Hospitality is More Important Than Ever
Lately, I find myself dreaming about restaurants. Not the meals, but the hospitality. My dreams are all about working in restaurants and being part of a team, setting the tone and interacting with guests; making the plan for the evening and creating a beautiful experience. I dream about restaurants because I have spent my career in the restaurant business and hospitality is part of my professional DNA. So I dream about hospitality and I hope my dream will come true.
When we get past this “pause” hospitality will be more important than ever. With a suggested closure of up to 30% of restaurants post Covid-19 those restaurants fortunate to be able to reopen their doors will be under great pressure to change their previous operations. The “new normal” will likely include mask-wearing team members, hand washing stations for guests and a reduction of up to 50% of the seats in order to maintain social distancing recommendations. The idea of sanitation will be top of mind for our guests and our teams will need reassurance that we’re putting their health and safety above all else.
Our challenge is that restaurants are inherently social; “distancing” is the polar opposite of our goal. The full intention has always been to pack our bars, restaurants and quick service shops full of people - the more the better - inviting them to sit at tables, stand at the bar, collect around the front door and even stand online, back to front, during lunch hour.
At their essence, restaurants and bars are about human interaction. Restaurants are a place to commingle, to fraternize, to meet friends and family, to encounter someone new and enjoy a communal experience. They are about sharing and participating with others and uniting in a shared moment. So the new, stringent and essential sanitation rules will impact our expectation of the collective experience.
The question is: how do we protect the health of our guests and teams while preserving the social aspect of dining at a restaurant? How do we provide almost medical grade sanitation alongside warm human contact? How do we keep the reminder of “hospital” out of “hospitality?”
The answer is actually through heightened, off-the-charts, intentional hospitality. With our crew wearing masks, obliterating their customary warm smiles, we will have to be even more overt about demonstrating hospitality, empathy and care through body language and gesture. We’ll have to train our teams how to “smize” (smile with your eyes) and make welcoming gestures to our guests in order to make them feel comfortable and at home. We’ll have to drill our employees in the new steps of service that will surely include changing gloves after clearing tables and putting on new ones before serving food in order to build faith in our practices. In the past, any sort of cleaning was done out of the sight of the dining room but now public displays of sanitation will be necessary in order to assuage any fear that the dining room is less than clean and therefore unsafe or untrustworthy.
We’ll have to train our teams on how to communicate clearly through a mask and from a safe distance. By doing so we’ll have to remind staff members to use their “friendly voice” so they don’t come across as a shouting bandit. We’ll have to train our servers and dining room team to use more overt, welcoming body language and demonstrate hospitality through gesture, tone of voice, small signals of empathy (head nodding, leaning in, turning toward the person speaking) and good posture; standing up straight to demonstrate confidence in the face of the unknown.
I believe even more staff may be necessary to help guests feel comfortable and safe. Automation and apps will help customers remain in control and feel secure. But by the time we reopen, hospitality itself will be sorely missed. People will be yearning for a communal and safe dining experience and will be curious and eager to see how restaurants update their practices. All over the world, people are dreaming of going back to their favorite restaurant. And for some, their dreams will come true. For many, their favorite place will not be there to greet them again which will make those restaurants that do reopen more essential than ever.
Your job - as restaurateurs and operators; managers, servers and bartenders; runners and bussers; chefs, cooks and bakers - will be to remind these new guests that restaurants are more important than ever. That hospitality is more important than ever. That safety is more important than ever.
Human connection is already in short supply so open the floodgates to your kindness and care, your welcome and gratitude, your empathy and connection; and express it loudly, verbally and physically.
I’m dreaming of hospitality. I know you are too.
