We are huge fans of the South West region and with the 'Eat, Drink Bristol Fashion' coming up later this month, it's great to see local food festivals bringing food communities together at a local level. Headlining the event is Josh Eggleton of The Pony & Trap (see CC review here), and Jonray and Peter Sanchez-Iglesias of Casamia (CC reveiw here) so the biggest names in the region are cooking there.

Fancy a great night out while making a difference to thousands of famine stricken children around the world? Of course you do, but where can you find such a thing? Well, the answer is a big party taking place at Shoreditch House, the one with a swimming pool on the roof. The date for this event is Tuesday 7th May 2013.

The event is a big party to support Action Against Hunger,  but more than just a party, more than just a champagne reception, more than complimentary beer and wine all evening, more than food from Dirty Burger and Chicken Shop, there will also be an auction with some amazing prizes, stuff that you simply can't buy. Fancy a day deer stalking with Brett Graham? Simply bid, and it could be yours. What else? How about this:

·         The chance to dine with critic Jay Rayner while he reviews a restaurant

·         A decadent supper for you and eight guests cooked by Michelin-starred Angela Hartnett in your home

·         Salmon fishing in Ireland with eminent chef and restaurateur Mark Hix

·         A day and night at the Waterside Inn, Bray, including time in the kitchen with the legendary Alain Roux and dinner at the three Michelin star restaurant

·         An exclusive behind the scenes experience at Michelin-starred Alyn Williams at The Westbury, with a table for four set up in the kitchen during the buzz and drama of service and a bespoke seven-course tasting menu.

And I'm pretty sure there's going to be quite a few more items, and all legendary stuff. Cunningly titled Auction Against Hunger, you can follow them on twitter @auctionhunger

If you want to but a ticket (and read everything I've just copied from their website again), visit the Auction Against Hunger page where you can buy directly. Ticket price is £75, which has to be worth it for a fabulous one off night and all the good that will arise from your donation. And who knows what you might take away from the auction.

'There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about' quipped Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Some chefs, it would seem, are increasingly upset on account of being talked about if that involves Twitter, Facebook and pictures of their food. But this article is most definitely NOT going to hash through all those 'camera in restaurant' arguments, rather, in a light hearted way, we will look at some unexplored facts around the public's fascination with food and see if it explains why the internet's plumbing is so heavily clogged with food picture debris.

Restaurants really are more popular than the internet

Given how much interesting stuff there is on the internet, surfing government websites is probably not high on most people's list of things to do on their day off, but amongst the bureaucratic rough, there is the odd diamond, and I would include for this the Office for National Statistics which has data on just about everything you could imagine. In particular, the biennial report Lifestyles and Social Participation focusses on social trends, and one has to go no further than page three of the most recent issue before the question of what people do in their free time is addressed. Since I am sure you can't wait to know the answer, we have summarised the data in a convenient chart below.

We can see from the above that the most popular free time activity of people in the UK is watching television, which is undertaken by 89% of the population (aged 16 and over). Spending time with friends and family comes second with 84%, though I find even the inclusion of this answer strange, effectively being a reciprocal question to 'are you a hermit?' (or I guess, do you have no friends?). Listening to music rates 76% and shopping 71%... and then it's eating out at restaurants, which 69% of all people over the age of 16 said they like to do.

This is big news, eating out at restaurants is the fifth most popular thing people do in their free time!

It is more popular than reading (67%), days out (63%), gardening (49%), and going to the pub (48%). And while we all use the internet, the number of people who said they choose to spend their free time on it is 59%. According to most recent data then, restaurants are 17% more popular than the internet as a way to spend free time.

For restaurants, this is clearly good news, but the news gets better yet. If we compare the 2009/10 survey (published in 2011) with the 2007/08 survey, we can see how these trends are developing in time. If we look at the absolute percentage point increase in people choosing to eat out at restaurants as a leisure activity, the two year on two year change is six percentage points making it the activity (tied with cinema) that has shown the largest absolute growth amongst all traditional activities. So not only are restaurants hugely popular, they are becoming even more popular still.

We should point out that the internet was not included in the 2008/09 survey (odd because it was included in 2006/07 survey at around 42%), so its growth rate cannot be exactly determined but it would probably be fair to assume it is higher, possibly eight percentage points if the improvement is linear during that four year period. If the trend continues in this fashion in the latest survey (to be published later this year), eating out would still then rate as a more popular pastime than the internet.

Change in selected activity (likes) performed in free time, 2007 - 2010 

The six point improvement in cinema also comes off a lower base (cinema slumped as low as 40% in 2006), so percentage wise, its growth rate for the same period to 2010 is higher (14.5%). But it takes nothing away from eating out: if relative rather than absolute growth rates are considered, restaurants, with 9.5% growth come second in terms of the improvement in popularity across all major traditional pastimes.

