The sommelier as Swiss army knife and team leader (for life!)
From the chapter: Service, service, service
The days of sommeliers living exclusively in their own world of shivery cold cellars, endless trade tastings, free lunches and busman’s holidays in other states or foreign countries are quickly passing. Wine specialists represent such large investments on the part of serious, profit driven "wine restaurants," many of their job descriptions entail much more than composing wine lists, ordering, inventorying, and popping open bottles.
Today’s sommeliers are often compelled to assist or even stand in for everyone from server assistants, hostesses and food runners to mâitre d's, general managers and banquet party reservationists. We organize nightly seating charts, post schedules, hire and fire, conceive and execute special events, write newsletters or blogs, update websites, open doors in the morning for the prep crews and set the alarm and lock up when there is no one there but you and the janitor. The more multi-talented, culinary trained sommeliers even jump on the line whenever the kitchen is short staffed.
It's the nature of the beast: When operating costs rise and management salaries are crunched (when are they not?), the "sommelier" is either the first to go, or the first one to be called on for double or triple duty. At least in the most successful restaurants or companies.
But where the modern day sommelier can most effectively prove his or her worth is in the area of staff wine and service training. After all, with specialized knowledge comes a responsibility, which is to make that knowledge exert a direct impact on sales, profits, and the critical success of the restaurant. Put it this way: If you want to earn the big bucks, you must prove yourself indispensable by contributing directly to the bottom line.
I put in over 20 years of such quasi-manager/sommelier duties; developing my own approach, while borrowing many best practices observed in other successful companies. Much of my approach has also been based on this commandment: In order to guarantee future success, or orderly multi-unit expansion (the dream of many a chef/owner), you must train each and every staff member as if you are grooming him/her for your job.
After all, long term success of any restaurant is always predicated upon quality of staff and service, more than anything else. Almost all successful multi-unit chef/owners will tell you that quality of service is more important than quality of cuisine. Guests may, or may not, return if they enjoy the cuisine; but if they've experienced great service, they are far more likely to return, over and over again.
By the same token, quality of wine service is more important than quality of wine list. Practically anyone can put together a wham-bam wine list. Teaching wine service is the bigger challenge, with potentially bigger results.
The ultimate objective of service training, which includes wine knowledge, is turning each and every staff member into future managers, or even sommeliers⏤even if they don't want to be a restaurant manager or sommelier. Good service is achieved by instilling it as a habit; a matter of adopting a strong sense of accountability and urgency, and developing a skill set, body of experience, sense of self-motivation and even ambition where before there were none.
It is a matter of getting staff to recognize that anything beneficial to everyone in their house is directly beneficial to them as an individual, and ultimately to the entire restaurant. It is knowing that when a restaurant is successful as a business, you are more likely to benefit financially and intellectually, as well as in terms of peace of mind or personal fulfillment. It gives you reason to get up in the morning.
Yeah, yeah, you've heard it all before, but hear me out. First, it should come as no surprise that, in the restaurants best known for impeccable service, managers are not so much leaders as participants in the process of service training. In my experience of successful restaurants, most of the training is done by the staff themselves. There is no better way to establish a culture of managerial responsibility than by making teams responsible for themselves—cognizant of the fact that that if one link in the chain is weak, we're weak as an entire team.
The operative term is team. Many restaurants, for example, are reluctant to establish team styles of service because of the traditional belief that waiters are best motivated by working for themselves, like hairdressers in a salon. It is true, of course, that we all possess selfish, every-man-for-himself inclinations. It is engrained in us culturally. Yet in every restaurant known for impeccable service, I guarantee you'll find team-oriented rather than one-waiter-per-section systems. Service is always more seamless and unerring when there is back-up for every situation; and lord knows, challenging situations come up virtually every minute of every shift in successful restaurants.
Servers are not only better off taking the responsibility of training themselves, they are better off when they are supporting each other on the floor. But they would never implement a system like that voluntarily. It has to come from leadership.
What's in it for you? Establishing entire teams of people who share the same goals is also how any manager increases his or her own value, especially in growth-driven companies; and increasingly, sommeliers are not just wine specialists, they are restaurant managers; meaning, the team leaders who determine how the restaurant operates.
Hence, 10 steps towards the type of staff training related to wine that contributes directly to the bottom line, and to your value as a manager/sommelier:
Begin by distributing a basic, but highly detailed, wine "primer" (you can assign a published book or, better yet, one that you’ve composed yourself, containing your standards and procedures) that staff is required to memorize, and then tested and re-tested on (pass rates should always be 100% because there is never any room for error when serving guests).
Start your staff training by addressing the fundamental "language" of wine sales by teaching and tasting staff on the basic sensory components of wine (dry, sweet, full, light, tart, soft, oaky, fruity, and all the important variations of grapes and aromas). It starts with sensory recognition, and is completed by ability to verbalize it.
