Graphic Design and the Dining Experience

While recently lamenting (for the umpteenth time, of course) the undying myth that graphic designers simply make pretty pictures, I happened to come across a brief little article on logo designer Louise Fili, who designs primarily for the hospitality and F&B industries.

The article touches on the power of graphic design when it comes to the dining experience, noting in particular that menu materials and presentation can directly impact the diner's opinion and actions. I figured I'd take the opportunity to expand on this a little, and point out a few ways restaurant owners can use graphic design to influence their guests' experience.



The Eyes Are Always the First to Digest
While every restaurant must turn out good food, the very first thing guests actually experience is the way a restaurant looks. This includes cleanliness, the floor plan, fabrics and textures, and so on. But it also includes the single unifying visual element of any restaurant: the logo. Think about the specific moments in which a guest - or potential guest - will see your restaurant's logo:

• When visiting your website after hearing about your restaurant for the first time
• When passing your restaurant during off hours
• When noticing your business card on a friend's desk
• When seeing your ad in a local paper

This list doesn't even touch on the many moments once a guest passes through your doors. It should be clear to you, then, why your logo should adequately and accurately represent your menu, your ambience, your service, and your values. Your logo, after all, is often the first visual clue a potential customer will see when faced with the choice of making a reservation.

The Menu Is a Tool, Not an Order Form
The point of any menu is to inform the diner of their options, of course. But smart restauranteurs use the menu to guide diners to particular choices. This requires careful consideration of size, item placement, colors, and materials.

Provide the guest with a visual path
Text formatting, colors and layout all serve to pull the eye along a specific path. You don't have to draw a large neon box around your high-margin specials, but consider where you place particular menu items to encourage ordering.

Be honest and clear
Avoid florid menu descriptions that don't actually tell the diner what they need to know. Specific ingredient details are fine, but ask yourself - does my customer come away knowing exactly what they'll get?

Reinforce the food
Menu presentation should reflect your food. If your food is simple and clean, for example, avoid elaborate menu folders or busy prints and textures.

Use Graphics to Build the Experience
Your guests want more than just good food - they want a complete experience that stays with them and brings them over and over again. Remember that list of moments when a potential customer might come across your logo? Consider, too, the moments that your guests will encounter other visual elements, and use them to build the experience:

• Menu (of course)
• Door and window signage
  
• Drink lists
  
• Table tents
• Other signage (restrooms, directional signage, etc)
• Check delivery
• Email correspondence
• Business cards
• Print ads
• Coupons and gift certificates

Every time you put a message out to the public - within your doors or without - that communication should reinforce your restaurant's identity. Everything a guest or potential guest sees should serve to enhance that experience, so they remember your distinct look, feel and flavors.

Drunk Driving Campaign

Nice environmental installation from Jupiter Drawing Room for Arrive Alive South Africa. These appeared in nightclub restroom stalls:



[Via Osocio]

How Word Choice Influences Behavior: The Hotel Towel Example

If you ever need to influence people's behavior, you might consider Dr. Robert Cialdini's approach. Cialdini has conducted numerous studies exploring how different types of messaging impacts the public's actual behavior. One such study focuses on those cards in your hotel bathrrom urgng you to reuse your towels. As it turns out, how those cards are worded makes a big difference in whether or not guests pay attention:

"In this series of experiments, Dr. Cialdini and his colleagues created four cards asking guests to reuse their towels. Three cards contained a pro-environment message, while the fourth informed guests that the majority of hotel guests reuse towels when asked. In rooms with the fourth card, towels were reused 34 percent more frequently." [from the Inside Influence Report [note: link broken, try the home page, emphasis added]

There are several conclusions that can be drawn from this research:

1. Word choice matters...a lot;
2. People are more likely to act (or not act) based on what they think others are doing (or not doing);
3. It is possible to realize dramatic behavior change with very low investment.
   

So the next time you're trying to get someone to do something, think carefully about how you deliver your message.

The Designer of LodgeNet's New Logo Speaks

"I joked with my client that it isn't what we create as much as what I talk you out of that has real value."

-Jerry Kuyper

[Full interview at Brand New/UnderConsideration]

The Continued Greening of Hotels, Restaurants and F&B

I knew the hospitality industry was a taking a turn for the better when I was asked to write a training program for Omni Hotels' Art of Breakfast initiative last year (the training taught Omni's employees about their new organic food selection and sustainable suppliers). Given how far the industry has to go when it comes to sustainability, it's reassuring to see the increased attention hotels and restaurants are giving to green issues. With so much room for improvement, I have no doubt the trend will continue.

