His latest creation is Hat Dance, a high-brow Mexican restaurant that offers a case study of how deeply Melman involves himself in the founding of a new restaurant. The sign over the sidewalk telegraphs that the place must belong to Lettuce. Melman's idea, it reads: "She lifted the fork to her voluptuously sullen lips, allowing the adventure to loll in her mouth for a moment and then. . . . "
The idea for Hat Dance came from John Buchanan, a divisional vice-president and now managing partner of the restaurant, who spent six years trying to convince Melman that Mexican food was more than over-spiced burritos and refried beans. A taste test, done in the Lettuce test kitchen, did the trick.
Melman and Buchanan put together a nine-person team, including two chefs, three artists, an architect, a Mexico City food-writer, and themselves. Melman and four other members of the team went to Mexico for some on-the-scene research; the chefs worked shifts in real Mexican restaurants. One chef noted how similar in spirit Mexican ceviche was to Japanese sashimi, and soon Japan crept into the concept. With Hat Dance, the team was after mood. It set five parameters: everything it did had to be romantic, avant-garde, existential, ancient Mexican, and 5% Japanese.
Melman had long wanted to do a restaurant interior using only white. Hat Dance gave him the opportunity. Customers would expect serapes, donkeys, the usual gaudy reds, blues, and oranges. White would immediately identify the place as something different. The interior came together wall by wall, on the site, with Melman and the artists adding and subtracting wall coverings and props. He played his instincts. He suggested hanging some Victorian chandeliers at the front of the restaurant. Victorian chandeliers in an all-white, upscale Mexican restaurant -- Buchanan hated the idea: "I thought, oh Jesus, this looks goofy. But when Richard got here and we actually held them up to the ceiling and looked at them, we realized he was right."
Melman, too, decided the booths along the inner walls of the restaurant should have one subtle tint of color, a single tangerine napkin plunged into a glass, all the other napkins remaining arctic white. "It's there, like a little glow in the room," Melman says. "That's fine-tuning. We wanted the room to look very clean, but have some punch to it. You want to walk out of a restaurant not feeling you've been in an operating room, but feeling warm about it."
Therapy helps Melman in this work, says David Roadhouse. He argues that "therapeutic" management is particularly well suited to the restaurant business. "It has so much to do with sensation -- senses as opposed to sensational," Roadhouse explains. By putting managers in touch with their own senses, it helps them better understand the play of tastes, scents, sights, and staff interaction that produce a good time. When these are correctly orchestrated, Roadhouse says, the customers feel "that they're being cared for, that this restaurant wants to do something for them, to care for them, to give them an experience."
Hat Dance is John Buchanan's restaurant now. As managing partner, he has a stake in the operation. The remainder is split among Melman and other Lettuce partners and investors. The $1 million that Lettuce spent founding Hat Dance came from Lettuce's cash reserves, bank loans, and a syndicate of investors. Melman retains the right to buy out any managing partner, but has exercised this only once. In stepping back, he is free to pursue new ideas and help in the founding of new restaurants.
But where does Melman find the people to run his restaurants, and how does he develop them? The answer is the 49%-51% approach to recruiting.
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Loret Carbone was a school psychologist in San Jose, Calif., until 1980, when, craving a change in job and climate, she fled to Chicago and landed a waitress job at The Pump Room. She later founded Lettuce's human-resources department, which Melman, with his populist leanings, had wanted to call the human-being department.
What Lettuce looks for first in a manager is psychological strength, Carbone explains, the theory being that technical skills can be taught. "We say if a circle represents 100% of what it takes to get hired, only 49% of that circle is technical ability. What tips the scale is the 51%, and that's your emotional maturity, your ability to develop the people below you."
Candidates judged capable of becoming managers -- they can be waiters or waitresses, or outside hires -- go through a detailed 12-week training program unusual in the restaurant business. The first phase lasts five weeks and covers all work done in the so-called "front of the house," the dining room. Trainees spend their first week boning up on Lettuce philosophy and culture. There is homework every night, such as reading about serving the elderly. In the second week, they wait tables in the restaurant they will help manage. "We want them to feel, not just intellectualize, the responsibilities of that position in our restaurants," Carbone says.
Over the next few weeks, they rotate through other front-room jobs, serving as hosts and captains and maîtres d'hôtel. They learn the subtleties of dealing with the public. Melman's guiding maxim for service is "Recognize and Reassure." Every customer, he believes, should be greeted on arrival and given reassurance that he or she will be served promptly and well. Lettuce also instructs management trainees in the Three A's of responding to complaints: Acknowledge, Apologize, Act.
