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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give and Ovation, the Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Zach Oates, and each week I get to chat with industry experts to uncover their strategies and tactics to help you create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is powered by Ovation, the feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. Learn what's actually happening in your restaurants and exactly how to improve while driving revenue. Learn more at ovationup.com. And today we have someone who this is such an honor because I actually have his book right behind me. He is Kevin Baim, the father of three James Beard Restaurant Tour of the Year. He's got 20 James Beard nominations. He's opened 50 restaurants, maybe 51 as of this week, because he's always opening more. Well done, Zach. That is correct. The co-founder of Boca Restaurant Group and the author of Bottomless Cup, a book which was given to me by a good friend Jeff Alexander of Wow Bao, also from there in Chicago. And I was so blown away by the book that I got it on audio and I got the printed copy. And this book is just amazing because, and Kevin, I gotta tell you, in my life, I have cried reading two books, Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember, and Kevin Baeme, The Bottomless Cup. It was such an amazing read, so powerful. And I was like, I would just be honored to chat with you. So it's grateful to have you on the podcast, Kevin. Bro, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

And I'll just admit right now, Nicholas Sparks, he's made me cry.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

He's not afraid to cry over some Nicholas Sparks. That guy, that guy, Nicholas Sparks, he's got the crying thing down, doesn't he? He knows how to tug those heart strings. I mean, every time I start to fall in love with a character, I'm like, oh, don't do it, Zach.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

You know what's gonna happen next. I know. It's the same thing in the music world that like Elliot Smith does me. Oh. Dude, I couldn't even tell you a single Elliot Smith song, but now I'm gonna go look this. Oh, there you go. If you want to feel really sad, hang out with Elliot for a while. He's gonna Okay, done.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Written. Awesome.

Swift And Sons Origin Story

SPEAKER_00 2:09

So, Kevin, I want to start with something that's pretty interesting that I found. This guy, a mutual fan of yours, Joe Fontana, Fry the Coop, he was telling me about the legend that is Swift and Sons. And I think this is just such an interesting story of how they had to thaw the building and how you're like, hey, this is a great place to build a restaurant. And I think that like it speaks to who you are as a person and like not being afraid to do something crazy. Do you want to tell us a little bit about Swift and Sons and what that story is?

SPEAKER_01 2:43

Of course. But first of all, I think that storytelling is such a big part of what we do. And if there's a great story behind it, it like kind of legitimizes the restaurant, makes it seem authentic. And there's nothing more authentic than putting a steakhouse in a building that was the meat locker for meat packing for a hundred years. But the problem was the building had been an icicle for so long. You had to let the building naturally defrost, or it was going to upset the integrity of the building. So for 18 months, we had to let all these stalagmites of ice and all this meat that had been in there freezing for a hundred years and naturally defrost. So we put a camera in there. Because the whole thing was actually like just like a big giant freezer, right? Giant freezer. So the ground floor of that building ended up becoming Swifton's Sons in a land where both Armour and Swift, the two biggest meatpacking companies in the world, were meat packing right outside. That's amazing. And so that became the Google Building, original Google Building in in Chicago, or the second Google building in Chicago. And then we put a steakhouse in there. And we're like, well, that seems pretty natural.

Designing A One-Of-One Steakhouse

SPEAKER_01 3:56

You know, and what it's so fun. When we when we ideate for a restaurant, we basically start to whiteboard and we're like, okay, on this side of the board, what are the core competencies that we need to be a steakhouse? You need big tables and you need to have shrimp cocktail and Caesar salad and different cuts of meat and all those things. And then the right side of the board is what are all those things we're going to do to bend the concept, to make it bespoke, to make it one of one, to make it ours? And so people will throw out some ideas that are awesome and some ideas that are probably moronic, and everything goes on the board, and then we kind of sift through it. And is that a good idea, or is that a terrible idea? Then you sleep on it, and then the next morning maybe it's even worse of an idea. But we threw out things like what if we had a magician who worked the floor and we put table side magic on the menu and a magician could come table side, and that's one of those crazy ideas from those original moments of us going into this cooler that stayed all these years. We've been open 11 years now, and there's a magician on the floor every single night. That is amazing. I love that. So if the magician stayed, what are some of the ideas that got cut? You know, it's so funny. I think I wrote about in the book that I used to always want to have an on-deck circle in the restaurants. And I want to have this table that right before you got sat down, something special happened. And there was one guy working the station, and maybe he was creating an on muse and a drink that was paired with it, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. And so the sixth top would go to the on-deck circle, get a quick on-muse course, be greeted by a bartender, and then go to the table. And I think we quickly said, I think that's impossible in a restaurant that seats 350 people. It's going to get backed up. What do you do to only certain people get it? I remember that as being one of the ideas quickly and swiftly, pun intended, kicked out.

