Volume 16 Issue 1 » 23
The Miso Smoked Eggplant Hummus with pickled crudité,
crispy rice cakes, and Okinawan sweet potato gaufrettes.
how an organizational dynamic works. I cannot sit in that seat and
I am not good at it. And my husband Paul is the CFO; economics,
accounting, finance and legal. That is what he does best.
You have a few different, very complementary businesses
in the area that are great sellers. You have a sushi
counter, lounge, dining room and you have some private
rooms as well. Those are a lot of different types of clients
you host. Care to comment on that?
J: The way we designed this restaurant was to serve all of these
“districts,” if you will. The dining room is a traditional dining room
with 7,000-8,000 sq.ft. as a typical traditional restaurant’s size. The
banquet space is about another 5,000 sq.ft. which holds a separate
kitchen that preps and services that space. We have a lounge, a bar
and a sushi bar. We make sure all the resources and expertise are
all there to support our business as we push the machine. We have
a post-mortem on everything. And those post-mortems are never
judgements but more to put in the objective list going forward to
refine ourselves, and this has been our success. We didn’t do it all
at once; we built the infrastructure to support it. When we’ve seen
ourselves push too hard, we took a step back to learn from that. We
really established in our group that we are agile. What was the best
decision six months ago in our operations may not be the best after
18 months. It’s okay to say we used to do it this way and it made
total sense, but now we are going to do it differently in 18 months
because it makes better sense. Our team understands that the
perpetual need to evaluate and change is the ethos.
E: We have in our mind that we are a very elevated restaurant in
the middle of the neighbourhood. The guests who’ve dined with
us, regardless of which space they dine at, we always want them to
say, “I had an ascendic experience.” We want them to feel they’ve
had different experiences in one restaurant. The ascendic experience
means something to us which is why we named the restaurant –
Ascend. It’s very, very specific.
So you talked about experience, ethos, agility. Is there a
hospitality philosophy that you can share? What do you
truly believe in, in terms of the hospitality business?
E: We are the servant leaders and that’s what we believe in. We hope
our hosts or waiters treat our guests like that. Our people are here to
serve, no matter if it’s the individual or the community. If you can’t
serve others, you cannot work here.
J: It begins with making ourselves available to our managers, to
encourage them; we want to see them win. It is not an “I catch
you doing something wrong” culture. We expect our managers and
leaders to be like that for their staff as well. There is a need to please,
to be available, to be present and ingratiate; to serve in a manner
that enlightens and encourages is at the core of what we try to do.
The precision of the service or mechanics of what we do is incredibly
important, and I think it’s almost lost in today’s service. We don’t see
any white tablecloths, but you should feel the white tablecloth. It’s
not enough to just satisfy our guests; it’s important for us to wow
them. If the guests are Instagramming, posting or telling a friend,