WalkingElephant

More Than [at a loss for] Words

Yesterday I went over to More Than Words on Moody Street in Waltham to present them with their $3,144.14 Benefit Restaurant Donation check as our July beneficiary. I'd been in as a customer a couple of times before, but this time I got the Royal Tour. It blew me away.

From the customer's viewpoint, More Than Words [MTW] is a casual, urban bookstore/café - complete with a full-service to-order beverage counter, a rich selection of used books and music for sale, comfy couches, and free wi-fi. Staffed by earnest, friendly young adult baristas and booksellers, the experience is akin to a compact, well-loved Barnes and Noble.

But my tour guide, the very impressive MTW Associate Marceline Josile [pictured below with the equally impressive MTW Founder and Executive Director Jodi Rosenbaum, and me], by ushering me down the back stairs, lifted the veil on the sophisticated and finely-tuned machine occupying the enormous basement below.

More Than Words' business is books. Made up of row-upon-row of bookcases loaded with painstakingly catalogued books for sale - some openly sorted, others in plastic bins - shelves packed with a hundred or more boxes of un-sorted fresh donations from individuals and businesses, and the enormous commercial laundry basket-fulls of rejects, the MTW "warehouse operation" is a model of data-driven efficiency.

Have you ever wondered what happens to a book you donate to a used book reseller? Well - after thanking you - the smart ones [like More Than Words] enter your books' ISBN numbers into a deep database of current statistics on the popularity and pricing of titles available from myriad online used book resellers.

Hey, it's nothing personal, but you can bet that a significant percentage of that beloved library you painstakingly collected and that you finally screwed up the courage to edit simply won't make the cut.  - More Than Words is a business. And one that's outgrowing its space. They simply can't accommodate dead inventory. So they are forced to cull, and they do so with ruthless precision.

But it's not just their organized workflow or their scientific methodology that impressed me. They post up-to-yesterday sales data parsed against sales-forecasts-by-profit-center [yup - they track seriously granular data] for the entire staff to see. They've got personal performance objectives quantified and posted for every co-worker to see. [Their level of transparency would - and should - embarrass the Obama Administration] Their level of operational efficiency and business savvy and acumen embarrassed me, quite frankly. I was so stunned and impressed by all Marceline and Jodi were showing me that it was easy to forget for a while that...

The REAL mission of More Than Words is to help shape and direct the precious lives of all the challenged young people they can. To quote from their excellent website, " Youth at MTW are in teh foster care system, court involved, homeless, or have dropped out of school. These subsets of the youth population face tremendous barriers to employment and there are few training programs that are designed to empower youth to develop the skills, experience and self-efficacy critical for a safe, meaningful and successful transition to adulthood."

I've seen it first-hand: More Than Words sells coffee and books to the public; but far more importantly, More Than Words delivers the goods to challenged young people when it comes to building self-respect, self-confidence and character, teaching real-world job skills, and an awareness of what it takes to make it in the working world. I met about a dozen of their current associates and graduates yesterday and have never been more impressed with the confidence, carriage, and professionalism of young people growing into their grown-up shoes.

Collaborate, cooperate, celebrate...

Food sanity in Mad River Valley - Part 3

Too rich to go into in this post, and far too interesting for you NOT to explore further on your own, The Cellars at Jasper Hill is a twenty-two thousand square foot underground cooperative cheese aging facility and an organization with a powerful cooperative marketing arm, storing and selling some damn fine cheeses! Most of the restaurants we'd visited featured Vermont cheeses very prominently, which we definitely appreciated, and when I started writing this post and pulling together the web addresses for you it became apparent that The Cellars at Jasper Hill was one of their principal providers. Like the Vermont Fresh Network, they are another strong connector of producers, preparers, and consumers, bringing together and bringing to market - and thereby sustaining - healthful and delicious, high quality food products and businesses. 

