Give an Ovation: The Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast with Zack Oates
Give an Ovation: The Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast is your backstage pass to the minds of hospitality leaders, innovators, and operators who are redefining what it means to serve. Hosted by Zack Oates, founder of Ovation, each episode dives into real-world tactics and inspiring stories from restaurant pros who know how to create five-star guest experiences—both in-store and off-premise.
From fast casual to fine dining, catering to curbside, learn how to drive loyalty, empower your staff, and deliver hospitality that hits home. Whether you're a restaurant owner, operator, marketer, or tech partner, this podcast will leave you with practical insights and plenty of reasons to celebrate and Give an Ovation.
Give an Ovation: The Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast with Zack Oates
Selling A Feeling with Scott Lawton
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At the beginning, Scott Lawton didn't know what food he was going to sell at his restaurant concept - but he knew how he wanted it to feel. The rest figured itself out.
On this episode, we explore the art of creating an exceptional guest experience with Scott Lawton, CEO of bartaco and Uncle Julio's Restaurant Group. Scott shares how bartaco cultivates a unique atmosphere, blending concepts from lifestyle retail with dining to offer guests a memorable escape. He discusses the origins of bartaco, inspired by food trucks, and its focus on light, healthful fare.
We also delve into how Scott's team uses customer data to enhance guest satisfaction. Through incentivized surveys and a focus on welcoming first-time guests, they prioritize the emotional experience over sales numbers. Learn how technology plays a key role in making every visit to bartaco special.
Thanks Scott!
Creating a Five-Star Guest Experience
Speaker 1Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation , the restaurant guest experience podcast , where I talk to industry experts to get their strategies and tactics you can use to create a five-star guest experience . This podcast is sponsored by Ovation , an operations and guest recovery platform for multi-unit restaurants that gives all the answers without annoying guests with all the questions . Learn more at OvationUpcom . And today we have the man himself , Mr Scott Lawton , the CEO and co-founder of Bar Taco , currently the CEO of Uncle Julio's Restaurant Group . Welcome to the show , Scott . How are you ?
Speaker 2I'm great , zach . Thanks for having me , man . Sorry , it took a little while for us to get together , but I'm thrilled to be here .
Speaker 1You know what the best things you got to wait for them . And so this was we finally got it on the calendar and made both of our schedules work for this . So appreciate that . And one thing I'd love to jump into is I love to talk about secret sauces . Talk about secret sauces and something about bar taco is just so special . And I guess , what is it , scott ? Like , why does bar taco have two hour waits constantly ? Why can I never get in when I'm , when I'm in Boston ? Like , what do you think it is about Bar Taco that's created such a vibe ?
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean , I think you just nailed it . We've created a vibe that you know I tell this story a lot , but sort of , when we created the brand and I call it a brand , it's not a chain , it's not a restaurant group , it's a brand and that was really the intention when we started was we wanted to become a brand , a lifestyle brand , if you will . We were watching retail . We were watching this was 14 , 15 years ago . So it was like Urban Outfitters , anthropologie , lululemon , all of these brands . It wasn't the Gap and Sears and those things anymore . It was like these people created an ethos , a place where you walked in and it gave you a feeling and it really didn't matter what they sold , as long as it fit the brand . So , you know , you go into anthropology and you could end up with a bar of soap , a book or bedding or a full outfit like it , but all of it fit that anthropology feel . Everybody who worked there feels like anthropology and we thought that there was , um , a real opportunity to do that in the restaurant space . We thought the restaurants were way behind . You know , and there are a lot of great brands that we admired , you know , patagonia and and um , they were just we .
Speaker 2We started with not what we're going to sell , but why are we going to sell it ? I'm excited , baby . We dug into the , we started with the why we started with . What's the purpose of this place ? What do we want you to feel ? Because , ultimately , we always say this inside our company we don't sell tacos , we sell fun , and we believe that we sell a feeling don't sell tacos , we sell fun . Um , and and we believe that we sell a feeling . We sell um an escape , uh , a little bit of time away , laughter with your friends , um , kind of you , you can feel transported to any beach you may love . I mean it it's reminiscent of , of vacation , almost , um , and we wanted it to be healthful . We didn't want you to walk out feeling full . We want so , no queso , no sour cream . That's why we don't have the heavy food . We actually wanted you to have this affinity with the brand that we wanted to be like .
