Jean
Bernstein puts her own stamp on the Starbucks rivalry: “Everywhere
we were, Starbucks came. There’s no question that
Starbucks ringed our stores originally when they came in
and drained off our coffee business,” she said. Starbucks
now has 18 stores in Albuquerque, and Jean believes the
company targeted the Flying Star stores specifically. “It’s
their business strategy,” she said. “They know
that if an established operator has created a territory,
the market has been developed and will work for them.” As
a result, coffee is no longer as big a part of the business
at Flying Star as it once was. “The question then
becomes, what do you do to handle the challenge,” said
Jean, who was quick to answer:
“ Without being resentful or sitting around whining about it, we went on
to build more Flying Stars, and what we did was evolve into more food. We built
bigger kitchens, we expanded our menu, and it paid off very well for us. We hired
a better chef. We spent a lot of time and money on pushing Flying Star away from
depending on the coffee and pastry business, though we still do a very healthy
pastry and coffee business now. It took a lot of work to change it around.”
A
growing strategy
Flying Star didn’t appear on the radar of any national restaurant chain
when it began as a Double Rainbow Ice Cream franchisee in 1987 on Central Avenue
in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill. “Double Rainbow began in the early ’80s
in San Francisco as a kind of West Coast Ben and Jerry’s,” Jean
relates. “We ended up buying a franchise from them and refusing to pay
royalty fees because they were so poorly run.” The Bernsteins learned
early to go with what works. “We started as an ice cream and coffee place
where people read newspapers and hung out,” Jean said. “People
started to ask for sandwiches. Over a period of time food and pastry began
to outflank everything. We evolved and followed our market.”
The Bernsteins split with Double Rainbow in 2000 (although some people may
always refer to the Nob Hill store by its old name) and decided to rename their
restaurant chain, which by that time had grown to three stores: the Nob Hill
store and two in the Heights. They were to learn that choosing a new name can
be a sleep–depriving experience.
To come up with the new name and theme, the Bernsteins hired the local design
firm of Vaughn Wedeen and began to comb possible logos and art motifs. “We
decided that we had to stay somewhere up in the sky and that we had to have
a little bit of fun with it and it couldn’t be terribly serious,” Jean
relates. “Many names we liked were unavailable. Flying Saucer was a good
fit, but was already taken by a chain of bars in Tennessee. We wanted a name
that was ours.” After considering more than 300 possibilities, inspiration
finally come. “At 3am one morning, I was looking at a book about the
artwork on Chinese firecracker packages. One of the illustrations featured
a little boy riding a rocket. That was it.” The boy made a metamorphosis
into “Rio Chan,” the cowboy who rides Flying Star’s rocket.
The Bernsteins were opening their fourth restaurant, this one in the North
Valley, just as they were changing the signs at the other three locations.
They were able to protect their trademark for Flying Star, but the Bernsteins
had a little trouble cementing the rights to use “Satellite” for
their new line of coffee and quick–bite shops. Sara Lee Corporation had
a previous claim to the Satellite name for a brewing system they planned to
sell to large commercial food service operators. On the advice of their lawyers,
the Bernsteins sued Sara Lee; after considerable legal delay the judge ruled
in their favor since Sara Lee hadn’t actually used the Satellite name
for 11 years.
“We
design the places to be hangouts”
It’s clear that the Bernsteins are not bashful about taking on immense
multinational corporations. Though they may be ready to call in legal firepower
when they need it, the true “secret” to their success in creating
an Albuquerque institution rests on a pinch of creativity, a good deal of daring,
and an appetite for extremely hard work. Their business philosophy is simple: “We
design the places to be hangouts, to hide and get lost in,” Mark tells
me. “We don’t tell our people to call everybody by their names.
We let our customers keep their privacy.”
“ We believe you have to run your business the way you would like to be
treated,” Jean adds. “I was working the counter and a woman came
up and she ordered four coffees and one cookie,” she giggles. “I
asked her if I could get her anything else. She said, ‘No, no, this is
one cookie that the four of us are sharing.’ She’s probably our age
and worrying about calories. That’s what she wanted.”
It becomes easier to understand Flying Star if you view the chain as being
run not by restaurant entrepreneurs but by dedicated “foodies” — not
just the Bernsteins but the whole cadre of chefs and menu designers. “Basically
we pick menus based on what we want to eat,” says Jean. “Lots of
people bring in suggestions or make requests. Sometimes the chefs just traveled
somewhere and had something they really loved and want to try it.” The
regular menu has typically–American selections like hamburgers and sandwiches,
but it’s augmented by some Asian and New Mexican dishes. And then there
are the specials. “It’s been a fun format to experiment with when
we see food directions and trends, just to see if something will work in Albuquerque,” says
Jean. In May, for example, the experiment was Cajun, which began with a shrimp ‘Po’ Boy.’ “The
chef has a burning desire to do it,” relates Jean. “He devised
his own homemade mayo–based relish for it. Then he decided to do a New
Orleans–style Muffaletta sandwich — he brought in all the different
kinds of meats that you need to do that and added a homemade olive relish.
