Secrets & Surprises

What really goes on behind kitchen doors.

May 24, 2010 1:00 p.m.

How much do servers make?

In the go-go years, downtown waiters and waitresses at top restaurants could make up to $150,000 a year. Those days are largely gone, especially here in the ’burbs.

And while you might think servers make the standard minimum wage, plus tips, they don’t. Like other states, Maryland allows tip credit, which lowers the hourly wage for tipped employees. Restaurants that use tip credit pay $3.63 an hour, or about half the minimum wage of $7.25. If the person doesn’t receive enough tips to reach the minimum wage, the restaurateur must make up the difference.

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Obviously, tips vary widely by restaurant, season, the skill of the waiter, the number of shifts worked and so on. At Oakville Grille, full-time wait staff can make $750 a week (that’s $39,000 a year). The best waiters and waitresses in the Black Restaurant Group—those working eight to 10 shifts a week—can make $1,000 to $1,200 a week, according to owner Jeff Black. (That’s more than $62,000 a year.)

At places with a lively bar scene, the bartenders usually rake in more than the servers. Peter Russo, the executive chef at Lia’s, says bartenders there earn an average of $1,500 a week, while the wait staff averages about $800. During a busy happy hour, when the bar handles a lot of large parties, tips can run up to 30 and 40 percent of the tab, Russo says.

How do restaurants know how much food to order?

It’s not an exact science.

“A lot comes down to experience,” says Black, whose Black Restaurant Group consists of Black’s Bar & Kitchen in Bethesda, Addie’s Restaurant in Rockville, Black Market Bistro in Garrett Park and BlackSalt Fish Market and Restaurant in Washington, D.C. “We keep a lot of empirical data about our menu mix, but we’re never 100 percent dead-on right,” Black says. “It takes a lot of thought and planning. It can be pretty challenging, to be quite honest.”

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Though restaurateurs have a general idea, their grocery list can vary depending on the time of year, holidays, prices, weather or other circumstances. In July, the Hard Times Cafe doesn’t need to order 350 pounds of onions a week; people don’t eat much chili. Not so in January, when people crave that comfort food.

But there are times when restaurateurs get stuck with too much—or caught with too little. When overabundance is the problem, the “chef’s special” is often the solution. For last year’s Taste of Bethesda, Nest Cafe bought 300 pounds of mussels, but ended up with 50 pounds of leftovers. So Jeremy Hummer, the executive chef and co-owner, used them in daily specials at the restaurant—seafood chowder, pasta dishes and more. “We put them in as many different things as we could,” he says.

Sometimes, family and neighbors are the beneficiaries of restaurant leftovers. Reyna Guardado, co-owner of Guardado’s in Bethesda, brings home whatever food remains after the weekend. “A lot of times we have a big feast on Monday,” she says.

When sudden scarcity is the issue, places in restaurant-dense Bethesda may swap and share. Damian Salvatore of Persimmon knows that if he runs out of cilantro, he can get a loan from Don Pollo, the Peruvian chicken restaurant next door. If Don Pollo needs lemons or lettuce in a pinch, Salvatore gladly reciprocates.

Domenico Cornacchia, owner and chef at Assaggi Mozzarella Bar in Bethesda, remembers one evening when that restaurant’s manager ran up the street to Mon Ami Gabi to borrow a specific brand of vodka requested by a customer. Cornacchia later bought a new bottle for Mon Ami Gabi at a county liquor store. 

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How much profit do restaurateurs make from menu items?

If a dish costs you $10, it probably cost the restaurant about $3.30. The rule of thumb is that the cost of the food should be about one-third of the menu price. But the markup is lower for dishes with costlier ingredients, such as fancy cuts of meat and seafood, and higher for items such as pizza, pasta, soups, salad and chicken.

Restaurateurs are quick to point out that they’re not taking home the difference. “I don’t want to sound like we’re running away with 70 percent profit,” says Hummer of Nest Cafe. A lot of other bills need to be paid—rent, labor, electricity, gas, laundry, new dishes, uniforms, repairs and more. According to the National Restaurant Association, profit margins for most restaurants run between just 4 and 6 percent.

So, there’s a lot of strategizing. Tom Williams of Rock Creek Restaurant says the establishment regularly analyzes its menu’s profitability by dividing it into four categories: 1.) popular dishes with low food costs; 2.) popular dishes with high food costs; 3.) unpopular dishes with high food costs; and 4.) unpopular dishes with low food costs.

Williams knows that tinkering with No. 2 could mean losing customers, so he may try to find a different supplier to keep costs down. “As you’re doing your analyses, you want to make sure you’re eliminating No. 3,” he says. As for No. 4, he might look for ways to increase demand—either by moving the dish to a different position on the menu, rewriting the description or better educating the servers about it.

Sometimes dishes get priced by what the market will bear, regardless of the food costs. For example, since Bethesda restaurants on par with Nest Cafe charge about $10 for a hamburger, Hummer knows he can’t charge $19.95 for his, despite his upgrade in beef. So he charges $10.95, even though his food cost is about 50 percent of that. “I’m willing to make a little bit less to make sure the burger is high quality,” he says. On the other hand, the restaurant’s linguini marinara—a dish he offers for the timid diner—costs him about $2, or 20 percent of the $9.95 he charges.

Why is the markup on wine so high?

Given that all a server has to do is open and pour, it seems strange that wine markups run two-and-a-half to three times the retail price. Restaurateurs offer two main reasons for the hike.

“It’s the only way to make money,” says Francis Namin, owner of three Don Pollo restaurants and co-owner of Cork 57, the Bethesda beer and wine shop. Nonetheless, Namin is taking a gamble with his new Wisconsin Avenue restaurant, Food, Wine & Co., slated to open in June in Bethesda. It will offer bottles at $5 over the retail price—no matter the cost of the wine. Namin hopes to make money on volume. “It’s a risk I’m taking,” he says. 

The second reason is the upfront investment. “I’m carrying a $65,000 to $70,000 inventory,” says Jeff Black, referring to what he paid for the bottles in the wine room at Black’s Bar & Kitchen. “My money is sitting on a shelf.” In addition, Black says wine glasses are the “single most recurring expense” at his restaurants. “The stems are $5 to $6 apiece, and they’re broken constantly.”

How do restaurateurs monitor what you think of their food and service?

There’s a lot of unspoken dialogue between diners and restaurant managers, who watch facial expressions and gestures for signs of pleasure or disappointment. “You can read a lot from people’s eyes,” says Dan Bucher, general manager of Woodmont Grill.

You also can read a lot from their BlackBerrys. “In this digital age, we get a lot of feedback,” Black says. “We get e-mails from people two minutes after they’ve left the restaurant.”

Internet-savvy restaurateurs pay attention to diners’ comments on Web sites such as Yelp.com, and follow their responses through OpenTable, the online reservation system. “We track them almost daily,” Eddie Benaim, owner of Bezu in Potomac, says of the two sites. Benaim says he learns from the comments and replies to some. For example, people who arrive on time for their reservation at Bezu occasionally have to wait because the diners seated before them—who arrived late for their reservation—are lingering at the table. Most people “take it nicely, but there are always a few that get very bent out of shape,” says Benaim, who will try to respond to an online complaint.

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