Restaurants
It seems I'm not alone. The Washington post reports that the Green Restaurant Association is experiencing the most inquiries it ever has, while individual restaurants begin integrating greener ingredient and materials sourcing, and other techniques.
Key resource: Green Restaurant Association (note: they seem to be having server issues)

Hotels
Whether large chains or independent operators, the fact that hotels deal in volume means they consumer more resources and produce more waste than many other business models. The American Hotel and Lodging Association recently compiled a series of green hospitality case studies to encourage hotels to implement new practices.
Key resource: Green Hotelier's selection of "Practical Solutions"

Food & Beverage
Hospitality isn't the only area focusing on these issues, though. F&B manufacturers continue to move toward organic ingredients (for all the labeling controversy that stirs up), and event planners work towards offering more sustainable options and reducing their own environmental impact. The San Francisco Chronicle discusses the rising organic food trend, which seems to be driven largely by consumer demand. Manufacturers keep turning out more organic options, like Square One Organic Vodka, as well as making sustainability a corporate priority.

Overall, the outlook is good and benefits continue to flow in. Over the weeks ahead, I'll be providing some practical solutions for hotels and restaurants who are interested in greening up their operations.

Lessons from Ike Turner: The negative outweighs the positive

Ike Turner died a couple of days ago. When you think of Ike, I bet you think immediately of Tina. And how he hit her. And all that cocaine he did. But Ike Turner also played an integral role in the history of rock 'n' roll, funk,
r 'n' b, soul and blues. His guitar, his ear, and his writing all shaped American music. "Rocket 88" came from him and his band.

Despite his musical contributions—well recognized by any professional musician around—Ike's reputation hangs static thanks to his abusive behavior. They made a movie about it, and his ex-wife wrote about it. No matter how much he tried to dismiss it or overwrite it, it's the image the general public keeps coming back to. It's just too heavy to forget, and he was so cavalier about it we don't have any inclination to.



Doing drugs and smacking people around aren't the only ways to destroy the positive work we do, though. A rude comment, or a refusal to cooperate, or a simple mistake gone unnoticed are all it might take. People are quicker to judge than to forgive these days and with the immediacy of our current market, it's unlikely that they'll give us a chance to fix things if they feel we've screwed them over. That is, if they even let us know how they feel (most customers don't bother complaining, they just go elsewhere).

I love Ike Turner's music. It was a backbone. Ike and Tina together were a force (of course, she'd be a forced even if backed by Lawrence Welk). I remember my dad playing "Nutbush City Limits" from a cassette I still have that hisses from being played too much, with that guitar stomping out of the speakers. It was unreal. But Ike screwed up bad, and he was so unapologetic about it that, as Rob Walker laments, his screw-up may forever overshadow his pioneering work.

No matter the talent, no one is perfect—in their personal life or in business—but I'd like to think that how we face our imperfections can be almost as powerful as what we do in the first place.

Hoisting a glass in honor of Repeal Day

The following is an article from the New York Sun dated September 6, 1930. It's the story of one family in the restaurant business—my family—and not only is it a fascinating look at hospitality and daily life in the first half of the last century, it also seems an appropriate way to honor Repeal Day.



"A recent transfer of a lease for a restaurant property in Chambers street, near Broadway, brings back memories of a family who for fifty years or more catered to the eating and drinking appetites of some of the best known men in New York. It was the house of Schmidt—headed by the father Louis, and his two sons, Ollie and George. They actually put the liquor or saloon business on the business map and conducted it as one might conduct a banking institution.

Louis Schmidt opened and ran for many years the place at 6 Center street and it was known far and wide as Pier 6. Just why this name became attached to the place is not of record. It was in this place that two sons were instructed into the mysteries of drink mixing. From the start they liked the business and stuck to it as long as Andrew Volstead kept his ideas to himself.

It must be conceded that the Schmidt menage was good when it had upward of a dozen competitors in the triangle on which now stands the Municipal Building. It was then bounded by Tryon Square on the south, on which the Staats-Zeitung Building faces; Center street, Chambers street and Park Row. In the newspaper building there was a famous rathskeller. Next door was Pier 6. Then came Leggat's hotel and bar. Two doors away was Humpy Hanover's Curio and on the corner Paddy Shea's.



While all these places were going full blast, the Schmidt boys and their father kept right on selling good things to eat and drink. George, the younger son, was born over the saloon on Center street and has been in business barely three blocks away from there during his life. Ollie, being older, took over the burden when his father died and continued the name of Schmidt in the purveying business.

