I want to tell you a story about a rusted grill because it is one of the clearest illustrations I have ever encountered of the gap between what a consultant recommends and what some owners choose to do with those recommendations. And because the thing being ignored was completely free to fix.
The Setup
I was called in to consult at a restaurant that was struggling significantly. Food sales were somewhere around 30% of total revenue. Liquor was doing 70%. That imbalance told me immediately that something was wrong with the food side of the operation — either the food was not good, the menu was not working, or something about the experience was discouraging food orders.
Before I even sat down with the owner I walked up to the entrance and saw it: a residential grill. Not a commercial grill. A rusted, beaten up, roughly ten-year-old grill from a home improvement store, sitting in a visible position where guests could see it as they approached the restaurant. The owner was cooking customer food on this grill.
The Recommendation
I tried to meet him in the middle. I did not say get rid of the grill. I said: can we move it somewhere guests cannot see it? It had wheels. There was a tree nearby. We could put it behind the tree, wheel it out to cook when needed, wheel it back. Total cost: zero. Total effort: thirty seconds per service.
He said no. The grill was in the perfect position. The smoke was part of the experience. He had an elaborate explanation for why this grill, in this specific location, was essential to his concept. He was genuinely attached to it in a way I had never seen anyone attached to a piece of cooking equipment before.
Nine Months Later
I worked with this owner for about nine months. The grill never moved. The food sales never meaningfully improved. Not because the grill was definitively causing the problem — though my strong suspicion is that guests subconsciously registered it as a signal about food quality — but because an owner who would not move a free-to-move grill was also an owner who was not going to implement the harder recommendations either.
The grill became a symbol of the whole engagement. Every recommendation that required any change from the established way of doing things met the same resistance. And without change, the results stayed the same.
What This Story Is Really About
It is not about the grill. It is about the principle that if a consultant gives you a recommendation that costs nothing to implement — that requires only your willingness to try something different — and you refuse, you have already told the consultant and yourself everything you need to know about whether the engagement will produce results.
The free recommendations are the test. They reveal whether an owner is genuinely open to change or whether they hired a consultant to feel like they are doing something about their problems without actually having to change anything.
At 5 Loaves Restaurant Consulting, we work with Connecticut restaurant owners who pass that test. Contact us for a free consultation.