At breakfast on our last morning at The Inn at Round Barn Farm, we were talking with innkeeper Tim Piper about all the great food and food culture in the area. After hearing us out a bit on cheese, he told us that they were hosting a three-day cheesemaking class in late to be taught by the highly accomplished and decorated artisanal cheesemakers at Three Shepherds' Cheese Company located just down the road in Warren. - And wouldn't you know, it also turns out that the Vermont Fresh Network annual meeting was just hosted at Round Barn Farm as well. Integrating, churning, connecting, learning. Impressive.

I can't help but feel that the food community in Vermont is showing us all the way to organize and operate a sustainable, high-quality, healthful food chain. What they're doing in the Mad River Valley, at least, creates and preserves jobs, respects the environment, celebrates the full spectrum of food arts, and - as far as we could tell - really enhances the quality of life for visitors and year-rounders alike. It was a little jarring to return to the big city from a getaway in the country and realize that suddenly my perspective had reversed: Notwithstanding the number of great, progressive restaurants we do have in the Greater Boston area, I realize now how far AHEAD of us city-folk they can be in the country when it comes to collectively embracing and integrating the local, the seasonal, the natural - and the people, both local and "flatlanders."

It's good to be served a slice of humble pie every once in a while - especially when it's delicious!

They get it in Vermont...

Food Sanity in the Mad River Valley, Part 2...

They get it in Vermont: Organic. Local. Seasonal. Hand-crafted. Small, artisanal producers, celebrating, supporting, feeding each other. It's impressive and profoundly satisfying to plunge into their world for a while. I don't feel like I have yet completely figured out why the commitment to quality and purity felt so pervasive, but I do think that the Vermont Fresh Network has a lot to do with it. Self-described as "dedicated to connecting farmers, food producers, and chefs to support Vermont agriculture and bring fresh, flavorful, high-quality food to all Vermonters and [their] guests," nearly every place we visited happened to be a member of the Network.

Yes, there is an evident, active commitment among so many of the local chefs to using high-quality local, seasonal, and organic ingredients. But just as satisfying was discovering that they take risks with their recipes as well, with wild boar, squab, even rabbit confit could be found at Hen of the Wood in Waterbury, The Black Door in Montpelier, The Pitcher Inn in Warren, and The Green Cup back in Waitsfield. Even our favorite place to stay in the area, The Inn at The Round Barn Farm, with an organic garden of their own, is very well aware of and closely connected with the burgeoning high-quality local food world around them. One morning they found a way to use local yak sausage as part of a delicious breakfast. - But, perhaps the most pleasant surprise was a brand-new vegetarian restaurant that grew out of a tea shop we remembered from our last visit to the area last March: Mint, in the heart of downtown Waitsfield, where I found their "Tempeh Bowl" to be one of the best lunch dishes I've ever had. 

One of the most refreshing aspects of this visit was realizing how selflessly they promote one-another. All our servers and proprietors seemed eager to share with us their local favorites, actively referring us to other good places in the area. Otherwise we may not have discovered Mint, nor The Black Door. However, it was the chef at our inn, Charlie Menard, who connected us in a new way with perhaps Vermont's best known culinary commodity: cheese. We were looking for a mid-afternoon snack and so he pointed us toward the East Warren Community Market - a new local cooperative market - where he said we'd find a great selection of local, artisanal food products, including cheese. He was right. 

Although the Market had sold out of fresh bread by the time we got there, we left with two great cheeses: Von Trapp [yes, those Von Trapps] Farmstead "Oma" and "Cabot Clothbound," an aged English-style cheddar that is nothing like your typical sharp Vermont or Wisconsin aged cheddar, nor anything like the more mainstream Cabot cheeses we commonly find in our local supermarkets. What most surprised me was the fact that, although the two cheeses were from altogether different producers, they shared nearly identical labels, prompting us to take a closer look. In so doing, we discovered yet another inspiring, community-building concept: The Cellars at Jasper Hill.

Next: Collaboration

Weather, or not...

...We'll always have weather. It just may not be what we want, or are told to expect.

