The Best Restaurant in Asia
Dinner in one of the best restaurants in the world offers some simple -- but extremely important -- human resource lessons. The restaurant's stature does not come from decor or an innovative menu. It rests on execution.
By Peter Cappelli
I'm in the middle of a whirlwind world tour that has taken me from Italy to Ireland to India, onto Spain and then Russia.
One theme from the trip is that every country is expecting a world economic slowdown.
Another is that the countries that had historically been the economic basket cases a generation ago -- India, Russia, and Ireland -- are now exploding with growth. Moscow is now the most expensive city in the world, Ireland has the most expensive real estate in Europe and management salaries in India are growing at the rate of 15 percent to 20 percent per year as the economy backs down from a blistering 9.5 percent annual growth rate.
An economic slowdown in these countries is almost greeted with relief.
But, the most memorable event of the trip has been dinner at the Bukhara restaurant in Delhi, where I was the guest of Anil Sharma, vice president for human resources for the ITC hotel and hospitality company. They own the restaurant.
Yes, this will be a story about human resources.
The Bukhara is routinely voted the best restaurant in India, the best Indian restaurant in the world and one of the top 50 restaurants of any cuisine in the world. And note, there are a lot of restaurants in India.
Vladimir Putin is said to have wanted to eat there three times a day when he was in Dehli and Bill Clinton, a big fan, got to make bread in the restaurant's tandoor oven.
The restaurant did not get its top rating because of fancy decor. The style might be described as rustic: log benches and rough wooden tables.
Diners eat with their hands -- no silverware. Long bibs protect the clothes of messy eaters. Bukhara takes no reservations, and the crowds regularly queue up in the lounge waiting to get in.
Nor has this restaurant achieved its distinction through innovation, offering the latest new ideas in dishes. Anil says that the menu has not changed in 37 years.
There are many different kinds of Indian cuisines, some with sophisticated sauces, for example, that represent complex blends of unique spices. That is not Bukhara, either.
It offers a decidedly simple and straight-forward cuisine from the northern frontier that features mostly meats and breads, few sauces and fewer vegetables. The dishes would not surprise anyone familiar with Indian food: Shrimp, chicken and lamb marinated in yogurt and spices and cooked in a hot tandoor oven.
Where Bukhara excels is with execution.
Even though the dishes they turn out are similar to what one could get elsewhere, theirs are just better. Some of this is through choosing the very best ingredients. But most of it comes from the skill of the cooks.
The head chefs at Bukhara have been with the restaurant for more than 25 years. The kitchen is organized around an apprenticeship model, in which beginning employees slowly learn the craft associated with Bukhara's menu and then spend a lifetime working in the restaurant.
It's tempting to ask, How much could there be to learning how to prepare this straight-forward menu? The answer is, apparently a lot, because the dishes are simply better than they are anywhere else.
The kitchen has another interesting management practice.
In most restaurants, the staff cook their own meals, often grabbing them whenever they can between shifts. At Bukhara, the head chefs are the ones who do the cooking for rest of the staff, as clear an example of "servant leadership" as you'll ever find.
The restaurant staff are all employees of the giant ITC corporation, but the company is smart enough to do what is necessary in terms of salaries and practices to keep the kitchen together and avoid imposing corporate-wide policies that would not fit the unique context of this restaurant.
I got a tour of the kitchen, which doesn't take very long because it isn't very big. The whole restaurant is surprisingly small, seating perhaps 100 patrons.
The cooks are on display in an open kitchen, albeit one behind glass to protect the patrons from the heat of the ovens. But they know they are putting on a show for the diners.
Anil says that the company is not worried about competitors trying to copy Bukhara, despite the simplicity of its concept.
Even if one of the head chefs left to start up another restaurant, taking all that knowledge with them, the system and practices in the kitchen that support the execution of the dishes would not be there, and the competitor would not be as good.
What's the lesson here?
The entire business strategy of the best Indian restaurant in the world rests on the ability to perfect and then execute what is otherwise a very simple and straight-forward product, something that would appear to be extremely easy to copy.
And that ability to perfect and execute is based on a set of human resource practices that creates the kind of stability and morale in the workplace that makes it possible to learn best practices, standardize them and then pass them along. It's as simple as that.
Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of Business.
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May 26, 2008 Copyright 2008© LRP Publications
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