elephantwalktalk

In Search of Sustainable Giving

My previous post mentioned three extraordinary, ongoing efforts to improve our world. Two common threads among them stand out to me: The first, of course, is the belief that literacy and education are crucial fundaments of a stable community that seeks to thrive. The second - and what I want to focus on here - is that it takes money to build and maintain those foundations [double entendre intended].

On September 1, 2009, The Elephant Walk in Waltham will become a Benefit Restaurant™ [not to worry: it will still be The Elephant Walk too!], committed to a new form of philanthropy that actively seeks to reduce the "drag" on the charity/non-profit world that the necessity of fundraising imposes.

We'll share more details of The Elephant Walk in Waltham's added purpose as September 1st approaches. In the meantime I urge you to visit benefitrestaurants.org to learn more about this new concept.

Getting an education... on Education!

Like many of you, I recently finished reading the 2006 bestseller Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin - an astonishing and ongoing story of a man [Mortenson] who, climbing down K2 after a failed summitting attempt, stumbled into a Pakistani village and a new life building schools where there aren't any in northern Pakistan and now Afghanistan.

Working similar magic, but from a somewhat different perspective is John Wood, founder of the remarkable foundation Room to Read, which builds libraries, schools and computer labs in Southeast and Central Asia, and now Africa. I also just finished Mr. Wood's book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, a no less inspiring story of an overworked corporate executive who stumbled upon a cavernous need for better education in the developing world and dropped everything to commit to help build libraries and schools for people who don't have them. - The Boston Chapter of Room to Read held a sold out findraiser at The Elephant Walk in Cambridge last November in pursuit of their goal of building 10 libraries in Cambodia.

It was Heather Faris, Cambridge resident and mother of two students who educated all of us at The Elephant Walk as to what American journalist Bernie Krisher is doing with his non-profit organization, American Assistance for Cambodia [AAfC}- you guessed it: building schools in Cambodia [more than 400 so far] and more. Ms. Faris brought us up to speed early last year on the Cambridge School for Cambodia [CambCamb] project, a grass roots Cambridge organization she was helping run that included many students and was raising money to fund a school through the AAfC. [We hosted a fundraiser in support of their effort at our Cambridge restaurant last April that raised over $5,000. - We're also hosting a follow-up buffet luncheon this coming May 9 - spearheaded by Cambridge high school student Lucy Flamm - to help further the CambCamb mission - (Tickets are still available!)]

Frankly, until recently, I had no idea how many people are making extraordinary commitments of time and money, sometimes even risking their lives let alone their life savings to help bring the opportunity of education to people whose governments and community resources cannot provide it. Their efforts and achievements are amazing and inspiring.

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 entrée. 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!

More than up to the Challenge...

This past Tuesday's Challenging Flavors dinner at The Elephant Walk in Waltham was a lot of fun. The spirited group dove right into all the dishes, which included plenty of pork belly, tamarind, shrimp paste and, of course, prahok. In fact, nothing daunted a soul, nothing until the durian served warm over sticky rice, that is!

It's always dangerous to generalize based on feedback from a self-selected group such as ours, but my biggest take-away from our guests is that flavors that once were extreme may be much closer now to the mainstream than even 10 years ago. Diners' palates have grown so experienced and sophisticated in the modern era of so many wonderful restaurants showcasing the full rainbow of global cuisines that there's not much people really don't like or can't handle. [Except maybe durian.... ;-)]

The wine component of the dinner was matched to the family-style presentation of the food: We offered 4 wines - 2 whites, 2 reds - up to the group to taste through in random fashion. Rather than the strict "this wine goes with that dish" traditional wine dinner format, we went free-form to acknowledge the fact that pairing Western wine with Eastern food is far from an exact science, or no science at all. As I suspected, personal choice ruled, with no obvious, perfect matches.

The one wine surprise to me was that the darker and more concentrated Toro - made with tempranillo - was much preferred over the brighter and fruitier Beaujolais-Villages - made with gamay. No question the Toro was the more elegant wine but what I didn't expect was that it would find such favor with our guests in the context of an unusual meal. To me, that's robust support for this truism I personally adhere to: "Have wine you like with food you like and very likely you're going to have a meal you like." - Tuesday's Challenging Flavors dinner was a good meal indeed.

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 à 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!