 

Seriously: Can there be a better gig than being a television weather forecaster? As "meteoroligists" they carry scientists' credentials, they're paid as entertainers, and there's no apparent penalty for poor performance. - Oh, right... they're entertainers. So their real job is to deliver ratings - which of course are up when the forecast is a downer; failing to actually forecast the weather correctly, at least to my amateur eye, doesn't appear to cost them very much.

 

This is NOT an image of yesterday [not in New England, at least!]:

 

Yesterday was an excellent example of the high price we all pay when a sure-thing snowstorm turns out to be a fizzle. A couple of anecdotes shared with me by Rocky, a dog park friend of mine... One: Late yesterday afternoon a five-snowplow caravan was rolling down Route 3 toward the Cape plowing... water - when they could've stayed in the barn. The other: A friend of his who commutes back-and-forth to Lexington each day from the South Shore, took Tuesday night's forecasts of dire Wednesday weather seriously and so traded his 40 minute drive each way [which would've been even shorter yesterday, under the circumstances] for nearly 4½ hours on several different trains.

 

And at about 6:30 yesterday evening, I get back to our Waltham restaurant after an hour in the woods with my dog Jasper [and Rocky with Max], in light mist, over clear roads and maybe a half-inch of slushy snow on the sidewalk, to find our shift supervisor, two waiters, a bartender, a busser, two line cooks, a prep cook and a dishwasher... and not a single customer. By the time I left at about 7:30 we had welcomed 10 brave souls, when we might've been serving 60 by then on an ordinary Wednesday evening.

 

Don't worry: I know well what it's like when the situation is reversed, when the forecast is for an afternoon dusting and we get 10 inches. I was one of those incredulous drivers who lived that evening commute nightmare a couple of winters ago when it took me nearly 5 hours to drive from Kenmore to Waltham instead of the normal 25 minutes [and I hit the road that day before rush hour, before 2:30!]. So, of course we do need to be careful. Absolutely. And when the talking heads see something coming, of course they can't say nothing... I just wish that, more often, they'd get it right.

 

I don't know if it's true or not, but I read somewhere respectable once that, over the course of the year, weather where we live averages out to run in approximately four day cycles. Translation:  if you were to simply say "Tomorrow's weather is going to be very much like today's," you'd be right about 75% of the time. - I also heard that professional meteorologists - with all their radar and satellite imagery, with all their computer models, historical records, and professional training - get their forecasts right just a little better than 85% of the time. Really?

 

To me, that's a good argument for, before deciding whether or not to venture out for the day or evening, looking out your window first. Then go online, [and read read the forecasts - yes - but also] take a careful look at your local radar and satellite loops [I use wunderground.com primarily, but also accuweather.com and weather.com], and crafting your own best guess as to what's going to happen.

 

If your experience is like mine, you'll find you'll disagree fairly often with the weatherfolk on the short term [2-8 hour] forecasts for what is going to really happen where you live and work. And you know what? More often than not, it is YOU who will be right - and that'snow joke!

Majoring in Restaurant Week

Who would have thought a city-wide restaurant event could be so complicated?

Devra's First's Boston Globe piece entitled "Bargains on the menu - and a side of jitters" made me think harder about this than I ever had before.

On the face of it, it's simple: For two weeks beginning last Sunday, more 220 Greater Boston restaurants offer three-course prix-fixe menus for $20.09 at lunch and $33.09 at dinner. What's so complicated about that? Well, let's begin with some technical aspects:

• It's called "Restaurant Week" but runs for two weeks. [If you think that's confusing, New York's Restaurant Week started on January 18th and is still going...officially!]
• While lots of restaurants are participating, many are not
• Not every participating restaurant is offering both lunch and dinner menus
• The official dates of the event's two weeks exclude Saturdays, but many restaurants choose to include them [Saturday is the busiest day/night of the week for most restaurants; I think the organizers didn't want participating restaurants to be forced to do anything that would hurt them - such as serve a menu that would drive sales DOWN on a busy night.]
• Some restaurants choose to extend the event to run the entire month of March

