The Next Course: Reinventing the Modern Urban Restaurant

By André LaRivière

Since its inception in Paris over 250 years ago, the restaurant has been a welcome, essential element of city life. With urban regions rapidly growing around the globe, today’s restaurants will play an increasingly vital role in sustaining communities. As with other modern necessities, the restaurant’s standard model would benefit from some timely innovation. The best and simplest way to kick-start that innovation is to ask a few good questions.
For The Next Course, sustainable foodservice consultant André LaRivière challenged notable chefs and restaurateurs, suppliers and city planners, with “what if?” questions. For example, what if restaurants were to localize product sourcing as much as possible? What if restaurants were to convert to renewable energy and use less of it? Their answers—and the dialogue they inspire—have the potential to future-proof urban dining. Not everyone agrees on the ideal way forward but, given what’s at stake, they all want to be ready for the next course.

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During his first career at CBC Radio, André LaRivière created, produced and engineered dozens of projects, from experimental late-night series to Juno Award–winning albums to weekly digests of mainstream popular culture. He also accumulated extensive management experience as an executive producer in Montreal and in his hometown of Winnipeg (St-Boniface), and as a strategic planning specialist at the Corporation’s headquarters in Ottawa.

For a second career, André became a professional chef, with training at New York City’s French Culinary Institute and a year’s internship at a Michelin-starred restaurant on the French Riviera. After cooking in New York and Toronto restaurants, he combined his kitchen and media experience as a Toronto-based writer and editor, covering all aspects of the Canadian food and restaurant industries for a variety of trade and consumer magazines.

André relocated to Vancouver in 2000. He has since been a restaurant critic, board member of Vancouver Farmers Markets and founding member of the Vancouver Food Policy Council. In 2007, André founded the Green Table Network, a mission-driven enterprise fostering sustainability in the foodservice industry, with more than 150 operator and supply-side members in British Columbia and beyond.

In 2011, he was instrumental to the success of a “restaurant of the future” project—the transformation of O’Doul’s on Robson Street to Forage, an energy-efficient operation featuring sustainable menus and low-impact design. It was this initiative that compelled him to gain an even better understanding of how the restaurant model needs to adapt to current and future needs.

He is now a principal of fish+river, a progressive foodservice consultancy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: André LaRivière
• Release date: Jun 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781775305217

André LaRivière

During his first career at CBC Radio, André LaRivière created, produced and engineered dozens of projects, from experimental late-night series to Juno Award–winning albums to weekly digests of mainstream popular culture. He also accumulated extensive management experience as an executive producer in Montreal and in his hometown of Winnipeg (St-Boniface), and as a strategic planning specialist at the Corporation’s headquarters in Ottawa. For a second career, André became a professional chef, with training at New York City’s French Culinary Institute and a year’s internship at a Michelin-starred restaurant on the French Riviera. After cooking in New York and Toronto restaurants, he combined his kitchen and media experience as a Toronto-based writer and editor, covering all aspects of the Canadian food and restaurant industries for a variety of trade and consumer magazines. André relocated to Vancouver in 2000. He has since been a restaurant critic, board member of Vancouver Farmers Markets and founding member of the Vancouver Food Policy Council. In 2007, André founded the Green Table Network, a mission-driven enterprise fostering sustainability in the foodservice industry, with more than 150 operator and supply-side members in British Columbia and beyond. In 2011, he was instrumental to the success of a “restaurant of the future” project—the transformation of O’Doul’s on Robson Street to Forage, an energy-efficient operation featuring sustainable menus and low-impact design. It was this initiative that compelled him to gain an even better understanding of how the restaurant model needs to adapt to current and future needs. He is now a principal of fish+river, a progressive foodservice consultancy.

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Introduction

Looking back

What if someone asked you to help them create the restaurant of the future? With our culture’s tendency to look forward, it’s a hard challenge to resist. Trouble is, it’s also a difficult concept to define. Are they really referring to the restaurant of the future—or to the future of the restaurant? How can we anticipate our next course?

Before becoming the title of this book, The Next Course was the name I gave to a 2011 project by a consortium of government, utility, industry and consulting partners to renovate O’Doul’s Restaurant & Bar, a venerable forty-year-old operation in the Listel Hotel on Vancouver’s Robson Street. The goal was to build a working proof-of-concept for next-generation sustainable restaurant design, technologies and operations. As a veteran CBC producer and writer, a trained cook and sustainability consultant, my primary role was to coordinate and document the project, and to consult on kitchen technologies and operating systems.