Limitations That Build Grit

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Well, I think that's so cool how you're able to take these ideas in these situations. And the reason I love that, just like the theory of the Swift and Sons building, is because it's a building that you look at and you're like, oh, that's never going to work. Like, let's just tear it down. And I think about the amount of tearing down and building up that you talk about in your book in this memoir. And I think one of the first big moments is like your uh first apartment in your Suzuki. And that Suzuki samurai. And I think about that, and I think about how many people have emotionally been there in that Suzuki. How many people have been like, whatever, this is just like nothing's working in my life, just tear it down, start over. What do you say to people who are feeling discouraged?

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Well, first of all, limitation breeds creativity. If you get too many things handed to you on the front end, I think it softens you up. If you have to go through obstacles, you continue being a student. I think probably one of the best things that ever happened to Tom Brady was the fact that he was a backup quarterback in both high school and college. And he continued to be a student and he learned all these things and he kept fighting, as opposed to someone who's given a magic arm when there's 12 years old. And there's a whole lot of those. The Ryan Leafs of the world. So I think every moment in my life where I was given something that wasn't quite right, it forced me to think my way out of it, including living in my car. So, which led to a fake resume that I I built, my my first wonderful piece of fiction that I wrote that had restaurants on it that had all mysteriously gone out of business. So they couldn't call for a reference check. And so I remember somebody telling me a story once about an architect who said, if you gave me a 10,000 square foot building that was a square and you gave me a building that was hanging off of the side of a mountain, I'll take the side of a mountain every time. Because I'll come up with something more beautiful and more interesting if you give me limitation. So take it as a sign that you're on to something right if it's challenging you. The universe has a way of putting roadblocks in your way if it's worth it. It's kind of an earning process. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

Because I mean, it's also challenging of, you know, the universe might be telling you to go a different direction. Or there may be some things of like I think about in the startup world, just the amount of pivots that you have to make. And sometimes there's things that are hard because you're pushing this hill, you're pushing this ball up this hill that is gonna like there's this cresting moment of like things are starting to work. And then there's the ones where it's like you're pushing the rock into a wall. Like there, there's nothing else beyond this. And I think it takes that humility sometimes to take that step back and say, where are we going? Is this the right path for me?

SPEAKER_01 8:44

Yeah. I

How To Know When To Pivot

SPEAKER_01 8:45

think if I look back on my life and I'm a good detective, and I look at like the failures I've had in my life, I either look back and say, okay, here's the moment where I was too soft, or here's the moment where I wasn't paying attention to the science. I should have known here, here, and here. They left me three clues that we were on the wrong track. And, you know, for whatever reason in life, we don't pay attention sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

What do you recommend to help us pay attention? How do we have those moments that we can like honestly look third party and say, is this a clue of what's going to come? Or do I just need to push through? Like what have you is there anything in the moment, or is it only in retrospect that you can pick those up? Do you think?

SPEAKER_01 9:26

I'm pretty sure it's in self-awareness. You know, is like like looking as you're moving and being very self-critical and having a team that's with you that's not like the guys that used to hang out with Elvis that told him everything he did was perfect and beautiful. You gotta have people around you that say, bro, I think you're on the wrong track here. And so we've always surrounded ourselves with very opinionated, smart people who are very smart in their lane. I've always kind of described it as a heist team. And, you know, people that are strong enough and uh confident enough in their own opinion that they say, dude, I think you're thinking about this in the wrong way. We just went through that last night. We're opening a brand new restaurant this week, and we all just said, you know what? The music's not quite right, is it? At one point I'd said, I think that this is just one playlist. I don't think it's like an early, a middle, and a late. I think it's a restaurant that is more thematic than usual. And I was wrong. We got in the restaurant last night, we're like, nope, we need to shift into another gear at 7:30, and we got to separate the playlists. And so I spent the morning sifting the playlists between an early version and a late version. Any Elliott Smith on there? There is no Elliot Smith. No, nobody, nobody wants that. Elliot Smith is for sucking your thumb and crying in the bedroom by yourself, not for a convivial evening out at the restaurant.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

So not being afraid to really share your opinions and where you fall on the line, Kevin.

