The Way to Bartaco with Anthony Valletta, President of Bartaco

How do you bartaco? “Bartaco” encapsulates both a “thing you do” and the name of this growing restaurant company with over 20 locations in 12 states.  Anthony Valletta, an alumnus of Boston University School of Hospitality Administration, and President of bartaco, delves into how the company has innovated the traditional restaurant business model. The secret sauce: operational excellence on the backend and warm service and fresh ingredients front and center.

bartaco

The “Distinguished” podcast is produced by Boston University School of Hospitality Administration.

Host: Arun Upneja, Dean
Producer: Mara Littman, Director of Corporate and Public Relations
Sound Engineer and Editor: Andrew Hallock
Graphic Design: Rachel Hamlin, Marketing Manager

Music: “Airport Lounge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Transcript

Arun Upneja: Welcome to the Distinguished podcast produced by Boston University School of Hospitality Administration. I'm Arun Upneja, Dean of the school, and I'm pleased to welcome my guest, Anthony Valletta, President of Bartaco. In case you didn't know, Bartaco, which has over 24 locations in 12 states, the concept is inspired by the beach culture of Brazil, Uruguay and Southern California, serving upscale street food with a coastal vibe and a relaxed environment. Very important to note, Anthony is also an alum of our school. He has an impressive track record. Anthony, thank you for joining us today. Great to have you back at SHA. 

Anthony Valletta: My pleasure. Great to be here.  

Arun Upneja: Bartaco was founded over 10 years ago in 2010. Now you have 24 locations in 12 states, including one location here in Seaport neighborhood of Boston. Before we get to how the company has grown, how did it start? 

Anthony Valletta: Our original founders, we had a concept called Barcelona. Barcelona was doing tapas food before tapas food really was popular in the United States. They were taking trips down to Uruguay and South America and coastal California and looking for inspiration. When they came back in New Haven, Connecticut right off of 95, there's a long row of food trucks that are still there to today. After they came back from a trip, they went and had this street food, which at the time was before street food really became a big craze like it is today. They said, there's got to be a way to take the beach vibe we just felt from where we were in South America, and bring elevated street food, combine those two things into one. They used the chef inspiration from Barcelona, and took those chefs and said, here's the challenge, and they created Bartaco from the merge of those two worlds, and that's where the concept got its start. 

Arun Upneja: Tell us more about the concept. There are a lot of variations on restaurants that specialize in tacos and margaritas. Because Bartaco is more than just a Mexican restaurant in the traditional expected sense, it's colors outside of the lines. So, what do you think has made the concept so successful? 

Anthony Valletta: Yeah, it's a great question. I think the key for us is that we don't consider ourselves experts in taco and tequila. We consider ourselves experts in fun. When you go into Bartaco, and I was just sharing this with one of the professors this morning when I was chatting with them, you feel transplanted. You feel like it's an escape. So when you walk in, that beach vibe, the way we decorate, the way the music is played, the vibe in the restaurant, the way it feels, it's meant to get you to kind of unplug. When Bartaco first started, there were no outlets in the entire dining room. It wasn't meant to be a place to go charge your phone or take out your laptop. And obviously, things have changed over the decade plus we've been in business, and we've adjusted some of that. But the idea is really how you feel when you go in there, and it's just as much about how you feel when you leave. So to us, the real secret to us and why the concept we think is really resonating so well is that you go in there and you just feel totally transported into someone's beach house, like where your toes are almost in the sand. And to your point earlier in the introduction, in New England in December, there's nothing better than feeling like you're sitting on a beach. So for us, that's been the vibe we've continued to push for our decade plus of business. 

Arun Upneja: So we talk at our school here, we talk about experiences and customer experiences. And so clearly you have defined what sort of experience you want your customers to have. So I'm assuming you don't want people coming here in suits and having business meetings or is that also part of your... 