Progress by teaching/tasting them on how the basic sensory components interact with food (concepts like similarity, contrast, and physical textures); preferably with sample dishes, since communication of ideal wine/food matches is best learned through the process of experiences.
Once that minimal comfort level is met, introduce staff to the world of wines (grapes, countries, appellations, terroir, winemakers styles, etc.), one wine at a time, slowly-but-surely (you cannot rush this part... it never happens overnight, it just goes on forever).
Yes, during each wine meeting (preferably at least weekly), you conduct interactive group chats on the basic selling points of each wine, the profile of guests who will most likely appreciate each wine (examples: big Cabernet for big wine connoisseurs, Cornas for Francophiles looking for alternatives, Grüner Veltliner for guests ordering raw fish in vinaigrettes, medium-sweet authentic German Riesling for the first-time wine drinkers, etc.), and the methodology of sales (basically, when and how to volunteer the wine information benefitting the guests). Rinse, and repeat: What makes this wine special... how do we describe and sell it... who would be turned on by it... what dishes are ideal matches?
Assign books (my go-to was always Kermit Lynch's Adventures on the Wine Route) as well as individual research papers (1-page reports, copied for the entire staff or posted on an in-house online site) on specific subjects, to be presented and discussed at the start of each wine training meeting. If you have a staff website, make it mandatory reading. If not, old fashioned print-outs and group recitation will do just fine.
Stimulate whole group participation. Do not pontificate, turn meetings into boring lectures, or subject your staff to ill qualified guest speakers (like old fogy distributor reps or anyone who has never worked a day in their life in a restaurant). Give your staff opportunities to share their experiences or challenges on the floor, or their personal wine experiences enjoyed outside of work or in other restaurants. Encourage them to discuss, and apply, their own individual approaches to their growing body of wine knowledge and table-side spiels. In other words, let them teach each other.
To conserve more of your own time while developing staff management skills, assign senior members to one-on-one wine training sessions with new hires (this works, of course, only if you’ve raised the expertise of senior staff to your level or better), and then reward your trainers with perks, increased responsibilities (such as inventory management or being part of a wine list selection committee) and possibly, of course, promotions.
Test and re-test at least several times a year (the better trained the staff, the more they enjoy the challenge of tests). Let team members come up with their own tests.
When opportunities to attend trade tastings come up, you need to encourage your staff to not only attend, but also to file formal reports on their findings, and contribute recommendations to your wine program. Going further, if you can't attend an important trade tasting, you should assign people to attend representing you. If you really want to get staff personally and professionally invested in your restaurant and wine program, this final step is one of the most effective ways of achieving this. Everyone is more enthusiastic about a product when they’ve contributed to it themselves. Look at it this way: If the most interesting menus are ones they reflect a collaboration of multiple chefs in a kitchen, the most interesting wine lists are a collaboration of an entire staff of wine savvy servers.
The ultimate goal is to turn everyone who deals with guests into sharp, enthusiastic, ambitious restaurant wine professionals. Even if a team member does not plan to make restaurant work or wine expertise a career, they will naturally find value in it for the rest of their personal and working life. I know this because I've had enough ex-employees tell me exactly that, 20, 30, 40 years after their experiences. The smart ones know it, even during their time with you. It is training to be a professional in any field.
Finally, slim pickings in labor pools are not excuses. I’ve seen successful team-driven operations work repeatedly even under dire circumstances in the tightest job markets, working with kids with seemingly little interest, no experience, zero qualifications. They might start off that way, but you'd be surprised by how much they quickly grow and change, if you stick to the process.
Everyone is teachable, given a push and right motivation. If you don't know exactly what motivates staff, most likely it is because you haven't sat down and had enough conversations with them. I assure you, one-on-one talks can be as enjoyable and fulfilling to you as much as it is to them. Conversation is conversation⏤sometimes we say what we mean, sometimes we don’t. But the possibility of learning something valuable, or making an impact on each other, makes it all worthwhile. Besides, it is human nature for all of us to crave that kind of attention.
It begins with a specific methodology. It doesn't have to be what I've just outlined, you can make up your own approach according to your needs and circumstances. Ideally, though, it adds up to something that makes fulfillment of company goals one in the same with that of your own, and extending out to each and every member of your team from waiters and assistant waiters to anyone on the cooking crew (who are often interested in what goes on in Front of House discussions), down to the most recent hires and most seasoned, cynical, been-there-done-that vets.
Finally, in this day and age of revolving doors, you may very well not be for long in your own restaurant. Does it matter? While you are there, a systematic approach to training and operations is still indispensable to your success as a sommelier, as a restaurant leader, and as a professional in any future endeavors. The goal should be to contribute to individuals you meet along the way, however long or briefly, which only contributes to yourself.
I realize, of course, that now I'm talking like an old man when I say the following: Whenever you tell someone they should be making the most out of their opportunities right here and now, you are really talking to yourself. I guarantee, years and years from now you will value the memory, and experience, as much as anyone. And you will happily say, we did it the right way, didn’t we?