Rebuild a North Idaho restaurant

If I had a dollar for every cook, dishwasher, server or diner who wishes to, "Have my own restaurant someday," I would be a rich man. The idea of cooking one's own food for an appreciative crowd of applauding patrons and making substantial money being creative, designing authentically French or Italian inspired menus and preparing delicious food in an air-conditioned, fully functioning kitchen is not the reality I've lived in my 20 years of restaurant work.

Work as a restaurant chef is hard, dirty, long and hot. Kitchen temperatures are often well above 100 degrees, cooks and chefs can often work eight to 12 hours without a break or meal and often change clothes due to the degree of food-filth collected on their chef coat or the sweat staining their jacket due to the kitchen temperature and high anaerobic activity.

Being a restaurant chef is hard work. The portrayal of the amazingly bright, clean, calm kitchen leader is greatly over-estimated and glamourized by television and magazines. Restaurant chefs adopt a different role. Most kitchen managers are orchestra leaders - snapping out orders to the culinary musicians ready to receive their command; "Fire the rib-eye, medium rare, 86 the oysters Rockefeller and replace them with oysters casino, I need the Cobb salad on-the-rail!"

Are restaurant chefs bright? Absolutely! Poised? Yes. In charge of their kitchen? They have to be. Can one learn these skills by being a restaurant patron, server, culinary aficionado or culinary school graduate? No. One learns the skills of running a professional kitchen and by working in a professional kitchen.

This being said, being a restaurant chef is an amazingly rewarding career. I have worked as an Executive Chef for 10 of my 20 restaurant years and still find the work exhilarating, creative and intrinsically rewarding. For this reason I have volunteered to work with a local restaurant to turn restaurant from a revenue vacuum into a moneymaker.

My goal is to discover my dining audience, price and purchase my food at an affordable price and focus on servicing my customer. There are five ways to make money in the restaurant business:

* Increase menu prices

* Decrease food cost

* Increase customers

* Decrease labor costs

* Decrease overhead to include shrinkage, facilities cost, non-consumable purchasing and waste.

My goal for this endeavor is to increase customers by creating an amazingly creative menu which is unique and offers a high perceived value and to decrease overhead costs. I also plan to examine labor costs to ensure each employee is at work when he or she needs to be and to ensure he or she is working at his or her full potential. I will examine every product purchased to ensure it is of the highest quality and fairest price for our menu while eliminating extraneous items which add nothing to a dish. The semantics of changing a restaurant's processes are simple but convincing customers to come back to our location is difficult.

Now I ask a favor. As readers of my column, I ask that you help in creating the best food North Idaho has to offer. I ask that you help me entice customers to return to a popular restaurant that customers have vacated. At this time, I will keep the name and location of this restaurant private but as we work together, and create an amazing restaurant, I will invite all readers to dine with me to celebrate the success of this establishment.

My request is simple. Please respond to the following questions which will guide me in rebuilding this restaurant into a place where we can all enjoy a meal together.

* What type of food, style of cooking or cuisine is missing for diners in North Idaho?

* What is your favorite signature food item that attracts you to your favorite restaurant in the world? Mine is the tomato bisque at the Bistro Jeanty in Yountville, Calif., and the gumbo at Moontime which rivals any gumbo I've consumed in New Orleans.

* What is your favorite local restaurant?

* What is most important - price, quality, taste, the dining experience, service or ambiance?

* Describe your "perfect" restaurant.

* How often do you dine out a week?

Thanks for your help. My goal in this endeavor is to create a place in North Idaho where I want to dine; a place where I can have a great meal, feel comfortable, where the servers know my name and where I am proud to bring my friends and family. Please join me in this work!

Send comments or other suggestions to Bill Rutherford at bprutherford@hotmail.com or visit pensiveparenting.com.