians to entertain my bored-out-of-their-mind guests dying for a little art. I received one of the first PPP loans which came with a “must spend in eight weeks” requirement despite my restaurant being closed for the first six of the eight. As we were preparing to open the covered patio above, I put 8 of the best jazz musicians in the Pacific Northwest to recombine as quartets and play every night for my patio of guests. It allowed me to spend some of my must-spend money while feeding the sould of my arts-starved guests who had been locked in their houses for months.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I started in the restaurant business as an 18 year old busser in San Diego at what turned out to be a mafia-owned restaurant with some other nefarious stuff going on. I loved the front-of-house work and the camaraderie of the industry and after catching on to the m.o. of the restaurant I was in, left for two jobs in La Jolla, one as what we now call a barista and the other as a barback, both of which I was fired from on the same day unbeknowst to the other owner for what each literally called “an attitude problem.” I started training to tend bar on my 21st birthday, opened my first bar/restaurant 5 days after my 30th birthday, ran that for 24 years, and opened my existing restaurant at 50.
I think what sets me apart as a restaurant owner is that because I think the job of General Manager in the restaurant industry is the biggest waste of money, time, energy, breath, hope and humanity that exists, I’ve empowered my staffs to run the places themselves. My first place had a staff of only 10-12 while my current place has a staff of 45-55 seasonally. My “bottom-up” management style, as I call it, is philosophically that I am their support person: my job is to make sure that they have everything they need for success so that they understand and take responsibility for the fact that any failure is theirs. Smart, good people will do anything not to fail, and a team of smart, good successes won’t put up with someone on their team who is a threat to their success. My teams have almost always been incredible because they always (always) try their hardest.
I have spent the last couple decades giving hundreds if not thousands of smart people a place to finance their changes in career, their time in school, their getting away from a bad relationship, their chasing their dreams. A restaurant is filled with people with dreams that become unrealistic only when they can’t provide themselves food, clothing and shelter while chasing them. The greatest joy of my last 30 years is knowing that I’ve contributed to the success stories I’ve been fortunate enough to witness.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Where chain restaurants are formulatic, independent restaurants must be the most counter-intuitive business on the planet if they are to succeed. Running a successful independent restaurant is all about “unlearning” lessons. Early in my career, I had the pleasure of working at a legendary Portland nightclub called “Key Largo” under an owner who, every time I pointed out that something we did could be done more sensibly, he would take the time to explain to me why sensibility would cost us dearly.
The best story I can share on this is one from a 5-star resort on the Caribbean Island of Antigua, where I worked between 25 and 27 years old: I ask the owner, “Howard, how is it that we are booked a year in advance but we never make Conde Naste’s ‘Gold List?'” He replied: “Because 25% of the score is build on the pool and we don’t have a pool.” I said, “You have 63 acres, why not build one?” He said, “If I built a pool, everyone would use it.” Stunned, I asked, “What’s the problem with that?” He said, as we were standing on the pathway from the beach bar to the reception desk, “Kent, my job is to get people to sit in (pointing) THAT sand, looking over their toes to watch THAT sunset over THAT ocean. If they spent their vacation sitting by the pool, they would go somewhere closer and cheaper next year because they can find a pool anywhere. My job, Kent, is not to give people an experience they want, my job is to give them an experience they will never forget.
Secondly, restaurants are the only industry I can think of where every single customer walks in and thinks they can do your job better than you can. Every single customer is an “expert” in restaurants because it’s a business that seems like nothing but common sense and no mystery: buy ingredients, put them together, serve them like customers want them served, charge them an acceptable price. To someone in the business, that’s like telling your cousin, Ned, to suit up for an NBA game, take this ball, dribble it that way, throw it through that net. Simple, right?
What I’ve had to “unlearn” is the value of “common sense.” Common sense will bury a restaurant. Working to give the customer exactly what they expect will bore the customer (the demand side) as well as bankrupt the business (managing the supply side). The supply side is far trickier than the demand side – and nothing I would put into print.
Have you ever had to pivot?
My current chef, Nate, and I were doing sold-out, super-geeky 5-course wine dinners every night at our previous restaurant in Portland. The previous spot, however, was a very upscale, turn-of-the-last-century billiards club, and although we were selling-out our 30 seat dining room every night, we had dreams of doing what we were doing for a bigger crowd in a place that didn’t carry the “pool hall” stigma that made word-of-mouth advertising seeem so Sisyphusian. I built my new place, called Tavern on Kruse, in my local upscale suburb and we opened with our 5-course, wine-paired dinners. They were utterly, abjectly, violently rejected by the community in which I had just bet my life savings. We held our ground for 90 days hoping that we would earn or find acceptance. At the 90-day mark, we threw in the towel and gave the neighborhood what they wanted from a place called “Tavern.” Burgers, ribs, fried chicken, and lots of comfort food which turned things around immediately. During these six months, to keep ourselves in love with the culinary arts and to push oursleves creatively, Nate and I had a secret dining society called “L’Affaire Gourmand” where we would secretly close the dining room once a month and do the off-the-charts-incredible wine dinners we couldn’t sell to the vast majority of our guests. We ran that same simple menu for six months until business was strong enough to take another risk. We pivoted back toward the creative again, but Instead of doing a super-heady, 5-course fixed menu that changed every 2 weeks, we offered an a-la-carte menu that changed seasonally and guests could wrap their head around… and met our community in the middle. It was an instant success.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://tavernonkruse.com
- Instagram: @tavernonkruse
- Facebook: tavernonkruse
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