Stop Needing To Be Right

SPEAKER_00 10:49

What's a belief that you have about hospitality that you think that most operators might disagree with?

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Oh man. I think it falls with whether the customer's always right or not, because I don't have a yes or a no answer to that. My answer to it is that it doesn't matter, it's irrelevant. Somebody comes into your store, and if they believe the dish is too salty or whatever, who cares? Manipulate the end result that you want to achieve. If you want that guest to come in and they're not being a bad person, help them get to the right answer. Figure out what is going to make them happy. There's so many different tricks when a customer is upset that you can help them de-escalate because the reason might have nothing to do with the restaurant. And so I've always approached it as irrelevancy of being right, which was actually a welcome conference theme once. And Danny Meyer told a story, actually, where when he opened up Union Square Cafe, he had some traders that came in that always said, Give me the most expensive bottle of Chardonnay. And one day it dawned on him, he's like, Man, they always asked for the most expensive one. Instead of bringing him Sonoma Contreras, let's bring him a Polini Montrochet. And so he bought a Polini and he went to the table and he said, Hey, Louis Jadeau, Polini Montrochet. And the guy's like, I asked for a Chardonnay. And Danny was like, Do I tell him that's a Chardonnay? Or do I just get in the bottle that he actually wants? And he's like, it didn't matter that I was right. All I was going to do was embarrass him by telling him. So he went and grabbed the bottle of Sonoma Catrera and he's like, that's more like it. Didn't matter. And so if you're too tied up about being right all the time, it's going to be a lonely place for you. Because really the idea is, how do I make these people feel good? How do I make them feel happy? Take yourself out

Calm Service Recovery Playbook

SPEAKER_01 12:33

of the equation.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

Is that why, Kevin? Because that was actually one of the questions I wanted to ask you was about the whole service recovery. And you seem to be so good at connecting with people when they're upset. And is it this mentality, or like, why do you think you're good at that? And what tips do you have for people who maybe not be as good at that table touch service recovery piece?

SPEAKER_01 12:56

Why the tremendous fear of a couple of things. One, fear of failure early on, but also fear of judgment of others. When I opened Boca, I was having my first baby and I didn't have any money. And it was sort of like if this restaurant doesn't work out, not only am I in a whole lot of trouble, I'm now responsible for other people. So no matter what was going on, all I wanted to do was have that guest come back. So I think just looking with that set of eyes, not taking anything too personally, and being a little bit paranoid about when I would look at tables and say, God, table position two at 31 doesn't seem to be digging it. I'm gonna dig in there a little bit and see what's going on. And then not having knee-jerk reactions to what people are like, hey, this room is too loud, and you're like, Well, no, no, that's what we do here. Sorry. You know, I mean So what about you?

SPEAKER_00 13:53

Is that is that the same thing like in your meetings? Like if someone, if you're in a meeting and someone says something that might be kind of offensive to you, who might be a partner, might be an employee, how do you handle that?

SPEAKER_01 14:05

I am a firm belief that especially within partnerships, nobody draws a line on the sand. And so you give your compelling argument like you're at a court case. And you know, you're like, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me tell you why I think my opinion is right. I've I've heard what you said. Here are the pillars of mine, here's why I think yours won't work. And Rob and I have been good partners for 25 years because neither of us is ever like, I think you're fucking wrong. Let's we're doing it this way. It's been a lot of times that we've compromised, and a lot of times that we said, I'm gonna give you this one, let's see where it lands. Oh, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

And how hard is it not to be like, I told you that wasn't gonna work?

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Well, you you can do it, but only in a jestful way. I told you. I think I knew.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Yeah, so any tips? I mean, like, you know, let's say someone has a restaurant and they're kind of struggling with this aspect of when the guest gets upset, they just fly off the handle. They get super frustrated by it. What would you tell them?

SPEAKER_01 15:09

I'd tell them to take a beat. I first I would say, what pattern of yours do you think that is that makes you react to it in that way? If somebody doesn't like anything, you going straight to, well, I think that's a perfectly seasoned crawfish at Tuffet. I tried it this morning. I tried it in line check, you're wrong. What is that about you and your own ego that can't say, let's get you something else? If you don't like that, I have a whole lot of things back there that I think are gonna make you happy. So let me buy this tonight and get you something else. I mean, that's where I think pre-rehearsing, when you have the wrong reaction to thing, and a day later you could say, I don't know why I was like that. I think it's pre-rehearsal in life of like, let's try this the next time and see what happens. And you're like, Oh my god, that was so much easier. I've kept that person as a guest. They've now told people that they thought I handled it in the right way. We shoot ourselves in the foot a lot of times because of patterns in life. And a lot of times, not to get too deep here, come from because 90% of us has either tried to emulate or rebel against a parent, and it creates patterns in our lives that go back to our parents. And so when we're judged by a guest that we don't even know, we bring way too much of our own ourselves and our own sensitivity into it.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Man, who thought in 15 minutes we'd go that deep? But I think that's I I love that though. I think that it's so true. And it's like you look at what drives you, it's like, man, I want to make my mom or dad proud, or I got criticized about this thing that I think is really important to me. And