Anthony Valletta: It's all part of it. I think one of the beauties of Bartaco is kind of joke, like how do you Bartaco? A lot of our guests frequent us three, four or five times a week because the way you can experience it is so different. The menu, you could eat something different every day and feel like you're at a different type of restaurant, but you're all within the same realm. And we have people coming in, solo diners, group diners, business meetings, social gatherings, bachelor parties, 70th birthdays. It's really the use case of how people use our restaurant is so dynamic. And I think that's part of our success is the fact that it's not one dimensional. A lot of restaurants have spent a lot of time in steak houses in my career and they're exceptional, but it typically is celebration and business. That was the dominant part of what drove that category. For us, we're able to have it so multi-dimensional and so many different people that can come and experience this that way. It's allowed us to really open the doors to everybody and we haven't really ruled anything out and I think that's been a huge part of why the brand has grown so well. It's a huge part of the appeal that on Monday night, you and I can go out to dinner and tomorrow I can go out with my wife and kids and Wednesday I can go out with a friend from college and then Thursday morning I can have a business meeting and they can all be totally different experiences in the same environment and that's kind of our secret behind the scenes. 

Arun Upneja: Have you changed your strategy in any way because of the pandemic? 

Anthony Valletta: We absolutely did. If I never hear the word pivot again in the rest of my life, I'll be thrilled, but a lot of people during COVID all started adopting similar practices, you lean in to take out which we never did before the pandemic that was something that we changed. But the QR code dotting that we use, which everybody became familiar with QR codes very quickly again during the pandemic, we leaned into it and saw the opportunity for us that when we thought about the guest experience, you think about any restaurant and the pain points the guest has, we've all sat at a table and looked around for our server because we wanted another cocktail, we've all turned around looking for the check because maybe our kids were screaming or we had to run to their meeting. And there's all those moments that the guest didn't have control of because your kind of unfortunately, the server had so many things to do to keep attending to you. So we wanted to put that opportunity back in the guest's hands. So with On Demand Dining, what we changed during COVID was we removed servers from the equation, and we created a new position called a service lead. So we took basically a hybrid of what a server was, and a manager was and created this new salaried position and their primary job is to literally engage the guests and create a memorable experience. When they're able to order on their phones, now you've taken away the minutia of all those things that take you away from the table. I've got to put an order in the POS, I have to go run the food, I have to go get drinks, all those things that take you away from the table and don't allow you to create this amazing experience, we took away from the position. And now we said your job is to literally stay what we call in your zone, 8 tables, 12 tables, whatever it is. And their only job is to literally create a memorable experience and engage their guests and do what restaurants are supposed to do best is provide great hospitality. So we completely changed our front of house service model. Because of COVID, and honestly, I think it's been a million times for the better. Our guests sent them, and we do a top box of one to five scale. Right after the pandemic, we were averaging in the high threes. This last month, we're 4.73 out of 5. We're averaging north of 4.6 every month. The guests are telling us how much they love this experience. And the new positions allowed us to really elevate our hospitality and guest experience overall. And that's allowed us to have some great sales and really open our doors to great people.  

Arun Upneja: You know, one of the big issues that I continually have with our industry is lack of innovation and clearly you have redefined how a restaurant service should be done. So, let's dig a little bit into how a customer the life cycle in the restaurant. So they walk in and how they're gonna be treated, how they're gonna be welcomed and set to a table. And then how will the service happen? 