When the reclaimed wood doors of Forage swung open in 2012, the restaurant was lauded for its comfortable, casual style and affordable, locally sourced menu. Its upgraded systems and design also succeeded in hitting measured targets for energy efficiency with minimal environmental impact and zero waste. Forage snapped up the Green Award at Vancouver magazine’s annual Restaurant Awards.

But had we defined a model restaurant of the future? Many of the solutions created for Forage, from demand-control ventilation to recyclable, non-toxic furnishings, remain future-ready. However, the essential takeaway for me was a slew of questions about what could, or should, truly be next for the whole of the restaurant industry as the world changes rapidly. With time and more wide-ranging research into these What if? scenarios, the overarching challenge seemed to boil down to one question—what kind(s) of innovation do we need moving forward: a restaurant of the future, or a different future for the urban restaurant? That’s what The Next Course 2.0—this book, The Next Course—has set out to discover.

Throughout the research and digital mise-en-place I did to answer this question, I found that many futurists posit the wisdom of recognizing the best way forward by knowing where you’ve been, suggesting a deep dive into the collected histories of food and foodservice—a lot of ground to cover. More to the point, I was unsure of how the restaurant’s roots could inform its future—until I learned the history of the term restaurant, which first appeared on a storefront sign some 250 years ago in pre-revolutionary Paris.

This history clearly indicates the fundamental elements that endure in the modern restaurant, from quality standards to customized service and convenient hours.

Beyond the gastronomic heights and entertaining delights that were to follow, la maison du restaurant’s core concept of offering affordable access to nourishing foods to sustain the health of urban residents may be its most valuable legacy. In every way that matters, a restaurant is as much an idea or a goal as it is a bouillon or bistro. And given the way that challenges to urban life are shaping up, restoration of this core value ought to feature prominently in both the future of the restaurant and the restaurant of the future.

Looking ahead

Doug Stephen, president of Winnipeg’s WOW! Hospitality Concepts, keen industry observer and the first person with whom I discussed The Next Course, expects we’ll see as much change in the restaurant sector in the coming decade as we have over the past thirty years.

That view is shared widely, with expert consensus that world-changing incidents—rapid urbanization and regular climate challenges, including those affecting food production, along with evolving technological and demographic impacts on the global workforce—are headed our way faster than most of us realize. Additionally, we can expect the acceleration of automation, urban agriculture, cultured meats, alternate (read insect) proteins, 3D-printed entrées and drone delivery systems to become mainstream components of the foodservice future—indeed, some already are.

How will these events and developments shape the industry in the long term? And who’s best positioned to influence (or deflect) their impact on sustainable growth for indie cafés, multi-unit systems and everything in between? In my experience, responses to those questions are informed by the scale and level at which one participates in this completely unique business, and one’s perspective on its potential for change.

My point of view has been informed by my post-broadcasting career path, from New York City culinary school, to internship in Mougins, France, to assorted kitchen jobs and back to media as a writer and editor for a national restaurant trade magazine—a great education on how the various aspects of this industry connect. Upon landing in Vancouver in 2000, I fell in with some avid proponents of local, sustainable food systems and soon after started a not-for-profit program—Green Table Network—to help restaurants go green, all while building connections with chefs, operators, local governments, manufacturers, trade associations and other early adopters of a more efficient way forward. I’ve learned a couple of core truths along the way, one about the industry and the other about the urban future.

First, while most restaurant operations or concepts do their utmost to differentiate themselves from the competition, it’s safe to say that, behind the kitchen door, they are essentially the same in terms of business model, operating principles, supplier relationships and the like. That’s not to say a fine-dining destination runs the same way as a quick-service kiosk, but it’s more that they’re variations on a theme than they are distinct models. This common ground extends geographically as well; whether the neighbourhood café is in Winnipeg’s West End or New York City’s East Village, the gears in each place mesh much the same way. So, while a globe-trotting research tour of dining spots (à la Anthony Bourdain) wouldn’t have been any hardship, most of what I needed to explore for The Next Course is here in my soggy home turf of Vancouver, British Columbia... which leads directly to the second truth, or new reality.

Economists and environmentalists agree that cities and emerging mega-cities (with 20 million–plus residents) are best equipped to meet the tough-slogging challenges of our future, with its unstable climate. This assertion is supported by demographic scale alone: the United Nations predicts that 75 per cent of an estimated 9 billion global citizens will reside in mega-cities by 2050. Therefore, any reimagined or reinvented model restaurant would do well to focus its business at street level, and explore local opportunities for collaboration and synergy to better feed the multitudes within its city or regional limits.

