by Bogdan Munteanu

How difficult is to provide good food to people, in a pleasant environment and to also to convince them to come back? Is there a secret for successful restaurants?

I believe that, from the outside, the activ­ity of a restaurant seems to be simple, and many people desire to own a restaurant. Well, from the inside things sort of change, you realize this is an activity that is most complex in comparison with other industries. Other businesses are facing cer­tain fixed problems – that, once mastered, things are running smoothly, but a restaurant is always facing challenges.

Let me just point out some of the variables! First and foremost, we work with people – in the kitchen and in the salon. Often, we try to convey a message through the salesmen – waiters and pro­duction staff – and kitchen personnel. You can do it directly yourself, but this would mean spending 100% of your life in the restaurant.

When the customer comes into the restau­rant, he doesn’t care if it is summer or winter. He wants a tomato salad because he saw it in the menu. And he wants tasty tomatoes, as they are in the summer. And although he knows this is not possible, he is disturbed by it, because he paid money…

All year round, a potato may have losses due to the peeling – from 0,1-0, 2%, for new potatoes and up to 50-60% for old potatoes – sometimes you get some that are good for nothing. All of these mean that the product for which we are us­ing potatoes shall have variable costs and quality. There are hundreds of millions of small secrets like this.

We might say there are also other industries that have similar secrets. But building airplanes is spectacular, while owning a restaurant is com­monplace. Anyone can own a restaurant. And af­terwards many people ask themselves: “Why the heck did I start this business?”

And did you get the answer to this question?

No. if were to start the business today, know­ing everything I know about this industry, I would run away as hell… At the same time, after 17 years of being in the business, it is impossible for me to get out of it. It is like a drug, it becomes a lifestyle. Leaving aside all the complexity, the business itself has its satisfactions.

We see nowadays that being a chef is trendy. Little by little, people have started to carefully ana­lyze restaurants. The restaurant is no longer some cheap pub looking to double your bill, but rather it has the place it deserves in society.

The restaurant is a place to socialize. It is part of the community’s economy and it engages several areas of activity. I would like to see a city functioning without restaurants, bars and coffee shops… People don’t get at the table just for eat­ing, but they look for living moments, meeting with friends.

For example, a restaurant involves so many economical aspects of a society and it consumes raw materials. Today, in the industry of Roma­nian restaurants, there are between 300,000 and 500,000 employees. I would ask: what other indus­try employs so many people?

How does a manager succeed in forming a trustworthy team that is so vital for the success of his business?

As long as you treat people with respect, they will give back respect. As in any other com­pany, the activity implies a set of rules that the manager must pay attention whether the staff is complying with it. As long as this set of rules is complied with, things will work. There’s always a possibility that someone may think about how to break the rules. But if the system doesn’t allow breaking the rules, this will come to light.

The basis of the restaurant is the inventory of stocks. If the bookkeeping is carried out correctly, you will always know how things are going. You have ten bottles that came in; you have to find five – not four, nor six. If things are simple, they are also easier to control. But without control, things are not possible.

What is the secret for training a good chef?

No matter what people say, cooking has also to do with talent. I have friends who don’t know anything about cuisine, but whenever they cook they do an excellent job. My mother cooked very well, yet she didn’t know any food processing techniques.

A professional cook learns also chemistry, nu­tritional technology – important matters. He learns all these during classes, from some expert staff. In my opinion, a chef school should last 2-3 years. Six months is not enough to form habits. A good chef must know how the cooking temperature impacts the final product, for example.

When the first „La Mama“ restaurant opened in 1999, people wanted „food as mom makes it“. Now the customers have different refrences: famous chefs, Michelin restaurants…

The Michelin stars idea is a beautiful story, but this is there is to it. I believe that at interna­tional level, less than 0.1% of restaurants have the Michelin stars. In Romanian there isn’t any such restaurant. And if someone wanted to have these stars, they would rather do it for their personal re­sume and not so much for improving the busi­ness.

It is very good that the chefs are valued. But we have too few in Romania. And unfortunately there are too many people who think they are chefs…

For many years, the job of a chef was some­how downgraded, meaning that if you don’t have any talent and no education, go to the kitchen and you will pick up! Presently, due to some TV shows, we are giving back this job the place it de­serves. This is a job that, if you do it well, you can have a fantastic reputation. This job is not inferior in any way to others.

But how did people’s tastes evolve?

When we opened the first “La Mama” restau­rant, in Bucharest there were 300 so called “public food eateries”. Today, there are almost 4,000 in Bu­charest, while in 2008 there were a bit over 7,000.

Since the year 1999, people have travelled all over the world, they ate all sorts of foods, so many of them wanted to bring back to Romania some of the things they liked. I believe that in Bu­charest we have all types of possible restaurants:

Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, Lebanese… Having such a various offer, people’s tastes got finer and finer. They see no reason to eat every day some soup and steak with fries.