Anthony Valletta: Yeah, so when you walk in the front door, traditional just like your normal restaurant, we have either a manager or we call Dragonfly, it's our logo. So all of our team members are called Dragonflies and get into that part a little later. But you greet the front door just like everybody else, size party, welcome in. We use a wait list management tool that we're actually starting to lean pretty heavily into in 23 to do a lot more working with some of the artificial intelligence we have behind the scenes, working with some of the guest management or the guest data we've captured to be able to customize some experiences. What's your side of the table? As you sit down, your zone leader will come up and give you the spiel of, have you been here before? If you have, most people are very familiar. If they're not, we give them a rundown of how our service works. Basically, there's a QR code in the table and they scan, which everybody knows how to do now. In there, it's almost like shopping on Amazon. The whole menu is there. You add things to your cart when you want to order. You just hit order now. You add in your credit card at the beginning. So literally, when you're done, you can just walk out the door. There's no waiting for a check. It's all there. You agree upfront to a gratuity, which you can adjust before you close your tab. But at that point, it's meant to be a tapas style, so food comes as you go. All of our food is smaller portions, so tacos are two or three bites. So maybe you start with three and say, hey, I'm hungry, and you can get two more. And that ease of access of ordering creates a seamless experience for the guest and the whole experience at their fingertips. All the meanwhile, the service lead is there to help you with anything you'd like. If you have any questions or origins or things like that, we have all the different systems we take care of there. But during that whole time, they're just hanging out, chatting with you, getting to know you. Again, if it's a business meeting and they want to be left alone, it's silent service, just like we would do in a traditional restaurant. If they're having a party and having fun and doing shots of tequila and things of that nature, we enjoy, we partake and have fun with them. So at that point, we spend a lot of our time with these service leads of really learning how to read a table, understanding what kind of experience these people want out of Bartaco so that if I have a 70th birthday, an anniversary, a family at a business meeting, they all want different experiences from Bartaco. But how do you read the table? How do you change the way you approach the table and the way you change the experience? And that's the difference of what we really try to do in that regards to the steps of service. And by removing all of the, we'll call them pain points of being a server, it allows them to have the flexibility to do that and spend that really precious time with our guests. 

Arun Upneja: So another customer has ordered and who delivers to the table? 

Anthony Valletta: We have, so we have our dragonflies. We have some that work in the expo that are running the food. We have some that are running cocktails, ones that run the front door. So we still have the, we'll call them traditional positions, but they're all interchangeable with each other. So again, that service doesn't have to leave the section now. They've got people bringing food and bringing cocktails to the section the whole time. 

Arun Upneja: So servers who are running the food, they're not assigned to a particular table or a section. They can be, you go in and you have one table in one corner, then next time you're delivering food in somewhere else. And that's because the server, the leads are their sort of to manage that whole process. 

Anthony Valletta: That's correct. 

Arun Upneja: That's a very, very different model than most other restaurants that, you know, that exists today. Okay, so now let's talk a little bit about what happened during COVID, our industry shut down and most, a lot of people that left the hospitality industry. And now that we are open again, we are having problems attracting enough people to work. In fact, that's a problem that all industries are having. So once you do attract someone to work in Bartaco, we need to, or to, you know, to generally to the service industry, we have to provide them with salaries and benefits, a positive organizational culture, growth opportunities. So how do you invest in your employees? 