Speaker 2I think Howard Schultz , uh , he always talked about the third place , uh , where you have your office and you have your home . But what's that third place where you have find refuge ? And that was the original sort of idea around what Starbucks was going to be was this third place . We remember that's when they used to have the cool baristas and the couches and you could use Wi-Fi all day in the bathroom and nobody would bother you , even though you just had a skinny latte . So that's why we don't upsell , that's why we don't try and raise the check average . So all those things , to me , were antithetical to creating this third place environment , this hangout .
Speaker 2So , anyway , we start with these big storyboards with pictures of surfers , skateboarders , mountain bikers that we had , like , um , beaches that we loved . We had people sitting on the back of a pickup truck drinking a beer with a fire on the beach . You know , all these different pictures were just starting to just kick in . What is this ? What is this ? You know what is this feeling ? And , um , we didn't get to the what we're gonna to sell .
Speaker 2Probably for six months to a year , sasha , my partner , had already had this idea that he wanted to start a retail store that happened to sell food and he was going to call it Max Wave and it was going to be a pizza oven in the back with surfboards . That was kind of the original thought , but this continued to evolve as we spoke about it and thought about it and we started to become obsessed with taco trucks . 14 , 15 years ago , the only way to get a real authentic great Mexican taco was find a taco truck and there's a whole bunch of them in New Haven , connecticut , that we would ride up to and eat these tacos and we're like these are so good . There's no full service restaurant that sells tacos . Like , maybe we try that . And so it was this crazy idea . It really was um , and it was on a shoestring budget . The first one , poor chester , it was um , it was . You know .
Speaker 2I think the famous quote from andy is okay , you guys go try that crazy taco thing you want to do , because it was more of a real estate play at the time . He had this great space on the water that was available to us and it was too close to Barcelona so we couldn't put a Barcelona there . So , all right , let's try that crazy taco thing . So we just kept riffing before we opened and we had all these ideas . Like we started without waiters , we started with paper cards and people would run around and grab the cards , ring it in . We got so busy that we couldn't manage it that way , so we moved to a more traditional model because of how busy we were and also the type of clientele that was showing up . And the reality was technology didn't exist to solve the problem at the time , but continue to kill it , and it's always been .
Speaker 2I think , when you walk into bar taco , there's this feeling of if you can make it in there , if you get in there's this feeling of wow , what a cool place . But also this feeling of familiarity , like it feels , it resonates . You know , and I remember when we , the day we opened , walking into the first one and just going wow . And I remember somebody else saying to me you know , I've never seen anything any place like this , but I can't understand why nobody's ever done it before . You know , and what a great feeling that is . That's when you know you kind of did something . You know . So , yeah , and we've been , we've been fighting to keep that culture and and and know what we sell , which is vibe and fun , ever since .
Speaker 1And I think that , staying true to that and I love that you started with the storyboards and you started you truly started with how you want things to feel .
Speaker 1Now , that's not the only way to do that , right , I mean right before , the podcast I did yesterday was with Dave's Hot Chicken , right , and they started with the food , had no idea what the brand was , but they just started with food and they are just , they are the vibe , like the founders are cool enough that it resonated with the LA market and the thing about LA and that whole beach vibe is it's very it's not like New York , right , like our brands that we work with in New York , they have a hard time scaling outside of New York because people look at it as like , oh , that's New York , but brands from LA , it seems very attainable , right , it seems everyone from middle America to New York can be like , yeah , I vibe with that . And the fact that you started with that feeling and then added to it great food , because , keep in mind , that doesn't mean you could have crappy food and do that . If your food sucks , it doesn't matter how cool your vibe is , right , no , no , no .
Speaker 2No , the feeling is all-encompassing , it's the food , it's everything you know . So you have to take that . I mean the food to us is the most important the quality and executing that on a daily basis and making sure it's craveable . But yeah , you know it's . I think in this world we're living in , where there's third-party delivery , there's tons of takeout , there's ghost kitchens , there's all these things happening .
Speaker 2If you look in my cloudy crystal ball , one of the things that I see is , in the future there's not going to be a lot of reason for brick and mortar unless there's a reason to be there besides just getting food and eating it .
