I’m a few days behind on 30 days of WWGD? Sorry; took the weekend off. Today’s snippet: imagining the Googley restaurant:
What would a restaurant run according to Googlethink look like—other than being decorated in garish primary colors with a neon sign, big balls for seats, and Fruit Loops and M&Ms on every table?
Imagine instead a restaurant—any restaurant—run on openness and data. Say we pick up the menu and see exactly how many people had ordered each dish. Would that influence our choice? It would help us discover the restaurant’s true specialties (the reason people come here must be the crab cakes) and perhaps make new discoveries (the 400 people who ordered the Hawaiian pizza last month can’t all be wrong?.?.?.??can they?).
If a restaurateur were true to Googlethink, she would hunger for more data. Why not survey diners at the end of the meal? That sounds frightening—what if they hate the calamari?—but there’s little to fear. If the squid is bad and the chef can hear her customers say so, she’ll 86 it off the menu and make something better. Everybody wins. She’ll also impress customers with her eagerness to hear their opinions. This beats wandering around the tables, randomly asking how things are (as a diner, I find it awkward and ungracious to complain; it’s like carping about Grandmother’s cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving). Why not just ask the question and give everyone the means to answer? Your worst diner could be your best friend.
The more layers of data you have, the more you learn, the more useful your advice can be: People who like this also like that. Or here are the popular dishes among runners (a proxy for the health-minded) or people who order expensive wines (a proxy for good taste, perhaps).
If you know about your crowd’s taste in wine, why not crowdsource the job of sommelier? Have customers rate and describe every bottle. Show which wines were ordered with which dishes and what made diners happy. If this collection of data were valuable in one restaurant, it would be exponentially more valuable across many. Thinking openly, why not compile and link information from many establishments so diners can learn which wines go best with many kinds of spicy dishes? If you want to be courageous, why not reveal that people who like this restaurant also like that one? Sure, that sends the other guys business—it’s linking to them—but in an open pool of information, they will also send business back. Nobody eats at the same place every night (well, there was the time when I went to McDonald’s entirely too often). Even a restaurant can think as a member of a network in a linked information economy.
Networks force specialization. In a linked world, you don’t want to be all things to all people. You want to stand out for what you do best. That’s why chef Gordon Ramsey focuses the menus of the restaurants he fixes on his show, Kitchen Nightmares, so they know the business they’re in. Serve your niche instead of the mass. Do what you do best.
Now, as Emeril would say, let’s kick it up a notch: Open-source the restaurant. Put recipes online and invite the public to make suggestions and even to edit them on a wiki. Maybe they’ll suggest more salt. Maybe they’ll go to the trouble of cooking the dish at home, trying variations, and reporting back. In the early days of the web, I worked on the launch of Epicurious?.com, the online site for Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines, where I was amazed to see people share their own recipes—there’s the gift economy—and also share their comments and variations on the magazines’ recipes. For example, a Gourmet adaptation of a bakery’s recipe for Mexican chocolate cake brought suggestions to replace the water with espresso (many commenting cooks liked that idea, tried it, and shared their endorsements); double the cinnamon; add Kahlua or rum to the glaze; use cream-cheese frosting instead of the glaze; use neither topping but serve it with whipped cream and berries; toast the nuts; substitute milk and orange juice for buttermilk; coat the cake pan with cocoa powder (helps with the sticking, you see); and even add cayenne pepper (pepper?). With these adaptations, you could argue the dish is no longer the same; could be better, could be worse. I’m not suggesting that recipes or menus become ballots; see the preGoogle rule about too many chefs spoiling the broth. It’s the chef, not the public, who will be held to account if the cake is too peppery. So I’ll violate Jarvis’ First Law—I won’t hand over complete control. But why not gather and use the wisdom of the dining room? A good restaurant has people who appreciate and know good food. It should respect their taste and knowledge, the Google way. . . .
Hey Jeff, this is a really great line, is it yours? “In a linked world, you don’t want to be all things to all people. You want to stand out for what you do best.”
On the internet, one should never claim authorship of any line for fear someone else said it first and it’s findable on Google?
Do you actually think that Google itself runs on openness and data or surveys its users?
It sounds a really good way of doing things, except the chef always knows best… who are we paying customers to know that we don’t like it so salty/watery/over/under cooked…
I love this idea of the Google Restaurant so much I wish I was a Chef! By collecting the meaningful data from diners ‘in the moment’ you would create involvement and, handled correctly, commitment.