Anthony Valletta: Yeah, no, it's a great question. I mean, I think it's the most important thing what we're seeing now as you're getting these new generations coming into the workplace, the values and things that that attract them to brands and keep them in brands are much different than they were even a decade ago. You know, we've brought out a company called Talent Pulse that we use that gives us kind of really good data as to what people are looking for in the workplace. So we spend a lot of time dissecting what we call employee sentiment. So that's one of the biggest things that we look at is typically restaurants look at labor, they look at sales and they look at guest sentiment and they, you know, that's kind of like their order of the morning. We look at employee sentiment first, then guest sentiment, then sales and then labor last. So to us, if the employees are having a great experience, they're going to take care of our guests. And if the guests have a great experience, it's going to take care of everything else. And the system that we use every day, our employees clock out and they have an opportunity to rate us just like a guest would. And if they have a bad experience, they can immediately provide feedback just like a guest would every day, every day. We use a platform called Seven Chefs that we partnered with. And we get sentiment scores for our employees on our restaurants daily, weekly, monthly. And they'll provide comments to us. So, it gives us this really interesting opportunity in the store to say, hey, Jane Doe had a really rough shift yesterday. I want to sit down and talk to her and say, how could we have done better? What could we do to change? Where did we miss the mark as leaders? I want to know that you know what, you know, your feedback is very valuable. And we've taken that, which has kind of spawned us to do some other things behind the scenes. One of the big investments that we made this past year in a platform called Giant, so Giant's a mostly executive coaching tool. They work with Pfizer's and big companies of the world. We invested that every single salary team member in our entire company, every sous chef, every service leader, every general manager has an executive coaching platform, every one of them. What I've always found in the restaurant business is that we tend to be very good at training hard skills. Here's how to write a schedule, here's how to read a P&L, here's the way you're supposed to read a table. I mean, at the end of the day, that's not the hard part of our business, right? Everybody is great, training manuals, that's fine. The hard part of our business is the people management. And we're managing, I think, such a massive amount of generational, different generational people in our restaurants right now, that the soft skills are more important than they've ever been in our industry. For years, we muscled results, right? For a long time, some of these great companies, they just powered through and were able to figure it out. Those soft skills are so important, not even just for at the workplace, for the balance of home, for the socio-economic things that we're doing with outside. We made a really big conscious effort to invest a substantial amount of money this past year so that all of our salaried employees are in this program, and we've made multiple levels of the program. We use the military acronyms of boot camp and flight school and things of that nature, but the idea behind it is as you evolve in your leadership journey within Bartaco, so does the soft skill development that you have behind the scenes. This platform really works on getting to know who they are as a leader. And the principle is known yourself to lead yourself. So really understand how you are as a leader, how you come off, how you're impactful. So we invested heavily in that. In our benefits piece, when most people were pulling back, we added a 401k percent match in last year when most people are going the other direction. So we really worked at taking the feedback from our employees on this daily basis, thinking about the things that are important to them and started putting investments there. We also went carbon neutral this past year, partnered with a company called Green Places to really work on our environmental impact on the world, and that's important to our staff. They've actually made comments that that draws them to us. So when we think about all the challenges that COVID brought, I think it brought good challenges in the aspect that it forced us to really think differently. That forced us to listen to the employee more than we ever had to before because the industry lost almost a third of our population that went to other industries. So now you're fighting for really good people. So they're going to have the option to go where they really want to go. And to us, we're insanely fortunate and knock on wood that we are 92% staff as a company. And that's an insane number in today's day and world. And we're at a point where we're actually starting to upgrade some of our talent when most people are just fighting to open sections and to be able to open for meal period. So we're so fortunate coming out of COVID that between this model and between the development we put back in and having amazing people in our company that are leading these teams, we haven't had as much of a challenge as I think most have, which is, I feel very fortunate to be able to say that. 

Arun Upneja: That's absolutely incredible. The way you described the work culture. And I'm just intrigued by the fact that every single employee is giving their sentiment or rating their work environment for that day every single day. Kudos. That's fantastic. You know, we always think about human interactions. In our school, we talk continually about human interactions and how we are a very human interaction focused company and focus on people. And most hospitality companies, with that, they think about their customers and their clients. But you are so focused on people who work in the company. And that is incredible. So have you seen that decrease your turnover? How much is your turnover in place? 

Anthony Valletta: It sounds a little counterintuitive. Our turnover is higher than industry average. And the Talent Pulse platform that I mentioned we brought on was a big part of the reason was to understand the why. And there's twofold of why we think our turnover is higher. We've got some data supportive. But the one thing, and this is the challenge we have today, is our company was built, our number one, what we call touchstone, is intolerance. We focus on the 1%, not the 99. So if we get a secret shopper back to 99%, we don't jump to pat in the back. We look at where did we fail? Where's the 1%? We're in that constant pursuit of perfection. And with the amount of data analytics behind the scenes that we've brought in, we have more data than we probably know what to do with at some point. But we've gone so far that I can gauge every single service lead their actual engagement score each night with each table. And that's a hard thing for a manager to hear is that I know how you've done every night. Did you engage last night or not? And if you didn't, your name's attached to this. So I can actually go back and ask you the question and coach you. And we rank them weekly, reward top performers, and we coach the bottom ones. We either coach them up or coach them out. But the environment of extreme accountability that we've always been at Bartaco is not for everyone. People say they want it, and they will say, oh, no, that sounds great. And when they get in and realize that it's real, that one of the things that we say all the time is we do what we say, and we say what we do. And there's a lot of people out there in a lot of industries that there's things that people talk about. There are things that people actually do. We don't really talk. We just do. And we've always kind of hung our hat a little bit that we want it to be higher than industry turnover, which I know sounds a little counterintuitive to the previous point. But it's because it means we create a culture of high expectations. And that's how we've performed so optimally over 11 years. And we continue to believe that's important. The second piece is we're creating a new position, the service leader position, which is our highest turnover position in our company right now. We've got some good metrics with GM and Chef and with sous chefs, but our service lead is exceptionally high. It's about 113%. But it's a new position. No one has this in the industry. So we're still figuring out how to properly recruit the right person for that job. We're still modifying constantly the way we train for the job, and we're still modifying the expectations for the job. So it's challenging being first to market with something like this because there's nothing else to go off of. And it's hard to explain to someone, like, here's a job that no one has, and I want to try to explain it the best I can to you, but it's really hard to explain until you do it. And some people get in and love it, and they believe this is the future of our segment of dining. And some come in and say, I'll go back to being an assistant manager where I have minimal ways to track my performance, or then some things in a P&L. I can shake hands with my tables, but you don't know if I'm doing great or not, other than just a feeling. And it's unfortunate that a lot of people want to work in that environment, and they just don't work well for us. So we pride ourselves on what we call good turnover. If we have an employee that believes in our culture and produces good results and has a great future, and we lose them, that's the number I care about. The people that come in that might not be a culture fit or might not like the environment, we're going to always take that feedback to heart and find ways to get better. But I don't spend a lot of our energy on that because we believe so strongly in our culture. 