As it happens, not only does the City of Vancouver aim to be the planet’s greenest city by 2020, but its regional district of twenty-one municipalities (called Metro Vancouver) has ambitions to rank among global leaders in sustainable urban development. It’s fertile ground for research and development (R&D) into innovative, regionally driven business solutions, including those that benefit the foodservice sector. The city has also been a long-time hub of activity and investment in local and regional food system development, and is home to many expert hands with been-there-tried-that experience. And, for a relatively small place, its vibrant restaurant sector lacks for nothing: from world-class fine-dining rooms to leading-edge farm-to-table bistros to handcrafted pop-up joints to food trucks to homey old-school family restaurants and any other trend or concept you can chow down on. It could readily stand in for its peers in modern metropolitan dining.

Therefore, Vancouver is a more-than-appropriate test kitchen and case study for The Next Course. The following pages feature many leading voices in Vancouver’s restaurant sector, along with those of expert consultants, suppliers and manufacturers supporting the entire industry. There’ll also be the occasional appearance by a high-profile newsmaker (Danny Meyer, René Redzepi, Kimbal Musk, et al.) and voices from Winnipeg, Manitoba, my hometown, when a family visit provided an opportunity to compare the commonalities of each market.

There’s one proviso to this state-of-the-industry snapshot, however. As with other retail sectors with national or offshore corporate interests, multinational chain restaurants are effectively untethered to the particular challenges of the communities in which they operate (though their franchisees may not be—more on that later). While their substantial operations have impact across all aspects of the industry, the majority of these chains have, to date, rarely participated in the development of local policies or invested in local or regional food systems and infrastructure. Given the indications that our urban future will be primarily locally sourced, multinational operators (save one Canadian upstart) are not part of this discussion, though I hope that, too, will change in the future.

Since that storefront start-up in Paris, commercial foodservice operations have become a vital and increasingly essential element of urban life. With its professional culinary and service standards, the industry is well positioned to thrive and be integral to every healthy, sustainable community of the future.

However, just as we expect more from the other essentials of modern living (housing, transportation, telecommunication, and so on), the restaurant’s core design and business model would clearly benefit from timely innovation and, in the best-case scenario, a collaborative effort with its many stakeholders.

Spurring innovation in an industry this diverse is a complex process, but there is a simple way to start: ask a few good questions. Then ask even better questions as a way to unlock real innovation. In order to answer the big question of What is the future of the restaurant? I posed a series of smaller questions to the aforementioned leaders in Vancouver’s foodservice industry: chefs, restaurateurs, multi-unit operators, front-of-house specialists. I also asked equipment manufacturers, growers, distributors, and community and civic officials throughout Metro Vancouver and elsewhere.

The two topics that prompted the most discussion are the industry’s primary building blocks, food and labour, with next-generation technologies and community relationships not far behind. As you’d expect, not everyone agrees on the best way(s) forward but, given what’s increasingly at stake, everyone wants to be ready for the next course.

Why should I join this conversation?

A core assumption of this book is that the pace of overall change is accelerating beyond anything the restaurant industry—and most other industries—has yet seen. As such, you’ll want to get up to speed if:

You currently are, or soon intend to be, one of the millions of hard-working people in, or in support of, the restaurant and hospitality sector.

You have designs on a new restaurant concept or project.

Your role in municipal government or in a community organization involves local food systems and related policies.

You simply want to know what some of your peers in the restaurant business consider to be the key challenges and opportunities.

You’re interested in how innovation could help the industry better serve urban communities in the future.

What are we really talking about?

Although much is changing, the many business decisions needed to describe and define a foodservice operation, from the creative to the mundane, the costly to the trivial, will continue to apply. Each chapter in The Next Course represents a core set of design and operating decisions common to every new or existing restaurant:

Concept + Cuisine Choosing a menu to reflect a particular cuisine, food category or emerging trend, along with a service concept and style to match.

Location + Service Selecting an appropriate urban location, scaled to suit the concept, along with service options to enhance its scope of business.

Hot + Cold Designing and equipping the kitchen and front-of-house facilities to efficiently prepare, serve and store menu items and related products.

Source + Supply Choosing reliably delicious ingredients and meal components from local to global sources, along with supply chains to deliver them regularly.

Front + Back Engaging, training and organizing a team of chefs, servers