Guess who's coming to dinner

Author: John Lethlean

Date Published: 09 Jun 1998

From section: Epicure

Publication: The Age

Did you hear the one about the diner who thought he would test the waiter's menu knowledge?

"What would you recommend?" he asked the unsuspecting waiter.

"I wouldn't eat anything here," was the rather surprising reply.

Then there was the diner, at a different restaurant, who called a waiter to point out a clump of blonde hair in her meal. "It looks remarkably like your hair, doesn't it," said the waiter. The diner was a brunette.

Or the time another diner, in another restaurant, ordered fettucine but was brought spaghetti. "I ordered fettucine but this looks like spaghetti," she said to the waiter, fearing her own dish had disappeared into the ether. "It does, doesn't it," said the waiter. And walked away.

Everyone has at least one horror story about waiters. The incident that sticks in your craw, growing in stature and personal indignation with each successive telling.

But these stories are a little different. Not only are they true, they went straight back to the restaurant owners as part of a thorough written report.

The diners were management stooges. Mystery shoppers. Virtually every night, somewhere in Melbourne, mystery shoppers are eating a meal in one of dozens of restaurants that use this form of market research. There are about 200 reviewers, part of a team put together by a market research firm that specialises in the restaurant industry.

Like a small army of hyper-critics, they book, order, eat, drink, make a nuisance of themselves, scrutinise everything from cutlery to toilets, pay by personal credit card and take exhaustive mental notes along the way. The notes become a written report within 24 hours.

And if the shoppers are doing their job, the restaurant staff have absolutely no idea. In some cases, they won't, until it is too late: consistent poor surveys have occasionally led to dismissals.

Media reviews of restaurants may sometimes provide management with useful information but, for a core of highly successful Melbourne operators, this kind of feedback is an essential part of their quality-assurance program. Witness the enduring reign of the Stokehouse near the top of The Age Good Food Guide's list of most popular restaurants. The Stokehouse has used the mystery-shopper system more than any other restaurant.

"Every industry must have a way of measuring itself, and restaurants are no different," says chef and restaurateur Guy Grossi, whose three restaurants (Cafe Grossi, Epoca and Pietro) are surveyed by mystery shoppers several times every year.

Gary Cooper, the executive chef at Chateau Yering in the Yarra Valley, has used the program to assess his restaurant, cafe and guest facilities since opening a luxury guest-house last year.

"It has helped us dramatically," he says, "because we've got blinkers on. We're on the inside."

Restaurant mystery shoppers work anonymously, span a broad age group (although most are thirtysomething professionals with an interest in dining), are well educated and articulate when it comes to reporting on a restaurant's performance.

They aren't paid for the "work" but the price of the meal is reimbursed. It can cost a restaurant as much as $1500 to run a round of mystery shopping to produce one survey, although, for several restaurants, it is part of a broader staff-training program.

Shoppers are expected to take it seriously. They won't shop more than once if they don't. According to Susan Bream (who preferred not to give her real name), 33, a management consultant and experienced mystery shopper, the system is all about identifying the factors that will create repeat business. She says for many restaurants there is a customer-satisfaction zone that exists somewhere between not complaining, yet not returning.

The notion of customer perception is often based on the old "complaints" system, as in "we don't get many complaints, so things must be pretty good". But, according to the Melbourne market research and training company that runs the mystery shopper program, 96 per cent of dissatisfied customers will not complain and 75 per cent of them will not return.

"From a business point of view, the restaurateur needs to know the truth about customer perceptions," says Tony Eldred of Eldred Hospitality. He introduced the shopper concept nine years ago. Eldred chooses from a database of mystery shoppers according to a client profile provided by the restaurants. Each shopper is thoroughly briefed prior to the restaurant visit. Each is asked to order three courses, side dishes and a moderately priced bottle of wine. The shopper who went to lunch at Marchetti's Latin and presented a bill for $350 did not shop again.

St Kilda's Stokehouse has used mystery shoppers for nearly five years. Every three months, 10 couples visit upstairs and down, providing an extensive and useful picture of the business. Eldred's reports, based on mystery shopping, quantify a restaurant's performance in the areas surveyed. Furthermore, these performances can be measured against a market average.

"It's costly, but this is one of the areas in the restaurant industry that has been neglected," Grossi says. "People leave, and they say nothing."

But it is not just large restaurants that value this kind of research. Onions, a small South Yarra restaurant that reopened five months ago, is owned by a couple who have both worked in restaurants using the system. "There's a lot of things we can't afford, but this isn't one of them," says chef-owner Glenn Tobias. "This is a reality check."

"Mystery shopping will help us make sure our vision is more or less consistent with what people want. You have to be up to criticism, and anything that challenges you is a healthy thing."

© Eldred Hospitality Pty Ltd, 2008