Arun Upneja: So in terms of this turnover, have you noticed, I mean, I'm sure with all the data that you have, is there less turnover with those who are high performers or is there less turnover with those who are not performing very well? 

Anthony Valletta: Less turnover with high performers for sure. Yeah, we believe taking care of high performers. So we do our absolute best when it comes to their pay scale or incentives or bonus to take care of them. Low performers, it's because we have so much data analytics around it, they can't hide for very long. And in a lot of companies, they can and in bigger companies, you can. For us, it's after your first week, I already understand how you're making impact. And obviously, we have patience, right? We want to make sure that they're continuing to grow and evolve. But if we look at somebody in their first 90-day journey and say, hey, there's no evolution here, and we've given you tools and resources and coaching to improve, but we haven't seen that yet, and we have data to back that up, it makes that conversation much easier. Whereas typically, it's hard after 90 days to look at someone and say, just don't think you're quite getting it. Well, show me how. I don't know of any restaurants that can literally give two dozen pieces of data analytics to a manager, assistant manager and say, well, here's why. We've got a trajectory of what kind of impact you've made in our company. And instead of all that is, you know, slow to hire, quick to fire. We believe that's the right way to continue pursuing perfection. 

Arun Upneja: In terms of the tips, are these service leads participating in the tip? I mean, since you've got such a distributed model, there is no one person that is in charge of a table. So how do the tips get distributed? 

Anthony Valletta: Great question. So that was a big change for us during COVID. So service leaders are salaried, bonused employees. They make their annual salary. They're part of the bonus pool, traditional bonus pool, where they get quarterly. The amazing benefit that we got out of COVID is all those tips, we are a fully pooled house. So every single employee in the entire restaurant makes the same base wage, everyone. The dishwasher, the line cook, the hostess, the busser, no one gets paid. There's no pay differentiation at all in our restaurant, zero. So if it's Massachusetts and DC and New York are the three jurisdictions where we can't do it in back of house, which we're working towards lobbying separately here in Massachusetts, but in all the other states that we have, everyone distributes those tips evenly. And what it did is that people are making a true living wage. On average, as a company, our employees make in the low to mid 20s per hour. We have some stores in peak volume that are making $40 an hour. So it's amazing, we had a story this past year of a dishwasher, which a lot of dishwashers in our industry work two, three, even four jobs, to be able to stay afloat or send money back to family if they're here from overseas. And we had a dishwasher come to us and said, I was able to quit both of my other jobs because I make so much money working here, and now I can actually enjoy my time in the States. Which to me was just, that's the sauce that is so amazing. To hear stories like that is incredible. And to be honest, we all know the back of house has been overlooked for decades in this industry. The dishwasher is the hardest working person in the restaurant, and they are the least paid in every single restaurant in the world. And to us, how did you equalize that? So not only do we get these great living wages and people are making great money, very competitive, and that tip is going to everybody who has to deal with that. But the other thing internally is it creates this incredible teamwork environment. There's no more he or she makes more than I do. There's no more, well, I don't want to go help them out, you know, because they're a dishwasher, because they're a...Everyone now realizes that I have employees from the front that go help in the back and back to go help in the front. And at the end of the night, the team closes are so much more efficient. And what also has happened is they self-govern because they realize the less hours, the more money they make. So what has started to happen in some of these restaurants that really have adopted the culture of how beneficial this is, is they let us know who's not going to work. And they call them out. And the managers actually get to have less conversations about productivity because the person that's on the line watching the one next to him take twice as long to prep the same item, they self-govern like, you got to pick up the pace, or if not, you got to go. And they start to have these professional conversations amongst each other. And we've seen our efficiency of labor literally go up exponentially. And not because we're managing differently, because the model allows them to realize that if we have high productive, highly efficient employees, everyone makes more money and can work less hours and continue to make more cash. So it's an amazing benefit that we've changed this model for so many different reasons. 