Speaker 2Because I think you can get any food you want easily through a triple drive-through or a third-party delivery or whatever it may be now and sit in the comfort of your own home and enjoy that cuisine . So what we sell if we're going to continue to get Class A real estate and build expensive restaurants , we have to sell a feeling , because you can't replicate that yet . They don't have the virtual AR glasses with the sandwich , so you're in there yet . I don't know what's going to happen then , but for now , the other thing that we sell is community . We sell time where people like they feel an elevated sense of happiness when they're there and they're with their friends . And tacos and margaritas make people happy but also making them a little less guilty . Feeling when you eat them and also giving this incredible vibe really resonates with everybody .
Speaker 1I love that . So how would you , if you were to kind of talk around your secret sauce when it comes to the guest ? Talk around your your your secret sauce when it comes to the guest experience . Like , what do you think is the most important aspect of guest experience nowadays ?
Speaker 2I think it's , it never has changed . That's the one thing . That's , that that's a constant is human interaction . It's it's . You know . You know I think of Will Godera's book Unreasonable Hospitality you know when you sell that , when you sell that feeling , you know that doesn't change
Maximizing Customer Happiness Through Data
Speaker 2. You know technology is really great but it can't replace that . It can actually amplify that if you use it correctly , can actually amplify that if you use it correctly . It can be a tool for great people who really want to go in every day and make people happier and know that that's what they're selling . It can be a tool that enables that and amplifies that . And we stay true to that and try and find technology that can help us with it .
Speaker 1Love that and and and , as you're looking at that , and is there anything that you , any tactics or any tools that you specifically have found to be like successful for you guys ? Yeah , so .
Speaker 2I actually just got to speak at the OLO shift for conference , beyond force right Conference last week and and one of the tools that I shared at that time was you know , a lot of people are looking at sort of a customer data platform and things like that as a marketing tool . That's everybody's looking at data right now is marketing like that . That's the easy pick and you know , we have data , let's market with it . We've operationalized that and so we have a five week rolling report that Basically shows the customer sentiment , the entire process that they went through in the restaurant , by server stack ranked and by manager . So you get a survey when you come to Bar Taco , after you eat I don't know if you've noticed that and it gives you about four or five questions and we give you a taco token a virtual taco token to come back and eat with us for the feedback . We'd like to pay you for your feedback and that feedback actually goes into a large gridded chart .
Speaker 2It's like looking at baseball stats and we see how everybody's performing by category , by store , by day . My first read in the morning I wake up and I'll read my sentiment email , which has about 500 comments on it along sorted by store and it also has all the social and every other feedback brought into one and we all start with that in the morning . We don't start with sales . We start with that and we will engage the regional directors , the GMs and everyone around how the sentiment went that day , how was the feeling , how'd it go ? And everyone around how the sentiment went that day . How was the feeling , how'd it go ? So we actually measure happiness on a daily basis and try and improve it .
Speaker 1I love that , because there are so many brands who do lip service to voice of customer where they say , ah , the guest is the most important thing at our brand , but yet they're not even measuring it right . Or if they are measuring it , they're looking at their online reviews and look , folks , I hate to break it to you , you will never get operational , statistically significant data on what to fix and what's going wrong by looking at your online reviews . It skews positive , it skews negative and it factors into the 1% of the 1% of people who have an experience at your brand . That's not indicative or representative right . Online reviews are similar to revenue in that they tell the story of what happened a while ago . They're not telling the story of what's happening right , right .
Speaker 2So we break down every day , the next day and try and do better . We also look at it sort of over a five-week rolling average so that there's enough data to actually see trends . And we work hard to get lots of data , because you need a lot of data to actually know that it's statistically true . So that's why we send out all of these surveys , that's why we incentivize the customer to fill them out , and we're a guest-first company . Both on Uncle Julio's side and the Bartaco side we are guest-first and we live by that . So we wake up every day literally sweating about did we make guests happy ? And I feel like sales are actually not the leading indicator , they're the lagging indicator , but happiness and frequency are the leading indicators . So we'll lean into those and look up at the scoreboard every once in a while and see how we're doing .
