I Lived in France and So Can You by Michael Hickins

Author:Michael Hickins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9 – Customers and Culture

Our vision was to make Molly’s more than just an American restaurant; our vision was to make it an American embassy of sorts, an outpost where your entire experience was foreign (in a good way).

This was in the days before the Internet, so we needed our own mix tapes from our own collections and from American radio stations playing “classic” rock and rhythm and blues. Our décor was authentic – either bought in Texas and shipped over at great expense, or artifacts from Molly’s family.

We loved our customers and they loved us back. Our first Thanksgiving, we had to turn away dozens of people; they all knew about the holiday and wanted to celebrate it with us. Subsequent years we made Thanksgiving an invitation-only affair. Can you imagine? We knew our best customers so well, we could just call them up and ask them to come on what was for them some random Thursday in November.

And they would come, shell out a premium for an all-you-can eat buffet of Thanksgiving fare that wasn’t especially meaningful to them (rarely ordering seconds because they didn’t like to overeat), spend extravagantly on Oregon Pinot Noir (wine was extra), and then thank us for inviting them!!

We would stop serving early (for us), and the entire staff would finish off the leftovers, we would hand out cash bonuses, and everyone would pitch in to close earlier than usual.

In fact, we tried to treat customers and employees with the same openness, honesty, and personal touch.

We stayed open much later than all the other restaurants. Most places closed at 10, which in reality meant they wouldn’t seat you after 9:30, because the cooks started breaking the kitchen down at 10. Staff at those places were done with their side work and cleaning at 11.

That gave us a huge, untapped market – all those restaurant workers and owners, who came in tired and hungry for t-bones and fries. They spent much more than average customers and tipped well.

For the first year, we stayed open 7 days a week and didn’t close between lunch and dinner. Only cafes stayed open all day, and even they usually closed one day a week.

Molly was ambivalent about our 24/7 strategy. It meant no breaks – even if we gave ourselves a day off, we still had to be around, still there to put out metaphorical fires. But I argued that an American eatery never closed, and I was certain that once word got around about our hours, people who missed their lunch hour – another untapped market -- would come in the afternoon, and no one would ever show up at our door to find us closed.

Never mind that no other restaurant did things this way. We were going to be different. Of course, like so many other things, we couldn’t change much of anything when it came to cultural mores.

The first thing we couldn’t change was how long it took for employees to greet one another – irrespective of the circumstances.

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