Arun Upneja: That's very interesting. And obviously very unique. But I do want to get to something that you said a couple of minutes ago, which that everyone makes the same base pay. So you have servers, and what about cooks and chefs? So there is no differentiation for the amount of training or education a person might have had. So chefs versus sous chefs are... 

Anthony Valletta: On the hourly level, no. On the salary level, there is differentiation. We do it by market. So we have baselines for every position that we pay. And then based off of cost of living, things like that will sway. So there is differentiation in salary, but it's not a lot. Our GMs and chefs, we just launched at our September conference. Based off sales tiers, if you are a $6 million store, we have a base salary for every GM and chef that you make no matter what. The second you're trailing 12 months, break $6 million and sustain them so your pay goes up. And that's where you stay. Within there, we've got about a $10,000 range. So if I'm a $6 million store in Boston, which is a higher cost of living versus Florida, I might make $10,000 more than that other GM, but it's still very close. But the full equal pay is strictly for our hourly team. So everybody in one restaurant makes exactly the same, the exception of the markets that the jurisdiction doesn't allow us to do that. 

Arun Upneja: I want to also dig into this. Some time ago, you mentioned a lot of data at Bartaco. And when we were discussing how a customer comes in and they're seated at a table, so do you take reservations or are they seated as they come along, and you just have to show up to be seated? 

Anthony Valletta: Yes, so no reservations. We do, you can call ahead, which just takes a half hour off your wait time. It's not like a call at wait, that's just get your name on there. It gets a little bit ahead, but everything is walk-in. And it's amazing, like our busiest location in Port Chester, they'll go on three-hour waits and people wait. And I will tell you, I'm so thankful for those people because I would not wait even an hour for anything. I'm just not that patient of a person, but it's incredible. They want to be part of the experience and they kind of know how to Bartaco. They come and they put their name in, and they might hang out at the bar, they might hang outside in the patio, or they might go shopping and come back an hour or two. But first come first serve. 

Arun Upneja: That's amazing for a customer to wait for three hours for a table. At some point, the person at the desk front has to say how long you have to wait. So one hour, three hours, two hours, 45 minutes, 30 minutes. How do they know what time to quote? 

Anthony Valletta: I mean, just like anybody else, if you're using its reservation, we've got a good flow of how the tables come and go. But we traditionally don't quote in time, we quote in margaritas. So we'll say it's a two-margarita wait. Obviously, once you get past three, it's hard to tell what's a seven-margarita wait because we don't want people to be falling over as they get to their table. But for us, we've got the system in front that we use has an algorithm built in that produces turn times and gives us an idea behind it. But one of our philosophies, and this is a little probably backwards compared to most restaurants, we don't necessarily care if they're happy at the door. We care if they're happy when they leave. Most restaurants will overquote because they don't want to have somebody saying, you quoted me an hour, it's been 90 minutes. They're afraid to push the door to get people in. It's usually an 18-year-old, inexperienced person up front that doesn't want the confrontation. So they pad it, so it's an easier way to go. We go the other way, and that requires really strong leadership, really high hospitality, the front door. So we've oftentimes sat people that are upset because we're 20, 30 minutes over. But when they sit down and they have an amazing experience and it's worth it, and they leave smiling year to year, that's what we really push. So we focus on the wait time, on the optimistic side. And if we miss, we miss. That's what we do. We make people happy. It's our job to engage them and understand. You figure it out, right? If you've got a young kid and it's 6 o'clock and I have to go to bed, let's sneak them in a little bit earlier. Let's take care of them. So we make sure that we do the best we can by all of our guests at the front door. 

