The high risk of being a restaurant owner is no secret, yet many chance it year after year. Crave investigates the reality behind the notoriously fickle and challenging business.
Text by Sofia Suarez, illustration by Tim Cheng
Almost all food lovers have, at some point in their lives, harboured dreams of opening a restaurant. After all, what better way could there be to convert their true passion into a career? But as Hong Kong’s breed of entrepreneurial restaurateurs will attest, it takes a lot more than a sophisticated palate to run a successful restaurant.
Take financial wizard and foodie Brian Moss for example. Moss headed up a global division of HSBC before he was a founding partner of Arcana, the group behind Spanish restaurant Uno Más.
For Moss, being a restaurateur is part investment, part hobby. “When I left banking, I thought it would be interesting to apply the same discipline we brought to our financial business to the hospitality business.” But he quickly learned how different they are. “It was a shock,” he recalls. “There are so many moving pieces in restaurants, which there aren’t in banks. There are more defined rules in banking.”
One of Moss’s earliest experiences was taking over Eden, an organic restaurant in Central, at the beginning of the financial crisis. “We had a fabulous chef and the food was really great. I thought, if people are cost-conscious, they’ll spend more on their health,” he says with a wry smile. “That was my first lesson. It was only about 150 yards up from Café O on Arbuthnot Road, and people just weren’t interesting in walking that far. Quite staggering.”
Location is important, but with the forbidding cost of rent in Hong Kong, securing the right retail space is easier said than done.
The thorny issue of rent certainly preyed heavily on the mind of Dimitri Bastiani of French restaurant Green Mouse when he decided to take a leap of faith and quit his job as head chef at Chez Patrick to open his own premises. It took him six months to find the right place.
“I wanted to be my own boss, but all the shops we saw were up to $160,000 per month for half the size of our current space,” he says. Then, a Chinese restaurant on lower Peel Street closed suddenly.
Although the landlord almost doubled the rent from $29,000 to $55,000 per month, Bastiani was delighted with it. “Compared with everything we’d seen, it was really cheap, and it came with the previous tenant’s two licenses, and all the tables and chairs,” he recalls.
So, is it all about location?
No, says Bastiani. “It was the rent,” he asserts. “Lunch is OK, but people prefer to go to Soho or Wanchai for dinner. It’s better to be in a quiet location and pay three times less [for the premises].”
Location is not, in fact, at the top of everyone’s list. For Liberty Group owner, Gerald Li, it depends entirely on each restaurant’s DNA.
“Liberty Private Works is a private kitchen that has been booked almost every night since we opened. It’s in an old walk-up off the beaten track, there’s no foot traffic, and we’re not going to win any awards for our interiors. But people come in and the food exceeds expectations. It matches the concept.”
Li never considered replicating the private kitchen when he was offered 5,700 square feet at Exchange Square. “We didn’t want to fit a square peg into a round hole,” he recalls. Instead, they let the location define their next concept, a modern American bar and restaurant. “I think our chef, Makoto Ono, puts it best when he says, ‘Liberty Exchange is a place where he’d like to eat every day; Liberty Private Works is a place where he’d like to cook.’”
Despite their varied backgrounds – Li studied law, Moss was a banker, and Bastiani was a head chef – these restaurateurs are foodies with vision. In fact, they would rather chat about food than anything else.
“Venue and design are important, but it’s most important to find the chef who can bring his own passion to it,” says Brian Moss, before he extols the mouthwatering triumphs of his Uno Más Executive Chef, David lzquierdo Jover, who trained at El Bulli.
It comes as no surprise that Moss and Jover are passionate about the quality and source of their produce.
“It’s essential to have good relationships with the suppliers,” says Bastiani. Illustrating the point, his phone rings during our interview. A supplier is offering him 500 kilograms of milk-fed veal from France. The order was just cancelled by a hotel, it’s still in the delivery truck, and he can have it at a reduced price. Will he take it? “Yes. Tomorrow, I can change my menu and do lunch with it. I’ll please my guests and also save on costs,” grins Bastiani. Running on a small, personal scale has its advantages.
Todd Darling, co-owner of New York-style Italian eatery Posto Pubblico, was so determined to source organic produce, he had to spend months gaining the trust of local farmers. “Everybody said we were nuts,” he admits, “because nobody was doing it consistently in the volumes we needed.” Darling was so successful he has transferred the idea into another enterprise, Homegrown Foods.
After food and real estate, service is a favourite topic in Hong Kong.
“Getting somebody who earns $11,000 a month to be proud of what they do is a real challenge,” says Moss. “You can talk about targets and quarters, but it’s just too far away when a lot of people are living month to month.”
Food and beverage consultant Nichole Garnaut enforces a regime of continual service training. When there’s resistance to the relentless schedule, she counters, “When you’re perfect at this, we can stop!”
