Trainees spend part of the fourth week as busboys, gaining, among other things, a glimpse into what life is like for foreign workers who have little grasp of English. Lettuce keeps copies of El Norte, a wrenching film about the northward progress of two young illegals. The company doesn't require its trainees to watch the film, but most of them do.
After a brief stint behind the bar, and a shift with the restaurant's general manager, each trainee takes an oral final exam, which he must pass before moving on to the next phase of training. During the exam, which can last five hours, a panel of Lettuce partners asks trainees to act out their responses to an array of crises. What do you do if a customer finds a staple in his hamburger? How do you handle an unruly drunk? Carbone and other partners on the panel play outraged customers and employees and try hard to make a trainee sweat. "I can bring tears on demand," Carbone says, grinning. "That throws some of them."
The second five-week phase covers the "back of the house' -- the kitchen. Trainees learn how to cook and order food, and such tasks as organizing a walk-in refrigerator. This too is followed by a final exam. A third phase of the program, still being developed, will add two weeks to the program and cover the various administrative duties of a manager.
Periodically, Lettuce checks up on how its managing partners and their restaurant staffs are getting along. Each partner holds a meeting in which his or her staff has a chance to air any complaints about the restaurant's manager, without the manager being present. Sometimes Melman sits in on these meetings. Sometimes he's the one being reviewed. Once, for example, he learned that the Lettuce staff was unhappy about his habit of asking people to do tasks without his realizing that they would instantly drop whatever they were doing.
To catch flaws in the restaurants themselves, Lettuce dispatches trained rating teams into each one at least once a week. The raters are customers knowledgeable about food and trained by Lettuce to watch critical areas of service. At the end of each month the restaurants receive a report card with the results of the weekly reviews.
Lettuce's best quality-control detector, however, may be Melman himself. "It's an instinct," says Bill Frost, a former Lettuce partner and minor-league baseball player who owns a Nevada restaurant overlooking Lake Tahoe. "I've seen so many excellent athletes who have an instinct about where to throw the ball. Melman has that same quality. The guy just has the ability to know what's right about a restaurant. He knows how it's supposed to feel."
Melman is a stickler for cleanliness and discipline, Frost says. At The Pump Room, which Frost helped manage, Melman taught two tricks to help the staff get the restaurant as clean as possible -- turn the lights up as bright as possible, and play rock music on the sound system for motivation. Melman also instructed the staff in correct diction and body language. "Rich doesn't want to see anyone addressing a customer while leaning on a chair," Frost says.
Melman focuses on a single aspect of a restaurant's performance and uses it to measure how the rest of the place is doing. "When you have a lot of restaurants, you put small areas under a microscope and look carefully," he says. "If something's wrong, you look deeper. If one thing's wrong, you'll see more things wrong.'
Here's Melman at the Chicago Ed's, for lunch. "I'm concerned that it's taking more than 8 to 10 minutes to get the order on the table," he says. Overall, though, Ed's seems to be running smoothly. The noise level is right -- too much noise means people are talking, not eating, and could indicate lagging service. There's no evident backlog of orders at the kitchen. And he likes the malted that's been delivered to his table. "I can know in two seconds if it's not made in the right proportions," he says. "I know the food so well now in our restaurants, I know when they're a fraction off."
Here's Melman at Don & Charlie's, another Lettuce restaurant in Phoenix: Melman wants the table no customer would ever request. It's a couple of yards due west of the kitchen door. Every few moments, the door opens and a server appears. Melman likes this table because it puts him at the restaurant's heart, lets him see how the place performs.
Melman looks a little put out, but not because he sees any problems. Rather, there's a brand-new dish, pecan chicken, that the chef wants Melman to try. Melman, however, has dropped 10 pounds since fleeing to Scottsdale for a month of vacation mixed with work. The last thing he wants tonight is to be a guinea pig. "I don't want to try something that might not be good," he mutters, a bit petulant.
But the dish is now on the table. Melman relents, gives it a try. "This is good," he says, still chewing. He tastes the pecan sauce, points his knife at it: "This sauce is not so good." He carves another hunk of chicken. Soon he's got the chicken in his hands. He's gnawing at the bones. Twenty years of therapy, and he still can't resist a good meal. n
* * *
"The Man with the Golden Touch" by Erik Larson. Published by Inc. Magazine, October 1988 issue. © 1988 by Erik Larson. All rights reserved.