Simply put, eating out is popular, and becoming more popular at a rate faster than almost any other pastime. 

So that photo thing....?

Polaroid (remember them) recently put out a press release (click here) that estimated that 1.5 billion pictures are now taken every day due to the popularity of smartphone cameras. Whether this is a sustainable trend or not, who cares, but right now, people love taking pictures with their iPhone or Galaxy and are of course going to take pictures of what they do. And what are their favourite things to do? Well, we've already considered this:

1) television
2) time with friends
3) listening to music
4) shopping
5) eating out at restaurants

You will quickly see that the most popular pastime, TV, does not lend itself it taking pictures with a smartphone. Nor does listening to music, and shopping. So of the five things that people most like to do in their free time, only two activities can you genuinely capture with a smartphone camera, your friends and your food. Should anyone be surprised therefore that cameras are now used so extensively in restaurants?

Conclusion

While some people (or more usually trolls) enjoy taunting those who like eating in restaurants, these statistics prove that naysayers, who so often claim to speak for the majority, are in fact simply a vocal minority, and if you like restaurants, you can include yourself amongst the 40 million people in this country who share that hobby with you. 

Half of all people in this country are estimated to use a smartphone while 64% of internet users are believed to be on Facebook. Such people are part of a budding photography pool who globally take 547,500,000,000 pictures every year with their phone (which works out at 17,000 smartphone pictures every second).

For those of you who half remember with terror Venn diagrams from your school days, why people are using cameras in restaurants becomes too facile a question to ask, but if it does need pointing out, it is this: what do you get if you cross the country's fifth most popular pastime with a public who take 17,000 photos every second? Pictures of food of course, lots of them, thousands, millions. But in reality, you get pictures of everything, a taxonomy of people's every waking moment, weighted by their favourite activities.

It is far too clumsy a sentence, so apologies to Wilde, but our message to chefs would be this: the only thing worse than customers wanting to take pictures of food in your restaurant, is customers not wanting to take pictures of your food. Well, either that, or having no customers at all.  

In summary

The conclusion must surely be that actually, you simply can't get away from the benefit of modelling the cash flows with sensible assumptions in order to make a good decision, but beyond that, the capital gain should not in our mind be the decisive factor for three reasons:

1) the restaurant needs to be excessively profitable to make a gain in the first place, and deciding to start a profitable business is an easy decision so it will never hinge on the gain.
2) the gain on sale is the very last cash flow you receive from the business and therefore enjoys the largest discount factor reducing its relative contribution to the total (even if nominally it seems a large number), and
3) the uncertainty surrounding any forecast that is at least five years out means that it is your least reliable assumption within your whole business plan. Do you really want the decision to invest, or not, to be decided on your least reliable assumption?

This is clearly a complex area but we hope the above discussion clearly illustrates why the key factor in making an initial investment needs to be an ongoing profitable business, and not an indeterminate capital gain that might otherwise trick you into an incorrect financial decision.


Read the previous article: Is your restaurant making enough money?

Turkey, chocolate and booze, the true meaning of Christmas. This and more is on show at Taste of Christmas show at ExCel which was opened today by Jamie Oliver and runs through till Sunday. The event boasts 250 market stalls with a full range of Christmas food and related items. This event will be enjoyed by lovers of sweet treats especially and there's a host of cakes and chocolate stands ranging from the average to the very impressive. Cheese too is well represented while Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without substantial space given over to wine, champagne and whisky. But while there are some turkey information stands and others selling preserved meats like hams, there's less space given over to meat products, most likely as dead animals in ExCel probably breach a hundred health and safety rules (so don't expect to be heading home with a pheasant under your arm).

What is most impressive however is the line up of chefs that you'll have access to at the show. There's cook-alongs, demonstrations and Q&A, and chefs participating include the great names of food in the UK such as Simon Rogan, Simon Hulstone, Sat Bains, Tom Kitchin, Michel Roux Jnr, Bruno Loubet and quite a few more. Even on the Friday, which we assume will be substantially less busy than the weekend, the events were extremely popular so if you do attend this weekend, you might want to plan your time accordingly and note that some events have limited places available.

And there's of course some eating to be done with Jamie Oliver's food well represented (naturally), Lima, Comptoir Gascon, Salt Yard, Hix and Cinnamon Soho. Currency within the event to buy food is, like the Taste of London festival, 'Crowns' though outside of the 'restaurant' bits, most stalls are charging in good old fashioned pounds.