Arun Upneja: Fantastic. A lot of economists feel that next year there's going to be a recession. And how do you sort of plan for that? I mean, you seem to be continuing to expand Bartaco. I guess you're not worried about the recession or how do you plan for it? 

Anthony Valletta: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Bartaco was created during the recession of 08-09. When we created it, it was 2008. And everybody remembers that year, especially our judiciary very, very well. It was created to provide value. So when we really were thinking about the concept and how it really resonates, we did it in one of arguably one of the hardest times, sans COVID. Our industry has faced in the past few decades. So I would never use the word recession proof because it doesn't exist for anybody. But I think the brand is recession resilient because it was meant to provide a high value. That's our big piece. Everything is still freshly squeezed, freshly made in-house, high-quality products at a great price. So we talk very heavily about the value equation. What you give over what you get, and we have to be heavily in balance over. We're giving more of an experience, giving better quality of food, getting better quality of drink than you're paying. So yeah, there's going to be a lot of other factors. They're going to come with a recession without a doubt. And I think everybody will see frequency at some point go down. But to me, the fact that our guest sentiment is so high, that's where we're going to hang our hat on, is that the more guests that I speak to and you know, understated people that we speak to, I think people won't stop going out, but they're going to go where their dollar makes sense and where they feel they're getting more for their dollar. So even during the last recession, people still went out. They didn't spend the luxuries. They weren't necessarily dining at Michelin Dining, but they may trade down a little bit, but they're going to trade down where the dollar goes further. I think that's where Bartaco excels. I think the dollar goes very far to our concept for what you get. And that's, I think, what people want during economic tough times.  

Arun Upneja: On that positive note, we have a speed round of questions for you, just for a bit of fun. So the idea is for you to respond with short answers to these prompts. So you're ready? 

Anthony Valletta: I'm ready. 

Arun Upneja: What's the vacation destination that you dream about? 

Anthony Valletta: Positano, Italy. 

Arun Upneja: If you could invite any four people to dinner, obviously at Bartaco or at your home, who would they be? My heart first tells me my grandfather who's passed and my wife and kids because I never got to meet them. But for probably a more relatable thing for the group, if I had to pick four people I've probably known, I would say Simon Sinek, Anthony Bourdain, David Goggins and Richard Bronson. 

Arun Upneja: That's amazing. Do you still remember your experience at SHA? So can you talk about your favorite class at SHA? 

Anthony Valletta: My favorite class at Shaw was actually the leadership class. It was an elective at the time when I was here. It was not mandatory, which I know it is now. Professor Oceans taught the class. And there's so many things that I learned from that class that I still apply to life today, whereas everything else, the world changes, HR changes, law changes, all these things evolve. Leadership, it evolves, but the core fundamentals are always there. In that class, I'm thrilled it's mandatory. I was excited when I heard that, but it was by far the best, most impactful class, both personally and professionally, since I left SHA. 

Arun Upneja: Professor Oshens has left a deep impression on SHA, and his legacy, as you know, will live on because we have the freshman experience named after him. So the last question, what's the driest taco at Bartaco? 

Anthony Valletta: I would say the pork belly for me, but I believe ravioli is the spice of life, so I don't think there's a bad one on the menu, to be honest with you. 

Arun Upneja: Excellent. I look forward to trying it out. So thank you, Anthony. It was a pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you for joining us today. Special thanks to the team who produced this podcast, Mara Littman, Andy Hallock, and the entire team at Boston University School of Hospitality Administration. To keep up with Distinguished podcasts, be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. You can also learn more about our undergraduate and graduate programs at Boston University School of Hospitality Administration by visiting bu.edu/hospitality.