Not far away from the Schmidt domicile was the home of the Stender family in William street, just around the corner from Spruce street. Ollie was a live wire and so was Emma Stender, the niece of the elder Kate, who established the famous Kate's, which ran until a few years ago and which went out of business because liquor was taboo in the premises. Good food could be had until the day the key turned in the door for the last time. Some years ago Ollie died. His wife, Emma, assisted by sisters, Kate and Frieda, tried to carry on. Many of the old customers stuck, although they had to forgo their accustomed whisky sour or the seductive cocktail or a schoppen of Rhine wine with their meals.

Ollie had died and Emma had followed in a few years and the load was left for Kate and Frieda. It was too much of a load with only a few hours of eating each day, and they closed the place.



But to get back to the Schmidt boys. Ollie had a following. The Center street place was not magnificent as far as appointments went, but the bottled goods were of the very best. The small priced luncheons were tasty and the free lunch good. So when the place was forced to close the boys looked about to see what could be had to take over the trade who constantly reminded them they should stay in the neighborhood.

The place at 81 Chambers street long had been an established place and they took it over. Then the difference of opinions of the two brothers became known. Ollie thought the place should be closed at 7 o'clock each evening. George thought a later hour would be better. But the hour was 7 o'clock, and if a customer happened to be in the bar at that hour he was asked to take a "nightcap" on the house and everybody started away from 81 Chambers street, but the records do not show they always went directly home.

From the start the Schmidt ownership prospered, but Ollie thought he should have a place of his own and he therefore opened on Park Row at the apex of North William street, one of the handsomest cafes then to be seen in lower Manhattan. It was not a success and Ollie lost practically all he had saved and dumped into a place that was not wanted on a street of people who were rushing to catch subways and elevated trains. Brooklyn Bridge terminal was in those days a wonderful railroad terminus, but the Schmidt place did not seem to appeal.

Ollie therefore took over the William street place made so famous by Kate. City officials and newspapermen of note of other days congregated here and pleasant hours of reminiscence often brought to light interesting news stories that found their way into print. The Schmidt boys as well as the Stender girls were known to writers and public officials generally, but their support was not adequate to pay the overhead when the Volstead law became a part of the dictum of the day.



But George Schmidt stood his ground. When the law against the sale of intoxicating liquors became operative he stood by the law and never sold an illegal drink. But he did try to make his restaurant stand up a little straighter and reorganized hi place with full restaurant equipment and with this he has gone along until he decided he had been in the purveying business long enough and barely a stone's throw from the place he was born.

The Chambers street place had a couple of things to its credit that did not call for the use of alcoholic stimulant. True the corned beef and cabbage on Wednesdays have tasted a little better with a glass of real beer, but George's customers knew the value of the food and were satisfied to forgo the stimulant. On Saturday's he had a dish of pork and beans that attracted men from far and near. Men who had never called except on Saturday could be counted in the throng, for such it was, during the bean season, which seemed to run the year round.

George Schmidt has not served a drink behind a bar for many years and he probably will never mix another, but he has fond memories of his lifelong experience catering to men in public life in New York city. He has known personally Mayors and their cabinets and the writers followed him around as they did Kate and Ollie. Now he plans to retire from active daily routine and take a rest that may eventually take him up to Connecticut, where he has his eye on a cozy place that will be his home for the rest of his days.

Many years ago the Schmidts—father and sons as well as sisters-in-law—wrote their names into the hearts of good eaters and drinkers. All sorts of men—and no women—found their way into 6 Center street and the other places. One of the customers wrote a piece of poetry of fourteen verses which he had printed on good paper and was distributed to the patrons of the place. The man was retiring enough to withhold his name, but the author was known to those on the inside. On the first page titld "Pier 6" is a cut of Ollie and George Schmidt. It points out that Ollie is the owner and that George and Fred and Ollie Curtis are 'a brave quartet of bartenders, who only serve the best.'"

Now please, go out and celebrate.

Coffee, tea, or me: flavor wheels

Taste is an interesting thing: most of what we taste is actually smell. Every food produces different molecules, known as esters, that interact with the nerves in our nose (Those hairs up there? They have nerves!), causing us to perceive different smells and tastes.

On top of that, the taste receptors on our tongue also help out; there's lots of crazy little scientific experiments going on inside your mouth at any given time. So without further ado, I give you a few examples of how these smells and tastes have been classified depending on what it is you put in your mouth.

The last one's the kicker.


The Coffee Flavor Wheel:



The Beer Flavor Wheel (Mielgaard):




The Wine Flavor Wheel (Noble):




The Devil's Flavor Wheel (Rowe):

Visualizing Beer: The Beer Menu

When I was working on the training program for the Four Points by Sheraton Best Brews program, one of the biggest difficulties was designing a beer menu that was actually useful. Every Four Points bar carries about two dozen craft and regional beers, with many locations carrying upwards of three times that number. The challenge boiled down to this: how do you design a menu that:

• Delivers all the necessary information that a beer drinker might want (beer name, brewery, geographic origin, beer style, general flavor profile, and alcohol by volume)?
• Is easy to scan?
• Makes familiar/national brand beers easy to locate?
• Conforms to the clean, simple style of the Four Points style guide?