But that short list is Algebra 1 compared with the calculus each restaurant and diner must work through to reach a go/no-go decision:

• For expensive and generally busy restaurants, Restaurant Week can create a real bargain if you're the guest- a full meal for what they might normally charge for an entre. But for the expensive restaurateur, offering a prix-fixe menu at this price will COST them money since their regular check average can be much higher. I believe this is at the root of why a number of high end restaurants do not participate.
• I heard that in past years some high end restaurants that did participate chose to limit the number of seats they allocated to Restaurant Week diners, requiring all other guests to order from their regular menu. Not sure if that's the case this year or not.
• Menu engineering [yup, that's real industry terminology] strategy for the high end restaurant has to be pretty challenging to settle on: Does the expensive restaurant offer up a menu of the same quality with the same portion sizes for the lower price - therefore shrinking their margin but giving their guests something really special, or do they reduce costs by shrinking portions, streamlining recipes or using lower quality ingredients so that they can still make money at the lower price point?
• Lower end restaurants run into the opposite problem: What if the Restaurant Week pricing structure makes your restaurant MORE expensive than you normally are? Is the strategy to serve the same food at higher prices to cash in, or to reach higher, serving more elaborate preparations, with better ingredients, or perhaps larger portions, trying their best to impress?

As Richard, one of my partners often says: "Things that make you go 'Hmmmm...'"

At The Elephant Walk it was the process of deciding how to approach summer Restaurant Week last August that informed our new prix fixe strategy that we implemented last fall when faced the value challenge head on and lowered our prices. First and foremost, we decided that prix-fixe menus should be about value. So during Restaurant Week for the $33.09 dinner price we offer 4 courses instead of 3, with the option of skipping any course if it feels like too much food or money, and thereby lowering the price to $29.95.

Our regular dinner tasting menu runs $33.95 so the Restaurant Week tasting menu is very close to what we normally do [we change up the dishes to add some extra value and make it more interesting]. - At lunch during Restaurant Week we're confronted with the event requirement to charge MORE than we normally do so we add value by serving more costly preparations

So, after all that, what is a diner to do? - Certainly, no one needs my advice to find happiness, but if anyone were to ask I would tell them something along the same lines as what I tell our guests when pairing food with wine: Having food you like with wine you like will get you closest to a meal you'll love. - Ergo, during Restaurant Week, don't over think it [like I've just done above!]: Visit restaurants you like with people you enjoy and you'll almost certainly have a wonderful meal!

Challenging Flavors

One of the things we've been doing in recent months is trying to align our self-perception with that of our customers. Our first step down that path was recognizing that most people view us as Asian restaurants first, and not fine-dining. And since most people expect non-sushi Asian restaurants to be inexpensive, we realized that we needed to lower our prices and did so in October.

Tomorrow night's "Challenging Flavors" dinner at The Elephant Walk in Waltham is another step in the direction of seeing ourselves as others see us.  While perennial Elephant Walk favorites like Poulet la Citronnelle, Loc Lac, and Khar Saiko are authentic Cambodian dishes, they offer fairly mainstream flavors - very approachable for the vast majority of our clientele.

Most of our Cambodian menu consists of more approachable dishes for one simple, sound business reason: People like them and rarely send them back. For a vocal minority in the dining public, however, our playing it safe has been tantamount to a betrayal of sorts.

As you probably already know, there are relatively few Cambodian restaurants in this country, and precious few with a national profile such as ours. So when some people come to The Elephant Walk and find that prahok - a fermented and salted fish paste that is Cambodian cuisine's one truly unique ingredient - has only a bit part in our play, they feel let down and really slam us for it.

Those critics make a fair point. As a more mainstream Cambodian restaurant concept, it makes good business sense for us to emphasize the flavors that we've learned our clientele wants, and avoid serving those flavors they've taught us they'd rather not try again! But what about that vocal minority that craves the rustic intensity of prahok, bitter melon, shrimp paste, tamarind, and durian? What about their needs? One answer is our Challenging Flavors dinner tomorrow night in Waltham.