With entry priced at £18.50, this is not a cheap event by any stretch, though getting to cook-along with the likes of Sat Bains will certainly justify the price for some. There's often samples to be had on the market stalls but not enough to stop you getting hungry, yet despite the festival name, you're not overwhelmed with options for a proper feed. There's an official 'Taste of Christmas Restaurant' though we didn't try it so can't comment on the quality. 

Being in the mighty ExCel, it can never feel cosy like a proper Christmas market, but there's a lot of amusing things on display (including one stand dedicated to hangover cures) and if you're preparing a Christmas feast or just looking for presents for your foodie friends, you'll likely find something here that will take your interest.

Full details can be found at the website: Taste of Christmas

Disclosure: we attended the press launch  

We're constantly told in life however that first impressions count but taking the peak end rule at face value, they don't in fact seem to count at all when we seek to remember how good a time we had. Accordingly, we might ask if there is any benefit at all for a restaurant to giving anybody a free glass of champagne at the start of the meal, birthday or not? 

The answer is of course yes. We use a glass of champagne in the examples below as it is an obvious and tangible thing that a restaurant might do, but even a smile, a warm welcome, and an extra nice table can have the same effect. 

Life is better with a glass of champagne.

Think of the answer to the question 'how happy are you with your life?' Not how happy are you today, or this week, but rather, the totality of your life: who you are, your job, your spouse, maybe your children, everything. You would think that would be kind of fixed really, hardly changing day to day and certainly not hour to hour. You'd be wrong.

Psychologist Norbert Schwarz invited participants to his lab to answer the question of how happy they were with their lives, but before answering, he asked them each to photocopy a sheet of paper for him. Deliberately placed on the photocopier, half the participants found a dime (the experiment was done some time ago) while half did not. Guess what? Those who found a dime then reported significantly higher levels of happiness at the totality of their own life than those who did not. 

If people can increase the positivity about their own entire life by simply finding a dime, something nice at the start of a restaurant experience, like a free glass of champagne, must surely alter people's moods positively such that they will enjoy the meal more. That in fact seems like common sense. How though does this influence the memory of the restaurant according to the peak end rule? One obvious mechanism is that the peak pleasure will appear to be increased, that is, a dish that a diner might have scored (even doing this unconsciously) at say 7 out of 10 may get bumped up to an 8 simply because they are in a better mood when they score. 

Everything seems better when you are happy, even average cooking. 

The Halo Effect

Second, the halo effect. Here, your early action of giving a free glass of champagne creates an emotional bias in favour of the restaurant that will make other characteristics of the restaurant and meal also seem more favourable as a result. Again referring to Kahneman's recent book (Thinking, Fast and Slow), he reports that:

The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted.

By giving a guest a free glass of champagne early on, you take random chance out the sequence and seize the initiative so that you guarantee the order of observed characteristics. The early gift deliberately sets up the Halo Effect to work in favour of the restaurant and so achieved, allows a better impression of later events that the diner would have been otherwise less enthusiastic about.  

Again, thinking of the peak end rule, if the last experience of the evening was a poor one, perhaps a mistake on the bill, the positively primed customer will be substantially more understanding and forgiving of the mistake. When applying the peak-end rule in remembering the meal, they might even ignore the mishap fully, whereas those not under the influence of the Halo Effect might mark the restaurant down despite an otherwise flawless meal.

Reciprocation

The final point is a read across from the work of Robert B Cialdini, a professor of both marketing and psychology, a leading expert on the subject of influence and the author of a book of that name. Cialdini describes it simply as this:

The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided for us.

Cialdini describes it as 'one of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us'. It's why if someone sends you a Christmas card, you feel obliged to send one back (who hasn't said of Christmas cards: I'm only sending them to people who send me one this year). He believes it is innate across all human cultures. He goes on to say that:

By virtues of the reciprocity rule, then, we are obligated to the future repayment of favours, gifts, invitations, and the like.

Accordingly, if you 'give' a glass of champagne to a guest, they need to find a basis to reciprocate. If you then shortly after hand them the wine list, their obligation to repayment will often see them buy a more expensive bottle of wine than they otherwise would have, even producing a net profit for the restaurant on the exchange.

The reciprocation rule might or might not influence the peak end rule for the guest remembering their experience, but that doesn't in fact matter for the positive mood bias and halo effect will take care of that anyway. The reciprocation rule does however mean that the cost of giving away a free glass of champagne will in fact be refunded to you by the customer, with the result being that they themselves have paid up to have (and remember having) a better time.

Conclusion 

Everyone wins it seems: the customer is put in a better mood, experiences a better time and remembers a better time. The restaurant meanwhile has a happy customer who is more likely to return, more likely to recommend the restaurant to friends and a customer who at a minimum refunds the restaurant for the 'generous' gift of the champagne through reciprocation.

Bingo.


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Why do we remember a restaurant as being good?