David Davidson: ready to give restaurants the old college try, university foodservice vet moves on to Back Bay

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 16, 2004 by Brooke Barrier

David Davidson, a veteran of on-site foodservice, recently made the jump to the commercial side of the industry. Well known in college foodservice circles for his work at two high-profile Ivy League schools, Yale University and Harvard University, Davidson on Feb. 2 took his extensive knowledge of what young adults like to Back Bay Restaurant Group, a 36-unit restaurant company based in Boston.

As vice president of operations, Davidson is responsible for more than 20 casual- and fine-dining restaurants spread across Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey. The concepts under his supervision are Joe's American Bar & Grill, Abe & Louie's, Atlantic Fish Co. and Charley's. The move to Back Bay also reunites him with his former boss, Michael Berry.

But while much of Davidson's 25-year foodservice career has been spent in on-site ventures, he is no stranger to running restaurants. After working as a cook in a local retirement home, he spent 10 years with McDonald's Corp., beginning as a management trainee and working his way up to area manager with responsibility for two units. For the past three years, he served as executive director of dining services at Yale. This interview was conducted right before his departure.

Why are you leaving Yale?

Before I came here, I was at Harvard dining services for nine years. Michael Berry was the director of dining services at that time. I worked for him for five years until he moved on to a position with Disney. Honestly, I wasn't looking for a job, but Mike recently became president of Back Bay and reached out to me. There are a few reasons why I took the position. One, it will get me back home to Boston, and two, it's an opportunity to work with Mike again.

What did you do at Harvard?

I started as the manager for the graduate dining halls, and when I left Harvard, I was the associate director for retailing and catering.

How does the foodservice operation at Yale differ from that of Harvard?

One thing is the facilities at Harvard are outstanding. They've been on a long renovation plan. Yale is just now catching up to Harvard's major renovation plan. So the biggest difference is in the facilities. Being able to have state-of-the-art equipment really makes a difference. At Yale the renovations are getting us there, but we still have six more dining halls that still have that traditional college dining-hall look. The [finished] halls have much more of a retail environment than they did previously.

Can you describe the operation at Yale?

We are currently at a sales volume of around $29 million a year. Our operations consist of 13 residential undergraduate dining facilities, four retail operations, one convenience store and a full-service catering division. We have a management team of 55 employees and an hourly staff of 340 full- and part-time employees.

Harvard was an independent operation, but Yale's foodservice is contracted out to Aramark. How do they differ?

You know, contracts aren't for every institution. For Yale, there was a time when the school felt it needed the support structure Aramark [could provide]. For example, we recently started a program working with local farms and organic foods, called The Yale Sustainable Food Project. I put together a team of people from Aramark, including a chef, a marketing person, a purchaser and more. That team wrote menus, priced them out and did comparisons with the old and the new versions. They came up with enough information to support the project, which we rolled out in September in the Berkeley College, [one of Yale's dining halls]. The plan is to expand the project into the other dining rooms by next year.

How will your experience at Yale be valuable to you at Back Bay?

I think no matter which part of the business you're in, the customer service end is no different. The end result is to satisfy your customers --even to exceed your customers' expectations. At Yale the students have to be on a meal plan, so you have to work that much harder because they don't have a choice to eat there or not. Take that and apply it to restaurants, where people do have a choice in where they go. You have to give an outstanding customer experience so your restaurant pops.

I think that managing managers would be another thing. Most of the management team has been here for years, and they had to go from being self-operated to contracted. So we've done a lot of work on organizational development. We got to where we are by involving managers in decision making and projects. We make sure to involve our hourly employees, too, because it's those people who are on the front line every day. So that's part of what I want to take with me--to run ideas and decisions by my employees and to hold focus groups.

What was the most rewarding element of your job with Yale?

I think I would have to say it was seeing how our hourly employees have really supported what we're trying to do here, whether it be in improving our customers' experiences in the dining room or working with the different programs and initiatives we have going. The level of commitment from our hourly employees and the way in which they've adopted this new way of [organic] cooking is really amazing.