It is a small irony that our Cambodian, chef-owners, Nyep and Nadsa - who are mother and daughter - themselves prefer the more challenging flavors of their cuisine even as their customers do not. So they're pretty excited about tomorrow night!

Predictably, there's still some space available if you want throw your palate for a loop. But if you want to have this experience but can't make it tomorrow, don't worry: "Challenging Flavors" is a very special theme dinner we are sure to host again soon!

Time flies...

Hello again... It doesn't FEEL like four months but it has indeed been four months since my last post...a cardinal sin in the blogosphere. Can't - won't - let THAT happen again!

It's been a busy time. Since early November, among other things, we've remodeled our Cambridge restaurant, really warming things up there. [And we now serve Sunday brunch and lunch Monday-Friday in all three restaurants.]

We've also been adjusting to the new economic reality confronting just about everyone: people simply have less money to spend.

There are marketing "experts" who counsel lying about how things are going ["never let them see you sweat"] when things aren't going great. And in my experience most small business owners really prefer not to tell the truth when times are tough. I prefer to respect people's intelligence [don't kid yourself: most people already know how things are going!], and I especially want to "keep it real," which in this case means having conversations about the truth of the matter rather than what I hope I can make them think. We all stand to gain the most out of what we share with one another when we share honestly, and earn each other's trust.

So, how are WE doing? Sales are definitely off a bit. The fall was off significantly with December particularly slow due to businesses reigning in their holiday celebrations, and that butal three-day snowstorm the weekend before Christmas was no help at all! But, as they were only a little slower than last year, both January and February provided us with a bit of encouragement.

Someone told me in the early 90s that restaurants are leading economic indicators, one of the first things people cut our of their budgets when the begin to worry about their economic well-being, and one of the first things they add back in when they begin to feel better. So what are our restaurants telling us? That the worst is over, but we've not turned the corner just yet.

Yes, like most businesses, non-profits and governments great and small, we have had to make some changes to the way we run our business to feel sure we're going to be serving you - and serving you well - for the long haul. I'll be exploring some of those things in future posts.

But for the moment, let me just thank you for reading, and for continuing to support The Elephant Walk with your patronage and your feedback. We are here for you, and because of you. Thank you indeed.

Defining - and delivering - Authenticity

You know something is authentic when you just know it's "the real deal," right?

Have you ever wondered about The Elephant Walk and how authentic we are?

Probably the most fascinating ad hoc debate I've observed play out on online "foodie" message boards like Chowhound and Yelp, as well as other restaurant listings sites that accept comments such as CitySearch, Zagat, and others, is over whether or not The Elephant Walk is "real - or really Cambodian," or "true - or truly Cambodian." As celebrated as The Elephant Walk has been over the years, we've also taken a lot of hits - some from native Khmers - for NOT being authentic.

Sigh... Of course we brought that on ourselves first when we chose to serve French food in addition to Cambodian food. But we really invited criticism from native Khmers and others who know Cambodian food well when we took the risk of creating NEW Cambodian food.

I remember well the evening in late 1992 when Nyep and I sat down at a table in the dining room of our orignal Somerville restaurant to talk about making some menu changes. After a tumultuous first year serving Cambodian food to primarily non-Cambodians in America, we had learned a few things about our guests' preferences. One of those things we learned was that the really strong and unusual Cambodian flavors were frequently rejected.

Customers sent back significant percentage of dishes that had enough shrimp paste, fish sauce, or prahok [the one truly unique Cambodian ingredient: preserved featherback fish - a VERY pungent fishy and salty paste that our primarily Western waitstaff dubbed "Cambodian cheese"] to really dominate their flavor profiles. And the people who ordered them sometimes left unhappy, panning us to their friends, and sometimes to our faces!