Speaker 1I love that . I think that's a great way to do it and , scott , you obviously know so many people in this industry , but if you had to mention one or two people who we should be following , some people that you think are more luminaries in this space , who deserves an ovation ?
Speaker 2Oh , that's a good question . There's there's quite a few out there that I like to follow . Yeah , Zach Goldstein I'm a fan of Zach . I think he has a really good perspective on things . You know , we don't do a loyalty program yet , but if I do one , it's going to be with him because he gets it , you know .
Speaker 1Yeah , great call out Zach . Zach has been not only a great partner , but they you know they do some great tech and we , we keep , we keep getting requests to integrate with them , and so we've . We've been integrated with them for a long time , but every time that there's a new request , it just means that there's more and more people using them and we keep seeing them coming up quite a bit .
Speaker 2So I think he's . He's helped teach the industry and he was ahead of his time a little bit around loyalty and and how it fits in our space , cause I don't think it fits in our space the same way it fits in airlines or hotels . And you know we're in the true hospitality space so you know when you're not going to be the the , the diamond , the platinum and the lead customer . You know when you come in the first , the first visit is maybe the most important visit , so you need to be , you know , one of the top priorities when you walk in as a new customer .
Speaker 1Yeah , and it's a factor that there's not four restaurants that I get to choose from right . There's thousands .
Speaker 2So we got to do the reverse of loyalty , like we actually really focus very hard on the first customer , their first visit , because there's a lot of sort of learning that you need to adapt to in Bartaco . So we might need to hold your hand a little bit or find out how you want to Bartaco because it's an omni-channel experience . So you know it's to me loyalty actually leans the other way . It's very much towards the frequent guests , but we're really interested in converting the first one into the funnel and kind of moving them through . We're pretty actually confident by the third time they've come to us they become a regular , it just happens . So how do we get them through those first three visits and really make sure that their experience is great the first few times ?
Speaker 1Yeah , right , cause it's like you've got like five restaurants that you go to on a rotating cycle and then maybe you'll try out a couple more , but what's it going to take to bump into those , those five that the guest puts on a rotating cycle ? And if you don't have a phenomenal first experience that at least meets expectations , you're not getting into their five . Right , you've got to figure out how to dethrone one of those five restaurants , and the only way to do that is by you create enough buzz to get a shot and then you make that shot .
Speaker 2Yeah , one of the things that's interesting about Bartaco , I mean , is typically we have some that are juggernauts . It's just the minute we open the door it's a line out the door . But if it's a new market or we're a new area where people don't know us , it doesn't start as fast as you would think .
Speaker 2It takes a little while for everyone that loves what we do , invites what we do with what we do to find us . But once they do , same-store sales increase year over year , over year over year . Like you know , borchester , which is our first restaurant , I think the first year was maybe 4 million ish and now it's 10 million a year . You know it's each year same store growth . It just happens year over year and that shows me just we can see it sort of through all the customer data is we're becoming part of people's lives . You know we , we , we , we get into people's rotation and stay in their rotation . You know it's , it's something that that you know neighborhood restaurants pull off really well , like you know your neighborhood local joint , but but it's very hard for large , larger groups to pull that off and we found that that's something that's very important for us Love that man , well Scott for our listeners who love this podcast I'm sure every single one of them did and they want to learn more and follow you and your adventures .
Speaker 1Where can they find you ?
Speaker 2Sure , I'm on LinkedIn , scott Lawton . You can follow me . Bartaco's on there as well . Bar Taco Life on Instagram Jump on , we got lots of fun things there . We're all over TikTok . We have to ask my kids how to find us on TikTok , but we're all over it .
Speaker 1I love that , scott . Well , scott , for creating my favorite taco , which is a taco filled with fun , and for teaching us the secret ingredient which is data . Today's ovation goes to you . Thank you for joining us and give an ovation .
Speaker 2Awesome . Thank you , and you're right , data is a new currency .
Speaker 1Talk to you soon . Glad you're with us today and thank you . Thank you to the risk takers , the troublemakers , the crazies who are keeping this world clothed and fed . You're the ones who deserve an ovation . Again , this podcast was sponsored by Ovation . To see how we can help you grow your business , go to OvationUpcom , don't forget to subscribe and , as always , remember to give someone in your life an ovation today .