Aspen confab probes guest demands, service woes

Nation's Restaurant News, July 10, 1995 by Richard Martin

ASPEN, Colo. -- While some 1,300 avid consumers thronged around this frontierchic ski resort for its annual epicurean extravaganza, hundreds of visiting restaurateurs pondered whether rampant discontent with service could undermine their courtship of the customer.

"Service has improved and is improving, but service is still the major deficiency in the restaurant industry," publisher Tim Zagat, co-creator of the Zagat Survey dining guides, told operators attending the four-day Food & Wine Magazine Classic.

Zagat said that nearly half of all complaints by his guides' 75,000 contributors relate to service while only 15 percent concern food, 14 percent involve pricing and less than 10 percent deal with ambience. Moreover, "the food ratings everywhere exceed the service ratings everywhere by an average one and a half to two points" on a 30-point scale, he added.

Declared Zagat, "There's no question about it; service is the weak link."

Service-sensitive guests deserve greater respect for the power they wield over dining businesses, warned Carol Gies, marketing vice president of Chicago-based Levy Restaurants.

"If you don't agree by now that your customer is in control and that he's engineering your restaurant concepts, then all of this is going over your head," Gies averred during a presentation of guidelines for consumer research.

Citing foodservice opportunities emerging from an "aspiration inflation" among customers rebounding from the last recession, consumer analyst Barbara Caplan cautioned nonetheless that operators should not underestimate the public's heightened cynicism toward hospitality.

"There's nobody, when it comes to distrust and skepticism, who has been spared," said Caplan, senior vice president of Roper Starch Worldwide in New York.

But the antipathies of unforgiving consumers may not be expressed in ways that can help rebuild trust and promote repeat restaurant patronage, Caplan pointed out. "I suggest you pray that somebody complains, because then you can soothe them," she added.

Enhanced service is the "cost of entry" for competitors courting "the '90s customer," said Caplan, one of several experts who proffered insights and data from the stage of Aspen's historic Wheeler Opera House during the food and wine convention's restaurant trade program, sponsored by American Express.

Compounding consumers' mistrust, Caplan asserted, is their growing stay-at-home inclinations, more cautious spending habits and waning interest in trendy eateries as ego-validating trophies. "In the old days the consumer aspired to the [restaurant] brand," she said. "Now the restaurant has to aspire to the consumer."

Operators -- and their charge-card marketing allies -- also must heed growing appetites for bargains, or so consumers' unbridled interest in discount dining programs would suggest.

For its part, American Express is "very close" to deciding reluctantly that discount dining clubs can use its billing service, Thomas O. Ryder, president of American Express Establishment Services Worldwide, told the assembled restaurateurs.

Ryder pointed out that his company consistently has objected to the "incredibly expensive" loan-redemption programs, which cost participating restaurateurs interest he estimated to be 400 percent to 500 percent. But the dining clubs "are driving an incredible amount of money; we see our share moving as a result," he said, explaining the pending change.

Discount clubs currently bill their members an estimated $150 million a year after deducting 25 percent from dining tabs, compared with some $11.5 billion in restaurant billings annually through American Express, company officials said.

News of expansion into a new guest-driven field was also divulged by the Zagat Surveys' co-publisher, Nina Zagat. "We now have a nationwide data base and market research details that we hope to make available to you very soon," she told attendees of the Aspen Classic's trade program, which helped attract some 350 restaurateurs and allied professionals to this alpine haven from cities nationwide.

Perhaps inspired by the focus of the program on service shortcomings, operators expressed interest in tapping the Zagats' previously unpublished data, which are based on critiques of some 15,000 restaurants in 35 cities. But Tim Zagat said commercial availability of the information is being delayed pending the resolution of perceived "conflict of interest" issues, presumably involving proposed payments to the Zagats from businesses their guides also rate and review.

Reviews of another sort abounded in Aspen during the long weekend of wine tastings, seminars, culinary demonstrations, luncheon lectures and celebrity chefs' buffet banquets. The 13th annual Food & Wine Classic also featured the magazine's awarding of its coveted "Best New Chefs in America" accolades to nine individuals.

While grape lovers freely quaffed or swigged and spit their way through hundreds of wines from the world's great producing regions, dedicated oenophiles paid supplemental fees as high as $200 for separate admissions to eight samplings of rare vintages, including first-growth Bordeaux from Chateau Latour and Ports from the acclaimed 1966 vintage.