To tell you the truth, those experiences worried us. We wondered about the potential long-term affect on our business of serving people food they wouldn't like. Our most creative adaptation was to create a boxed-out section on our menu we called "Challenging Flavors." "Caveat Emptor!" we wrote, warning people that the flavors in those dishes were not for the faint of heart, or palate, and that people who didn't want a relatively extreme experience ought to think twice about ordering them. But even then we still had what felt like too many people leaving not having enjoyed their first Cambodian meal.

That was the context when Nyep and I sat down that night to talk about our next menu. She confided that she was worried, feeling like she had already presented most of the traditional Cambodian food that she thought our guests would enjoy. Well, what about presenting some new Cambodian food?, I said.

I'm not sure that even today most Asian chefs are comfortable creating new food for their their native culture. Even today most "ethnic" restaurants - Chinese, Mexican, Greek, Cambodian, you name it - tend to have menus very similar to one another. But now and then chef-driven restaurants serving higher-end "continental" cuisines - I'm thinking French and Italian, primarily - offer menus likely to be entirely unique, or original. More to the point, rarely in my experience do Asian restaurants in America take the "risk" creating an entirely new, original dish.

And I'm sure Nyep felt the same way that night; one just doesn't create new Cambodian food. It is our duty to serve the traditional, the familiar.... But of course, that leads to a dead end.

I pressed my case: "Who makes the rules, anyway? You're Cambodian. You're the best Cambodian cook I know, probably among the best in the world. If you prepare a dish that uses traditional Cambodian ingredients and techniques, is it not Cambodian just because no one's ever had it before? I think you are a culinary artist with the talent and this wonderful opportunity to continue to develop the medium in whatever direction your instincts take you.

"Chefs create; cooks re-create. You're a chef! You have every right to create new Cambodian food - as long as you respect the art of Cambodian cooking as you understand it.

"Plus, if you create new Cambodian dishes, you guarantee that The Elephant Walk will always remain unique, unlike any other Cambodian restaurant. And by continuing to evolve, we'll keep things interesting for our guests who will inevitably become bored if we limit ourselves to the strictly traditional."

Yes, we were worried that we'd reached a dead end. I tried to convince Nyep that new Cambodian food was the way out.

Late one evening about a week later Nyep emerged with a dish of chicken stir-fried in a rich, deep golden curry-like sauce fragrant with garlic, galangal [a ginger-like root] and its slivered kaffir lime leaf garnish. It was beautiful. I dove in. It was absolutely delicious.

"What do you think?" she said... I asked her what it was. Haltingly, she told me she didn't know, exactly; she'd just made it up... I smiled. We were free!

That was Nyep's first original Cambodian dish. She named it "Poulet Dhomrei," and it was a MAJOR hit, immediately. Many more favorites - Avocat Kanthor, Poulet Malika, and more have followed.

This is straight from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language at my favorite online wordsmithing referent, bartleby.com:

"authentic

"adjective: 1. Conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust, reliance or belief. 2. Having a claimed and verfiable origin or authorship; not counterfeit or copied...

"synonyms: bona fide, genuine, real, true, undoubted, unquestionable..."

The most visible change we made with our recent menu change was to reduce our prices so that all of our entres cost less than $20, in line with what we've learned people expect of Asian and ethnic restaurants.

But the other major change is almost as important insofar as it attempts to address the authenticity issue, by clarifying who we are and what we do at The Elephant Walk. We re-classified our dishes so that each item we serve comfortably resides in one of three categories: Traditional Cambodian Food, Original Cambodian Food, and Original French Food.

There has been occasional and understandable confusion over the meaning of "original" in this context. Original Cambodian certainly could mean "First" Cambodian, or to some "True" Cambodian.

However, we refer to those dishes we serve that are known to people already familiar with Cambodian cuisine as "Traditional." Our Traditional Cambodian dishes - and a good synonym in this sense of the word would be "orthodox" - are the old-time recipes, food you'll often find in Cambodia today and served in Cambodian homes and restaurants the world around - dishes Khmer natives recognize as "the real thing."