Step one, of course, is logically categorizing beers. Most bars that focus on craft beer tend to categorize beers by region, although some opt for style. Both approaches can alienate (yes, alienate) the casual beer drinker, to whom such categories may be virtually meaningless (just what the hell does a German beer taste like?).

Luckily, my client had spent years creating a system for categorizing wine by flavor profile. Could we apply this same approach to beer? we wondered. In theory we could, but WineQuest's flavor profiling relied on an intricate database of thousands and thousands of wines. Amassing a similar database of such detail-level information for beer would never be done soon enough.

The solution, I found, was to create five straightforward categories that any customer could easily understand:

• Draft Selections
  
• Crisp Refreshers
• Smooth Thirst-Quenchers
• Robust Brews
• Low Calorie and Non-alcoholic

I then recommended that each category list the beers according to the following format (with mildest flavors at the top and strongest at the bottom, much like WineQuest's progressive wine list format):

• Beer Name (Style, ABV%): Region
• Example: Sierra Nevada (Pale Ale, 5.6% ABV): California

Of course, there was plenty of back and forth between myself, WineQuest, and the in-house design team at Four Points. But ultimately, they used pretty much the format I created (though I think they may have played with the punctuation and text formatting of the individual beer names).

A menu like this accomplishes several things. First, it forces the drinker to focus on the beer's general flavor profile (I wrote in-depth training courses for the staff to familiarize them with the various flavors of their core beers and beer styles in general, so that the menus would be accurate). Placing the name of the beer first in each line is the logical placement, allowing brand-loyal drinkers to easily find their beloved (cringe) Bud. Providing secondary details like place of origin and beer style serves a twofold purpose: it lends a uniqueness to each beer, and it helps educate more casual beer drinkers. Finally, the simple presentation prevents those who just want a cold brew from feeling like they have some hoop to jump through, while beer geeks get all the info that helps to reinforce their geekiness. It's a beautiful, though delicate, balance.

The piéce de resistance of the menu has been stripped down in its final form, sadly. My original design called for an additional key of icons to indicate particularly hoppy, fruity and malty beers for those who are looking for more specific flavor guidance. I was also insistent that Four Points include an icon for high ABV beers, to ensure hotel guests, many of whom would likely be driving, would know what they were getting into. I think (though I'd have to double-check this at an actual Four Points bar), they ended up using icons only to indicate recommended beers and high ABV beers.

I have to admit, I'm really proud of the final menu. The look and feel is all Four Points, thanks to their in-house team, but the structure is all mine. It makes it really easy to select a beer from what can be an otherwise daunting list, regardless of how much beer knowledge you might have. So the next time you're traveling, don't forget about this incredible beer goldmine!

What Sells Drinks?

What influences a drinker more than any advertising or promotion when it comes to buying drinks in bars? Their bartender, of course! This earth-shattering revelation comes from a recent survey by the Adult Beverage Insights Group. And although it may seem screamingly obvious to many of us, the fact is that too many bar owners overlook the selling power of their own human capital.

So how can an owner help his or her bartender sell more? Stop stocking crap, for one thing. Quality tools allow the bartender to do a quality job; and when a bartender is proud of the drinks s/he's mixing, s/he'll be more likely to get the customer excited about it, too.

The other—and most important—way to help your bartender sell more and up is to give them the information they need to sell product. The survey's respondents support this idea that "familiarity and product knowledge are key influencers in what they sell at the bar." That means training them on proper mixing techniques, setting up regular tastings, and getting them involved in menu creation.

Sadly, there was one thing this study revealed that sent a chill down my spine: it turns out that a lot of bartenders actually prefer working with "fewer ingredients and convenient mixers." But perhaps this is less of an indication of laziness, and more of a cry for help. Maybe with a little extra training and exposure to higher standards, these bartenders will learn to appreciate the joy of freshly squeezed juices and carefully prepped garnishes.

[Cross-posted to Bar Stories.]

Service Matters

A recent study shows that rude waiters are the number one cause of customer dissatisfaction among guests when dining out. And as I wrote in the Restaurant Report's recent email newsletter, the number one way to improve service at your establishment is to empower your staff and encourage them to share a stake in the success of your restaurant. Doing so takes time, effort and a lot of training, but the results are happy customers who return again and again.