By facilitating the growth of a community around your restaurant (but not trying to own it) you could tap into the collective knowledge and by listening carefully for the subtle changes in feedback over time (and responding to it) you should ensure you’re always close to the prevailing tastes.
As a business that sounds feasible and desirable, but how many Chefs do you know that could handle that amount of feedback (sometimes opposing their firmly held beliefs) without banning a few diners and reaching for the Meat Cleaver! Isn’t great cuisine synonymous with great ego?
Hi Jeff,
I heard you outline this idea at the NYTM describing the Google Restaurant. It makes even more sense written out and digested after a few days. I think more restaurants will actually adopt these practices and advancements in the systems servers use will force these business changes as they start looking at KPI’s, choices, and feedback from customers directly and in real time.
How about the googly energy management company. Check out the Google Powermeter at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/power-to-people.html
Now if I were Google, I would:
1. have say a whole bunch of micro graphs on a dashboard. One graph showing your site’s data, and the others showing other similar sites – basically to introduce some rivalry in energy savings. This also helps customers see the effect of exogenous changes (e.g. hot periods, cold snaps) on the groups consumption; which helps give some good objectivity. Say an opt-in feature where you can try to outsave other similar households (and the whole thing could be anonymous of course). Could work with a ‘tribe’ of social media followers, etc.
2. include quite a few different and meaningful ‘views’ of smart meter data. One I’ve used in particular is the ability to view say a year’s worth of data, but filtered to only include a particular time of the day. This is real handy for setting half hourly ‘baseload’ amounts, and finding anything out of the ordinary.
3. build a ‘tendering engine’ into the data, so that the customer could very easily test out the different types of tariffs offerred by different retailers on each site, and see which offer was cheapest.
4. Publish a whole bunch of representative electricity use profiles that could be applied to sites that had ‘dumb’ meters on (and the ‘dumb’ tariffs that went with them), so that customers can estimate whether it was worth installing a smart meter at their own cost at the site rather than waiting around for their electricity company to get around to it.
5. Run all this from a wiki with some public spaces, in order to offer:
* Forum – for customers to raise questions to be answered by other customers or experts
* Blog – where experts can tackle issues raised in forum or other topical stuff.
* Open Wiki – where users can put resources and encourage others to put stuff and share their knowledge. This would be great for case studies
* Energy Comparison area, where community can submit what power prices they recieve from their retailer, so that customers can check their tarriff against other deals in their area.
* Tendering area, where businesses can tender for efficiency experts, advertise energy management positions, etc
* Open Source templates – e.g. energy management spreadsheet templates for multiple sites
Not to be a wet blanket here, but doesn’t this lead to a kind of mediocrity.
I mean, when it comes to a truly great restaurant, I am not really interested in what the vast majority of diners want. This is what makes Zagat so useless. I go to Jean Georges because I want him to experiment and push me to eat things I might not normally eat. I am enthralled with Masa because I trust him to make the critical decisions. I could not care less what the majority of diners at Masa would prefer. Let them stick to investment banking (if they still have jobs). Where is the room for excellence here? The wisdom of the crowd is not always the best.
That’s why the chef still has authorial freedom and responsibility – but now input.
since when do people know what they want, especially when it comes to describing taste?
[...] Link: Jeff Jarvis The Googley Restaurant [...]
So what would a Googley McDonald’s be like? It’s not like MCD isn’t collecting the data…
My wife and I own a hospitality company. We own and operate several mid to upscale restaurants in the mid-west. I find the concept of the Googley restaurant an interesting one for sure. For me it’s interesting because many of the ideas that you describe are ones that we use internally to engineer, build and rebuild menus (yes, good menus are engineered). But I hadn’t ever considered actually revealing some of this information to our guests, I wonder what will actually happen, I’ll have to try it. So far, WWGD has reinforced some of the paths that I was already on, I am now moving forward faster with taking a page out of the dell and starbucks playbooks as I am currently developing my own version of ideastorm and my-starbucks for our group of restaurants and allowing our guests to get involved with feedback for all to see. I do believe that a great restaurant is a community and that our worst customer is one of my most important allies.
Really enjoying WWGD so far, I downloaded it at audible.com and it makes for easy listening to make the miles go by on a few good runs.
Thanks Jeff.
Very interesting – any hints at where this place is?
[...] ce que révèlent les données d’utilisation, pourrait s’appliquer dans le monde de la restauration et du [...]
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