We’re also doing shrimp étoulfée, which worked out wonderfully
too, with crawfish, that everybody who tasted it liked.”
Flying Star does extensive testing — occasionally using a panel of tasters — and
sometimes they must reluctantly jettison a “brilliant” idea of
two. “I just rejected a ‘Yum Nee,’ which is a Thai beef salad.
It was good, but it has too many ingredients and the flavors just didn’t
click for what we think is our customer base.” The Bernsteins try to
stick with dishes that aren’t too complicated — or prone to error. “We
want something cooks can do well, again and again.”
If Flying Star has rules, and no restaurant operation can succeed without them,
they are basic, and all too rare for those of us who choose to eat away from
home. Jean spells them out: “Free bread. Good bread with real butter.
That’s not always the way it is. Bread costs money, so does butter, but
that’s what you should get if you’re buying food. You should be
able to refill your coffee cup yourself so you’re not mad at the server;
it should be good and hot and fresh. You should be able to make your own decisions
about the menu and have it organized in such a way that an average person can
always find something to eat on his or her own terms. We’ll customize
it, change it within the options that we allow. You should be able to stay
as long as you want, read your newspaper, bring your laptop, use us like your
living room. The service should be noninvasive.”
Corporate
condescension
National chain operators of sit–down table–service restaurants
have swarmed into Albuquerque. Applebee’s alone has nine Albuquerque
locations; Chili’s has five; nearly every other chain operator from Romano’s
Macaroni Grill to Mimi’s is represented. “The chains have decimated
the market here,” says Mark. “Over the last five years, at least
5,000 restaurant seats have been added in Albuquerque — all national
chains — in a market in which, in the same time period, independent operators
have been able to add perhaps 200 seats.”
But most chain restaurants treat their customers in ways both Bernsteins find
reprehensible. The key sin seems to be “over–servicing.” Jean
switches to her best server imitation: “Welcome to our restaurant,” she
squeaks, “can I help you?” The point hits home. Jean continues
with real passion: “I asked a girl one time, ‘Are they going to
fire you if you don’t recite an ultra–perky script to your customer?’ We
want people to be themselves.”
Periodicals that cater to the chain restaurant business frequently discuss
the concepts of “head turns,” “per–check averages,” and “strategic
upselling.” The Bernsteins subject me to a crossfire of chain restaurant
stories: how at several restaurants, managers are trained to “touch” patron’s
tables to make them feel welcome; how at another the server goes through the
ritual of writing his name in crayon on the disposable table cover. Servers
are programmed, they tell me, to ask “What wine would you like with your
meal,” or say “I hope you left room for dessert.” Servers
are trained to be artificially friendly with patrons, to move the meal along,
and to get patrons the check so the table can be freed as soon as it becomes
apparent the party will not be ordering more.
“ Ultimately,” Jean stresses, “we only care about being the
best. If you really go and pay attention to the ways the big chains design their
menus, they’re designed structurally and psychologically to try to get
you to spend more.” The Bernsteins freely admit they’d be happy for
patrons to spend as much money as possible at their restaurants; they like to
think they do it by making you feel that you’ve gotten a good meal value
without pressure so you’ll become a steady customer.
The concept of “noninvasive” service begins at the beginning: The
customer gives their order to a counter person. The order taker will then instruct
the customer to proceed to a certain cash register to make payment. If the
customer has chosen something that can be served then and there, like a pastry
or coffee, he or she will be served by the order taker, and can then simply
choose a seat. If the item must be prepared in the kitchen, the customer receives
a numbered table marker; when the order is ready, a server brings the dish
to the customer.
Flying Star didn’t actually engineer its serving format in advance; it
evolved from much simpler days when the restaurant served mostly coffee, ice
cream and pastries. “As we grew, we thought about changing the way we
served,” says Jean, “but then started to think: If people sat down,
and had to be approached by a waitress, they would feel pressured to order
a certain amount. It was important to us to let them continue to choose whether
they wanted just coffee or a whole meal.” In the early days, Flying Star
met some resistance to the format. “But now that it’s become so
common,” says Jean, “with lots of other chains doing it — Souper
Salad for example — it’s become a more accepted format. We’ll
never please everybody of course,” she said.