At The Elephant Walk, our use of the word "Original" in describing our food is - and this is straight from Roget's Thesauraus: "characterized by new things or new ideas; not the sames as what was previously known or done..." - and also "arising from or going to the root or source." In other words, our Original Cambodian dishes are new Cambodian food created by our Cambodian chef/owners, using traditional Cambodian ingredients and techniques, a natural evolution of the Khmer culinary art. 

Is The Elephant Walk authentic? Perhaps that's not for us to say, for some people don't think a restaurant that doesn't serve strictly traditional food can be authentic.

But I think The Elephant Walk is authentic in the sense that our restaurants are an honest expression of who we are. The Elephant Walk is authentically us. We all [the owners] come from multi-cultural backgrounds. I grew up in Asia. Grard [Lopez] is half-French, half-Spanish. The De Monteiros were raised in a Cambodia that was a French protectorate; they were educated in French schools. I think it's fair to say that the bi-cultural aspect of The Elephant Walk is more true to who they are than if it were Cambodian alone.

Our new menu format now makes it possible for anyone to enjoy a strictly traditional Cambodian meal anytime. Someone else will inevitably prefer to dine on some of our Original Cambodian [or French!] dishes instead. But either way, both can feel confident that their meals are authentic!

Defining - and delivering - Value

Defining value is relatively easy. Delivering value is hard. – Hopefully you’ll find this lengthy post delivers some value of it’s own.

What makes something, anything we decide to spend our increasingly precious money on, a good value? Bringing that question home to us, the right-between-the-eyes version became: “Is The Elephant Walk a good value?”

We’ve taken a long, hard look at ourselves this year in the context of value. Of course, we’ve learned some interesting things about subjects other than value that we’ll talk about here at elephantwalktalk as time goes by. But, on the question of whether or not we’re a good value, we found that – surprise, surprise - it depends… It depends heavily on the lens through which people view us.

We learned that most people view The Elephant Walk restaurants through one of two lenses, as either “fine dining” or “Asian.” At the risk of being accused of stereotyping, it seems to us that the dining public gives fine dining restaurants permission to price almost as they like, but most Asian restaurants are expected to price their menus inexpensively. And we concluded that more people view us as Asian [some say “ethnic”] rather than fine dining. Accepting the foregoing, it is not surprising that price over the years became an issue for many customers of The Elephant Walk. For the most part, most people who view us as fine dining considered us a good value. On the other hand, those who view The Elephant Walk primarily as Asian grew to feel we had become expensive – or, in other words, not such a good value.

The choice we made nearly 18 years ago to serve both Cambodian food and French food has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it gives The Elephant Walk texture and nuance; our guests have more choice in an authentic [authenticity will be the subject of a future post!], multi-cultural context. On the other hand, being both Cambodian and French [we ARE bi-cultural restaurants; we are NOT “fusion” restaurants] has sown seeds of confusion, some which have matured into strong opinions about us that conflict with one another.

In all honesty, we’ve probably been a bit confused ourselves about our own identity – a not our cultural identity, mind you, but our economic/marketing/branding identity. I’ve been using the term “fine dining” in this post. But a more accurate descriptor of how we’ve regarded ourselves for many years is the restaurant industry has term “upscale casual.” We grew very comfortable viewing ourselves in that context, as peers of many other great restaurants in Greater Boston. What we ignored is that most of them were American or European in theme, there having been relatively few upscale casual Asian restaurants in Greater Boston during our time. We felt very comfortable comparing our pricing with the European and American restaurants in Greater Boston [look for an analysis of the Zagat Survey's list of Greater Boston’s “Most Popular” restaurants in a future post]; in that context we ARE a good value. But the fact is, according to most of our customers [and our sales bear this out: nearly three out of four people order Cambodian food at The Elephant Walk]… we are Asian.

It did not feel good sweeping away the denial, to understand and accept that a large percentage – perhaps more than half – of our existing and potential clientele thought we were overpriced. Swallowing hard, it was on to the obvious next question: What were we going to do about it?