If anyone knows the business, it’s Garnaut. Since arriving in Hong Kong in 1985, she has been the driving force behind some of the city’s hottest venues. With the influential Ninety Seven Group, she opened 18 venues from 1989 to 2000. As partner of Alibi, she brought the party up to Wyndham Street in 2000, long before the area exploded into the scene that it is today. Garnaut recently helped Swire Properties launch Café Gray at The Upper House, and was a public relations consultant for Sugar at East Hotel.
Over the years, she has tweaked and tested her recipe for success, it now reads:
“Twenty five per cent ambience, 25 per cent service, 25 per cent product, and 25 per cent what I call ‘the magic’ – it’s how you orchestrate the theatre. Don’t assume that you’re going to open your doors and have the revenue come in. Otherwise, at three months you’ll make reactionary rather than informed decisions.”
From the location, to the menu, to the service, it would be easy for the details to overwhelm even the savviest business person. Ultimately, only those with a clear vision succeed.
“Anybody can go and spend $10 million and build a restaurant where it’s all look with expensive glassware and plates,” says Posto Pubblico’s Darling. “But it goes back to aligning all the different elements of the concept.”
“Make sure you’re very specific about your concept,” Garnaut advises. “A clear message should follow through from your marketing and sales to how that’s being sold on the floor and to the public. Sort out the business plan and finance to get you through the first year of operation.”
Daunted by the Herculean task ahead?
Running your own restaurant requires not only vision, sharp business acumen and dedication, but also the ability to constantly evolve.
Style maven Bonnie Gokson is known for her fabulous dinner parties and is not new to restaurants, either. She was the driving force behind the fashionable Joyce Café, a go-to place for ladies who lunched at the time.
“My biggest passions are food, lifestyle and entertaining,” she says.
Gokson jokes about the arduous year and nine months it took to get the Calvin Tsao-designed Sevva up and running: “I’ve never given birth, but when people ask me, I say it was like having a baby!”
Intimating that a new, younger, edgier venue is in the works, she says the ability to improve and evolve are vital. “For my recipe, you’ve got to have a lot of luck, a lot of guts, and a strong vision.”
Restaurateur 101
We present some general fun restaurant facts from the inside out including costs, profits and a kitchen’s chain of command.
Text by Jason Spotts
1) Profit margins for food and beverage tend to be higher in free standing restaurants than in hotel restaurants, which then differ by restaurant concept. In general, hotel fine dining should operate between 35-40% food cost, and same range for beverage. All day dining at 30-35% food cost and beverage between 20-25%
2) At a fine dining restaurant, average food cost for a dish is about 40% of menu price. For premium items such as blue lobster, it can go much higher but many French fine dining restaurants are reluctant to charge the correct price, preferring to make less profit.
3) Most restaurants have a week’s worth of stock for food supply, and three weeks worth of alcohol, but high rent price per square foot in Hong Kong makes storage space a premium. Some restaurants request deliveries as often as twice a day due to a lack of storage space.
4) Staff pay is the biggest expense in the restaurant business though in Hong Kong it can often be rent.
5) Smaller kitchens tend to be more efficient as everything is within reach. There must be a balance between the size of your kitchen with the size of its team. There is nothing as important as a well fitted and routed kitchen design. In the long term it can be the money maker or breaker.
6) Behind the scenes, the kitchen is a diverse place. At most fine dining restaurants, however, you will find some if not all of the following personnel creating your meal.
General Chain of Command in the Western Kitchen:
In charge of the kitchen, creates culinary direction, sets and develops the menu, and interacts with the dining room managers. Is in charge of cost and is the image and spokesperson for the restaurant. Still runs service in order to check and verify if required standards are being met. 
Assistant to the Executive Chef, and generally does more of the cooking than the Executive Chef. Orders for the kitchen, manages kitchen teams, and focuses on monitoring actual food production and service. 
The connecting link between the kitchen and wait staff. Monitors timing of dishes, and relays orders to chefs. In smaller restaurants, this role also belongs to the Executive Chef or Sous Chef. 
Cooks most of the food at the restaurant according to their speciality and station. They report to the Sous Chef. Examples include, grill cooks (Rotisseur and Poissonier), sauté cooks (Entremetier), salad chefs (Garde Manger), and sauces chef (Saucier). Pastry chefs often have their own separate hierarchy and report directly to the Executive Chef. 
Prepares food for the upcoming shift and the line cooks. Cleans, cuts, sorts, and trims. In smaller restaurants, line cooks do their own prep. 
Clean and deep cleans the kitchens, looks after the glass and chinaware. Ensures all stations and servers have the correct levels of equipment and supply during service. Also takes out the trash. 
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