The Spotted Frog Foundation calls and asks if you’ll help with their benefit. You say yes, because you care about the spotted frog, so you pack up your tools, and you pay for your airfare and all the food you’ll cook and the staff who come with you, because the spotted frog doesn’t have any money. It’s two days of not working at your paying job (or taking care of the guests that expect you there), and it means you come back to the restaurant tired – and that’s fine, when it’s a cause you believe in.

But every day I’m in the restaurant, literally every single day, somebody asks for my help with fundraising. “Michael, can you donate dinner for eight for the Run to Cure Liver Spots?” “Could you donate dinner for six to the Wider Road Foundation?” I’m joking with those charities but the fact is most of the charities people ask me to support are good ones, which makes it tough to say no.

On the other hand, I have my own causes about which I’m passionate – Clinic Ole, Meals on Wheels, and a handful of others – and I’ve found I can make a bigger impact for them if I hang on to some of my time. In the old days I would donate my services and I’d travel – go to wherever the benefit was and pay for all the food and airfare and staff. I still do that for Meals on Wheels and a few other big benefits but these days when people ask me to donate “my time” I tell them we’ve come up with a formula that allows me to auction off my services but still keep my Bottega staff and myself out of the Food Bank line.

1)   I cook their dinner for eight (or six or twelve or twenty) in the restaurant. That way, I can still take care of all the other patrons at Bottega that night. And I get to go home and see my wife afterward.

2)   I ask that they pay Bottega’s average revenue for the table – for us, it’s $60 per head. So if they auction off the table for eight at $5,000, they pay us $480 and still make $4,520 for their charity. I agree to work with them and write up a special menu, and I’ll give their table a lot of love when they’re here.

This approach means I can still look at myself in the mirror every morning without going anywhere near the security line at my airport. The restaurant is able to help many more charities then it would if we were footing the bill and the charities get the difference in $$.

It’s the only win-win solution I have been able to come up with that sounds fair all the way around. How about you? How do you handle all those requests that come your way?

- Michael

In 1987, a successful restaurant (or at least my successful restaurant) had a simple checklist:
1) Beautiful courtyard (check)
2) Well-executed pasta dish  (check)
3) Great wines (check)
4) Vibrant atmosphere (check)
5) Bartender who could make a very good Manhattan (check)

In 2010, Bottega has all of this and more but the customer base is very different. It’s bigger for one thing, and my average customer is younger and more savvy than our first customers in 1987. A customer can go on their iPhone, check 20 different wine lists in the neighborhood and know what everyone charges for the same wine. Our customers have many more choices than were available in 1987 and Food Network, Top Chef, hundreds of food blogs, Yelp, Chowhound, and all the other social media sources to guide their choices. I have to laugh when I see people looking at their phones, flipping through the Yelp photographs of the dishes on our menu before they order.
     
The bar has been set so high that the experience required to satiate a customer is much bigger than it was 25 years ago. I sometimes feel that I’m charged with providing a bowl of pasta that is life-changing.

On the flip side, what hasn’t changed is customer loyalty. I once read that of the ten things that bring someone back to a restaurant, the food isn’t the top deciding factor. Your food had better be fantastic, don’t get me wrong. But if you know the customer, greet the customer yourself, provide a place where the customer feels welcome, included, part of us, that customer (provided your food meets its mark) will return. That is what we strive for at Bottega. And it may be the most gratifying part of running a restaurant. At the end of the evening, when the kitchen is more or less calm for the first time since 7 a.m., and you say goodnight to the last guests who are still sipping espresso and Amaro and you realize they want to linger and stretch out their experience as long as possible…that’s a great night.” 

-Michael

Easy Entertaining fans...the show has been off the The Food Network, but it's coming back! The Cooking Channel (Food Network spinoff launching 5/31) is rerunning the show 6 days a week: Monday - Friday at 11am and Sunday at 9am. Don't know when the first rerun airs, but will soon...

- Michael

I’m thinking about carbon footprints these days and the value proposition to acquiring meats and produce locally. The less time it takes to travel, the better food tastes and the less you pay for it, generally, and you can pass those savings on to your customers. It’s a win-win-win. So we all agree, local is better.

But then you think about truffles. An Italian restaurant has to have truffles, right? The truffles I need have to be imported. There is no equivalent product grown in the U.S. Truffles don’t weigh much, they cost a lot, a little goes a long way so I don’t worry too much about flying in those truffles. (I’m already seeing some self-justification here.)

Then you taste some of the seafood offered by the restaurants nearby, and you’re pulled right back to the “traveling to the far side of the globe” concept of getting the best food you can no matter how far it has to fly or how much it costs to ship. We have shrimp shipped to us three times a week from the Gulf Coast. One fisherman catches all our shrimp and ships it live in sea water. It’s the best shrimp I’ve ever tasted, even better than the mind-blowing shrimp I tasted when touring Positano and the Amalfi Coast. I can justify the cost of shipping it because it’s as local as I can get for this quality of shrimp and I know our fisherman catches his shrimp the “right” way and plus it’s the best shrimp I’ve ever tasted, but still I think about how many travel miles those shrimp log.

This opens up a whole can of fishbait, and all of us are on the same boat: if my Petrale sole does not deliver the same flavor punch as Adriatic sole, do I go with the Petrale and lighten my carbon footprint? If I choose local sole, what do I say to the people at table 22 who were hoping for more flavor? Looking around at my competition, it seems to me that I owe my customers the best-tasting food I can put on their plate. So while we buy the very best local produce, chicken, and meat (grass vs. grain is a whole new blog…but for the record it’s grass at Bottega) I’m still shipping in some of my products from far-off lands (and oceans) because they taste better than what we have locally. But I still feel like I should go to the culinary confessional.

How about you? Are you buying the best products from around the world at any cost or trying to make the best food you can while keeping your carbon footprint small?

What about our home cook readers? When I’m cooking for family and friends at home it seems to be easier to stick to local goods….maybe because they’re not paying for it, I am. This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ?

- Michael