On the other hand, in the last 20-30 years, we all gained some extra kilograms. And this is not because we eat more, but we eat low qual­ity, processed food, and because we don’t have enough activity and we live incorrect lifestyles. It is not possible to eat at midnight and still wonder why you don’t weigh 60 kilograms.

Against this background, some nutritionists appeared on the scene and they say: stop eat­ing fats, stop eating cholesterol! And these things contribute to the variety of opinions that people have on food in general.

I know a relatively simple fact: each individu­al should eat food from the region where he was born. It is no me who made this up… Our desire to eat a soup or a borsch after being in vacation abroad for two weeks doesn’t come from bad habits, but comes from our genes that have cer­tain needs.

No matter how much variety was acquired by the customers’ tastes, Romanian food is fortu­nate to be very tasty and very pleasant. Those that are saying it is unhealthy are forgetting how they grew up. Some habits and some quantities, some processed food may not be good for us. I shall al­ways say that Romanian food is healthy. The proof for this statement is the fact that, despite the super-variety of restaurants in Bucharest, we still have clients.

This means that the „La Mama“ brand stays with Romanian food?

Yes. The only thing is that we were never a traditional Romanian restaurant. We never had furs hanging on walls or strings of onion and garlic. The ambiance of the restaurant has never been traditional. We have always tried to be mod­ern in our approach. When we opened the first place, everyone thought of it as a French bistro.

But we are a Romanian bistro that offers a Romanian urban cuisine. Why? I was born and raised in the city. Everything started out from the food that my mother was cooking. There isn’t an­ything out of the ordinary to have sarmale served in the restaurant, they are part of the urban indi­viduals gastronomy for at least 50 years, and like­wise many other dishes we serve.

What could Bucharest do to attract more tourists who have a certain level of education, refined tastes and have already seen many places around the world?

Unfortunately, we are not on the gastro­nomical map of the world; however I would place the Romanian ciorba in the top of best dishes in the world. It is as complex as many more preten­tious dishes. All foreigners coming to Romania are delighted to discover the taste of Romanian food. We have customers, in our restaurants located in the central areas who – if they spend two weeks in Bucharest – they eat at least ten times at us. When they ask the concierge about a good Romanian restaurant, for sure they are told to come and eat here.

We are partners of the “George Enescu” Fes­tival, which attracts many people. Tourists, orches­tras, great artists, many of them stopped by. The last celebrity we had as guest was the President of Poland, in November 2015. He and his team let us create the menu for them and they ate every­thing we put on the table.

Even if “La Mama” is not as fancy as other Ro­manian restaurants, if you want to eat some Ro­manian food, it is impossible not to stop by. If this seems a bit arrogant, then you are right... it just seems.

You are not a traditional restaurant, but you have a day when you celebrate the ia, the Romanian traditional blouse, don’t you?

We have started this based on something that we observed in our daily routine: people are re-discovering the Romanian ia. We encourage our customers, once a month, to come in wear­ing these blouses. Ia is one of the few Romanian things that is part of the world`s culture. Let’s take a look at the superb collection by Carolina Hererra! If I were woman, I would like to wear those blouses!

Ia is no longer a Romanian traditional prod­uct, it became a modern Romanian one. It is no longer about wearing opinci and ițari [peasant sandals and trousers]. It is a blouse that people wear. It is amazing to see many people I know buying these blouses or taking them from their grandparents’ closets and re-discovering the pleasure of wearing them.

If „La Mama“ means Romanian urban food, how successful are the Romanian wines?

We are serving Romanian wines exclusively. They go quite well. And speaking about how the tastes of Romanian people have changed… If we take a look at how the Romanian wine has evolved, we may see how the customers’ tastes changed as well. Twenty years ago, 80% of all Ro­manian wine was sweet and somehow of bad quality. A lot of sweet wine is still being made, but the wine served in restaurants has already be­come premium. Some of the Romanian varieties developed a lot, the wineyards are well worked, and there are many Romanian wines that receive medals. There was a time when some of the more sophisticated clients would have said: “I don`t like any of the Romanian wines, they are impossible to drink”. Presently, even if you have higher stand­ards, there are a lot of Romanian wines to choose from.

Maybe I didn’t choose the right person to ask, but tell me, how does failure looks like in the area of restaurants?

It is painful. You must accept the fact that you have invested money and you lost it, you must accept you made mistakes. Even I had to shut down some places – not restaurants, but cof­fee shops. When you look at the end of the month and you see that you didn’t make any money, it’s either that you go in front of the mirror and you curse the person you see, either he curses you. However, if things don’t go well, you must never blame the system.

When I think about the threats fromoutside the industry, the first thing that pops into my mind is the changes brought to the legislation in the last two years and the multitude of problems that the taxpayers and companies are burdened with. Yet, we must confront all these challenges. If you don’t, you turn off the lights, you close the door and you go to sleep. It is just a matter of choice.