Hospitality, Ego, And Being Forgotten

SPEAKER_00 16:50

I think that part of it is you ended the book, I felt like on a very surprising note. It's not what I expected when one of the last things you talk about is basically, and let me share you with you what I got out of it, and you tell me if I was supposed to. People don't really care as much about you as you think they do. It is totally reframed how I think about things in terms of like, you know, here I am running the software company, but it's like I think about this software company a hundred thousand times more than any of my customers think about the software company. And you kind of talk about that from the restaurants and from like life in general. It's like kind of get over yourself and realize that you're only the center of the universe to you.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah, everybody's not uh thinking of you all the time like you think. And I love the expression most people in life will do what's in their best interest, and what you look for is people whose best interest is your best interest. And so if somebody selfishly wants you to be happy because that makes them happy, those are the people in life that are thinking about you and that you want to do good things for, and then there's a whole lot of other people in life that are so concentrated on themselves that if you can be hospitable towards them when you're in their space and show that it's in your best interest, their best interest, that's where you've really won somebody over. That's where you really have a guest for life. When they they're in a moment and you are given the luxury of being a part of their big moment, and you take your little cameo roll, those few seconds that you have, and improve the situation, that's when you've got somebody for life. Man, I love that. You want them to selfishly, selfishly love you. Correct. They're like, Man, I know that if I go to whoever's restaurant on a night when I'm celebrating this, that he is going to take good care of me. This is what people do. I had a very great customer for years named Lynn, who the first time she ever came into Boca restaurant was when we first opened. And she goes, Kevin, I had a nice time, but you probably won't see me in here again. And I said, Why? And she goes, because I'm a Gibson's girl. And she goes, I got asked to this meeting tonight, but I threw a lot of parties for my hospital. I know they always take care of me and you know they always know who I am. And I'm like, well, I could be that person. She's like, well, who knows, maybe. And so several months later, she came back in. And when she walked to the door, I was like, Miss Kahana, it's so good to see you again. And I took care of her the whole dinner. And at the end of it, she goes, You know what? I might end up being a Boca girl too. And then over the years, she threw all kinds of parties and buyouts with us and all this sort of stuff. And it was off of me recognizing her the second time she came in and her feeling like it was in my best interest to take care of her, which it was.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

Yeah. I mean, and I think, Kevin, one of the things that's been incredible to see through your career is just how much you really care about the individuals because in hospitality is proving to the guests that you care, and it's a hand-to-hand combat, and they're not going to care unless they know that you care about them. And I think that you throughout your memoir, just the stories you told about the individuals really showed that.

Earning Regulars Plus Closing Notes

SPEAKER_00 20:02

And so, in conclusion, Kevin, who is someone that deserves an ovation? Who is someone that we should be following?

SPEAKER_01 20:10

There's a guy named Steve Palmer in Charleston who has like 40 restaurants. Indigo Road Hospitality is the name of his company. I spoke at their symposium they have every single year for their employees. And I went to it and it was so educational and so detailed and so loving. All that stuff that they practice all year long, great food, great hospitality. They give it towards their people, and it's this whole education day. He's so good at that. He's so good at culture. He's so good at understanding what other people want because he's gone through his own stuff. He has also a very amazing book about his trials and tribulations. So he deserves an ovation. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

Well, Kevin, how do people find and follow you and where can they get your book?

SPEAKER_01 20:54

They can get my book wherever fine books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes Noble, Target, and books called the Bottomless Cup. And they can find me on Kevin BameBoka on Instagram or at BocaGRP.com, is my restaurant website. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

Well, Kevin, for giving us just a sip from the bottomless cup of your wisdom. Today's experience goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Given Ovation. Thank you. Thanks for joining us today. If you like this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We're all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by Ovation, a two-question SMS-based, actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants. If you'd like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at ovationup.com.