WHAT DOES IT COST TO SERVE MEDIOCRITY

I have heard operators say, no one ever complains about our food. Unfortunately, these days people will usually say, "it was fine" To me that is the worst thing someone can say. Yes, you can serve food that is subpar, people will notice, and you will see the results in empty chairs during meal service.

Local Eats are the Best Eats!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Good morning. It is July the 19th, 2026, and straight from the Highley Kavanaugh studio, this is the Mad Food Critic Podcast. I do apologize for missing last week. Uh my allergies have absolutely got the best of me, and my voice quality is still not what it should be. But I think I can get through the whole podcast without any coughing. Now I can't promise I won't have any word salads, but that's, you know, that's just a bonus. But my voice quality has been a little iffy for quite some time, and I'm just pushing through it. I've got three different podcasts that I do, and I try to do three podcasts in one day gets to be a little bit much, even when my voice is strong. But we're gonna power through this because I have a question today, and that is how much does it cost to not serve quality? Everybody wants to know why don't restaurants just use better ingredients? Well, the answer is let's call it simple, but it's all because somebody looked at a case price instead of a menu price, and that's one of the biggest mistakes that I've watched restaurants make during my 40 plus years in this industry. Now, I used to have this conversation every single day. I'd walk into a restaurant, show them three levels of green beans, or three quality grades of green beans, same vegetable, three different quality levels, and the owner would ask, How much? And it was usually phrased in the form of uh what's your case cost? And because they wanted to know the price of the of the case. And I would tell them immediately, give them the price, and they would say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's six dollars more a case than distributor X. And I would smile and I would say, You're asking the wrong question. The question that you should be asking is how much more per serving? Not per case, per serving, because your customer is not buying a case. When your customer comes in and sits down at a table, you're not putting a case of green beans on the table, they're buying one plate. So let's do some simple math. That premium green bean might cost 10, maybe 11, 12, 15 cents more on the plate. 11 cents. Is that the hill that we're willing to die on? Really? Meanwhile, the customer notices maybe they don't know the why, they just know, man, this place used to be better. I have actually said that phrase about some restaurants here in my local area over the last couple of months. Man, this place used to be better. Restaurants lose customers one tiny disappointment at a time. Remember that phrase. Restaurants lose customers one tiny disappointment at a time, not all at once. Let's talk about onion rings. It's one of my favorite examples, and it's can also turn into one of the most heated arguments, and I that's why I love it. You can, you know, look, Mr. Operator, you can go buy your frozen onion rings, and they're $30, $40, $50, $60 a case, sometimes even more. I've seen onion rings get up almost close to $100 a case. But what's the argument that you hear? Oh, they're consistent, they're easy. You just throw them in a fryer, and every single time, Mr. Customer, uh, they'll be the same. You'll have consistency. If someone doesn't show up, it doesn't matter because you've got these in the fryer in the freezer, and all you have to do is just throw them in a fryer and they're done. Okay. Or hear me out. You could buy a 50-pound bag of colossal onions, 25, 30 bucks. I mean, I've seen them go cheaper and I've seen them go higher, depending on the season. 50 pound 50-pound bag of flour. We'll be talking 20 bucks, you know, probably less, probably maybe sometimes, maybe a little more. Season it, batter it, bread it, whatever your case may be, whatever you prefer. And then maybe, just maybe, you'll make something that people actually remember. Now, I already know the arguments because I heard them throughout the years. Oh, I could play them back for you word for word. But here they are. But the labor, you don't understand the labor's gonna eat me up on making those onion rings. Really? We we owned a restaurant that seated 300 people. We breaded fresh onion rings for 12 years, and I I I never seen it hit us on the labor side. Consistency. It's an onion ring. How inconsistent can you possibly be? You take the onion ring, you take the flour, you put the two together, bada boom, bada bing, you got an onion ring, drop it in the fryer. Oh, but that's it's the time, it takes so much time. It's the employees, the turnover. I've heard every one of these excuses. The manufacturers will tell you, you can't make them consistently. You just you're whatever you make today, they won't be the same as tomorrow. Food service salespeople, I'm sorry, uh, they'll tell you frozen's easier, and even some consultants will tell you labor is too expensive. Okay, maybe sometimes they're right. But let me ask you a question, a serious question. I I mean, I want you to stop right now, and if you don't hear another word I say in this podcast, let me ask you one question. If every restaurant in your town buys the exact same frozen onion ring and buys the exact same frozen cheesecake, buys the exact same frozen appetizer, buys the exact same chicken fried steak, what exactly is it, Mr. Restaurant Operator, that makes your restaurant worth driving across town for? I'll sit here and I'll wait for the answer. Yes, what I thought. I don't hear anything. Look, I'm I'm not I'm not mad, I'm not angry. I'm just trying to wake some people up. You cannot serve the same stuff off of the back of the truck and expect to be, oh, this is our signature appetizer, this is our signature burger when you're using the same frozen hamburger patty as the guy across the street. No, the only thing signature on it is your signature at the bottom of that food service distributor invoice. That's the only signature thing going on, and I'm trying to wake people up to this. Look, you know, I get it. I I I've been in the restaurant, I've I've owned restaurants, I've designed restaurants, I've built restaurants, I get it, I understand. I've been there, I've been in, you know, and if I hadn't been in these positions, then yes, you could throw something at me. But I have been in these positions, and I can tell you that if you're not setting yourself apart from the restaurant across the street or across town, I I don't I don't know. I really don't. I'm I'm out of words for that. But I'll tell you this if I can identify your food distributor before I can identify your restaurant, got a problem. That's where I dropped the mic. Here's something most operators never calculate. Think about this. What's the lifetime value of a loyal customer? Because let me tell you something, folks. That's the real math. Let's say better ingredients cost 25 cents more. 25 cents. But one customer comes back twice a month for five years because they loved your food. What's that worth? Hundreds, thousands? Nobody calculates that. The money they lose, the people quietly stop coming, they calculate food costs, but they don't calculate disappointment. Here's something I learned selling food. The cheapest product often becomes the most expensive decision because nobody tells you how many customers never came back. There's no report for that. There's no spreadsheet, no inventory adjustment, no invoice. Just are you ready for this? Just empty chairs. Look across your dining room during any meal service. How many empty chairs do you have? If you have a lot, if more than 50%, what I would tell you is to walk into your office, grab your distributor invoices, and start making little check marks on how many things are pre-made. I don't have to tell you the answer to that. You already know. You know what's funny? And I don't mean funny ha ha, I mean funny ironic. Restaurants will spend five thousand dollars on a new sign, ten thousand remodeling the dining room, twenty thousand on advertising, but they will fight you on 11 cents worth of green beans. Seen it so many times over the years. The irony, people don't come back because your parking lot was beautiful, they come back because the food made them happy. The food was different than what they could get anywhere else. And that's where I'm gonna leave you. Don't ask how much does quality cost? Ask yourself, how much is mediocrity costing me? Because mediocre restaurants don't usually close overnight. They slowly bleed customers until one day they all wake up and they wonder where everybody went. I'm the Mad Food Critic. I'll see you again next week, right here behind this big old mic. Thank you for listening. Have a great day. Bye bye.