Having to close your restaurant must truly be the bitterest of pills.
So it’s easy to understand why restaurateurs would search around for reasons outside of themselves for why things didn’t work out.
Brexit and the global pandemic did indeed call time on restaurants that may have otherwise survived; but it always seems unrealistic when restaurateurs lay the blame for their closure on the dining public.
Absolute accountability is one of the foundations of leadership; and if there is a salutary lesson in any restaurant closure – it is this: the dining public cannot be wrong in their preferences.
Whatever your concept, your story, and whatever boundaries you’re trying to push, your restaurant still needs fundamentally to follow the same 3 rules:
Offer an experience the public wants. At a price they’re willing to pay. In a location they’re willing to travel to.
If the public didn’t ‘get’ our concept – then either we didn’t explain it right, or it wasn’t easy enough to understand. If the public wouldn’t pay our prices, we priced ourselves wrong or failed to communicate our value. And if they just wouldn’t make the trip – we didn’t get the first two sufficiently right to justify their journey.
It’s a hard truth, but the dining public doesn’t owe us a damn thing.
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