“ I do occasionally meet clients at Flying Star,” comments an Albuquerque
realtor, “but there’s something in me that dislikes waiting in line
to order, especially when the line reaches into the vestibule. If I were seated
at a table I’d be able to curl up with the menu and take my time deciding
on what I wanted, after I’d put all my things down.”
Still, noninvasion may be the key to Flying Star’s popularity as a place
to do business. Groups of all kinds meet at the restaurant on a regular basis;
university study groups are about as easy to spot as blind dates. You’ll
see “Wi–Fi” Internet users speckled through the clientele,
their laptops open, their gazes transfixed. You don’t imagine they would
relish being disturbed by a server who, in classic “restaurantese,” has
been programmed — above all other considerations — to ratchet up
the check.
“ Most of the chains like Starbuck’s are charging for Wi–Fi,” Mark
explains, “but I feel that it’s going to eventually be free wherever
you go, so we went with the free service rather than thinking that we should
charge. It’s tough to tell whether it brings in business; it definitely
spreads laptops all over our locations. They do take up seats, but we think that’s
the way coffee houses should be. I want to create an environment and a hangout,
a ‘third place’ other than home and work.”
The
proof is in the pastries
Since I go to a restaurant to escape from my computer, Wi–Fi didn’t
exactly press my button, but as a patissier by training I was more than impressed
with the level of the cakes and pastries. “For the desserts we have,” Jean
beams “you’d have to sit at a white tablecloth restaurant and spend
a lot of money. We still remain true to our bakery roots. Everything is baked
fresh every day, in–house. There are no mixes or frozen products. We
have a Dutch pastry chef who runs the show and a French sous chef — he’s
our bread man. We do all our decorating work in a separate air–conditioned
pastry room.”
Flying Star’s bakery is still so tiny (at 2,000–square–feet)
that it has to be kept running 24 hours a day just to fit the people in. Jean
talks of expanding to a 10,000–square–foot operation in the near
future. Baking, it becomes clear, is her passion. “For example,” she
says, positively glowing, “we just put out a Boston cream cake this week
with a profiterole on top for each slice. My cholesterol levels are hopeless
because of this. This week we’ve got a bananas foster cheesecake. We
don’t skimp.”
Flying Star’s success, of course, relies in large part on its staff. “I
think we have the best bakery staff in the state,” said Jean. “We
have been very fortunate in that people want to work here. We also pay market
or above with full benefits like any major national chain: vacation, health,
disability, 401k match plans. Also we have such talent that people who are
interested in the business come to us to learn. We’ve had some of our
bakers for ten years or more.”
Flying Star does offer Southwestern–themed items like enchiladas and
breakfast burritos, but it is not the menu that links the restaurant with the
city where it began and came to thrive. I ask the Bernsteins to help me determine
what makes Flying Star Albuquerque. None of us question the connection, but
the explanation eludes us a few moments as we grope for ideas. Flying Star
is a “loose fit,” “low key,” a “good value,” “laid
back.” The true connection, Mark finally volunteers, is that “Flying
Star is varied, just like Albuquerque, which is quite diverse.”
There is no questioning Flying Star’s motivation to expand significantly.
The newest location will be downtown at 8th Street and Silver (scheduled opening
is November 2004), in the former Southern Union Gas Company Building (designed
by famed regional architect John Gaw Meem, who also designed UNM’s Zimmerman
library). Expect to see more Flying Stars as the company scouts appropriate
locations. Satellite Coffee, however, will be the main push. There will be
six locations by the end of 2005. “We’re packed,” Jean tells
me, with a combination of frustration and pride. “We can’t service
everyone. We have to grow because we can’t fit them in anymore.”
It’s a certainty that Flying Star does not want to direct their overflow
to the nearest Starbucks. “When we were ready to go into Riverside Plaza
at Montaño and Coors with a Flying Star restaurant,” Jean says, “the
other tenants, like Defined Fitness and Great Harvest Bread Company, thought
we’d be a great addition to the mix. This was before Satellite Coffee.
But Starbucks had exclusivity clauses with the developer, and they didn’t
want us around because technically we also serve coffee to go, though we’re
primarily food. They’ve never minded coming close to us, of course.”
Starbucks used all its contractual clout to win the round. Flying Star, after
making an unsuccessful request for the space, had to retreat to their corner
and wait for the next opportunity. Call it a knockdown, but hardly a knockout.
Starbucks undoubtedly knows how it wants to handle Albuquerque as a part of
its larger, multinational strategy. Flying Star has its own strategy, perhaps
closer to the ground, but ambitious nonetheless. CW
This
article first appeared in Crosswinds Weekly, July 8, 2004
and is used with permission. Text copyright by Elliot Essman,
photo copyright by Randy Siner.
CLICK
HERE FOR PRINTABLE VERSION |