If math is not your thing, please accept my apologies… but one way it’s possible to define Value is in the form of the following equation: V = Q / P or Value is equal to Quality divided by Price. Accordingly, if we increase the Quality of The Elephant Walk dining experience while holding our Prices steady, the Value of The Elephant Walk dining experience goes up. Similarly, if we hold the Quality of The Elephant Walk dining experience steady while lowering our Prices, again, theoretically, the Value of the dining experience we offer goes up.

It was easy to decide that we wanted to commit to providing better value to our guests. In the healthy internal debate that ensued over how, we concluded we should address both quality and price. Quality is the far harder nut to crack since, when you do, it fractures into so many big pieces: We can change how our dining rooms look and feel, what food and drink we serve and how it is presented, how we greet people, seat people, serve people, and much more. We have begun the process of planning how to improve in each of those important areas. But price, while not EASY to address, requires a much narrower focus to address. So it was price where we decided to begin our process of making The Elephant Walk a better value to our guests.

The first decision we faced was: What kind of new pricing policy would be truly meaningful to our clientele? The immediate follow-up question: Can we do it? Our discussion zeroed in on making a genuine effort to price ourselves more in line with Asian restaurants at our level of quality. And we also felt that we had to make it obvious at a glance that our prices were better than they were, and better than other restaurants perceived to be at least at our level of overall quality regardless of ethnicity. The prices on our menus today meet those requirements, with the clearest indication the fact that all of our entres are now under $20.

Reprinting a menu with new prices is easy. Maintaining food quality in the process is hard! Nadsa faced the huge challenge of creating new dishes that met our price and quality standards and re-plating our classics that had to look better while costing less, using the same ingredients. Something had to give, of course. What was required of her was reducing portion sizes where necessary, and possible, to fit our new pricing structure. When she bumped up against a dish that no longer fit, she created a worthy replacement. Nadsa, I think, achieved something great accomplishing this daunting task, recalibrating our menu pricing to meet people’s expectations of Asian restaurants with no sacrifice of The Elephant Walk quality that our guests have loved for so long.

While eating my lunch yesterday afternoon at The Elephant Walk in Waltham, a few days after the last new menu was implemented, I picked up a copy of the September 23, 2008 edition of Stuff @Night, a Boston “scene” bi-weekly. Flipping through the pages I came across a review by Louisa Kasdon of a new Indian restaurant in Brookline, Massachusetts called “Tamarind Bay Coastal Indian Kitchen” – quite a mouthful! It sounds like an interesting place worth checking out – but I digress…

What caught my eye in Ms. Kasdon’s rich and informative review was the conclusion of the third paragraph: “…And with only one or two entres above $20, it’s also a fabulous value.”

I agree.

Do you?

Big menu changes! Lower Prices and Better Organization

Beginning in late September, restaurant-by-restaurant, we introduced new menus at The Elephant Walk.

Perhaps most importantly, we have significantly lowered our prices. Most individual items on our menus have had their prices reduced. Perhaps the most noteworthy change is that all of our dinner entres are now priced below $20.

The other major change is in how we group our dishes together. The Elephant Walk’s choice to serve Cambodian food and French food under the same roof presents its share of challenges in making the experience of dining with us user-friendly.

We've learned over the years [can you believe we are now in our 18th year?!] that each of our guests is looking for something different when they visit us. Accordingly, we rededicated ourselves to the goal this menu redesign of providing a clearer and more useful roadmap to a delightful, personal Elephant Walk dining experience.

To do that we felt we had to give you a way of better understanding the origins of each dish. Accordingly, within each familiar menu grouping of Starter, Soup, Salad, and Entre, we now feature the sections "Traditional Cambodian Dishes," "Original Cambodian Dishes," and "Original French Dishes." And of course, we also provide a definition of each of those sections.

As you might imagine, a great many factors influenced the process of developing this new menu. Probably the three most important were the economy and our reputation for delivering value and authenticity. The organizational introspection and internal debate that this process stimulated was challenging and fascinating.

For those who are interested, we will continue to talk with you about that process here, on our blog.