The Sage Rabbit, my restaurant in Lexington, will be closed for Christmas Eve day and evening service and my first question to others would be: why are you open?
Aside from Thanksgiving, and the days of Christmas and New Year’s, most every other day is fair game in the restaurant business. We are after all in the business of serving people and their guests. Whether we are open all week long or closed a day or two out of each week, those days represent far more than potential revenue.
Christmas Eve in particular is more about family, shared traditions, and breaking bread together than almost every holiday but Thanksgiving. The shared time with family, and, in some cases a brief moment before the crush of New Year’s is a welcome respite for the service industry. There are certainly opportunities for the ambitious to open for lunch or dinner, and there are effective ways to do so without scheduling full staffs or breaking out all the special items that you may be saving for the next week.
I’ve eaten a Thanksgiving buffet when I was traveling in Chicago during the holidays. It was proper if a bit sparse, adequate and wholly mainstream. It seemed almost a laminated postcard to something you were missing by being on the road.
For some travelers it might have been a slice of nostalgia. Missing was the human connection, the warmth and energy of relatives and friends that gather to celebrate. As nice as Christmas weather might have been for us on another vacation away it ended up less than satisfying, not because the food was bad or the service was sloppy, but rather the restaurant’s heart seemed not to be into it. And that is a reminder for us that the soul of each restaurant is not the décor or menu or wine list, it is the people who staff, plan and execute the space and fill it most of the year with spirit.
Some Italians traditionally celebrate Christmas Eve with the feast of the seven fishes, a dinner filled with seafood, laughter, love and tradition. Of the many holiday meals it seems to combine a bit of all of them with a little Mardi Gras thrown in for a bit of fun. Hanukah meals are typically steeped in tradition and strive to closely connect the many family members that may be elsewhere during the season.
Most of us have a memory of a type of celebration similar to this if not as specific. The thought that you could transfer that spirit to a restaurant serving holiday travelers may be a great marketing concept, but will miss the point entirely. It is a family celebration, not one that you can easily observe when you should be actively engaged.
I intimately understand the slim margins that restaurants operate under, I teach it at Sullivan University and I live it each day at The Sage Rabbit. This unique perspective sometimes muddies the business waters a bit as I struggle to evaluate what may or may not work when it comes to marketing a restaurant. I come back always to the simple fact that restaurants are run by people and that intangible is the single biggest reason why businesses succeed or fail.
Customers, employees, decision-makers all have within them the power to be a Scrooge or a Cratchit, expecting all in or family first and only really succeeding when they can find a happy balance. The cautionary tale of Ebenezer Scrooge could have been written about any business besides the counting house that Scrooge operates as long as we remember the human factor involved. Ask yourself; where should you be on Christmas?
We are a service industry, that’s what I tell incoming students and outgoing graduates alike. We will be working when others are playing. In fact, we sometimes make our friends and family’s events more memorable because we are willing to do the work. Our reward is monetary and in some cases extremely creative and fulfilling.
We are craftspeople, artists, dreamers and rogues. But most of all we are sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, family that in this one brief season of joy could and should take a Saturday off and Sunday, too. Cook and serve at home if you must. New Year’s Eve is a week away….
John Foster is an executive chef who heads the culinary program at Sullivan University’s Lexington campus. A New York native, Foster has been active in the Lexington culinary scene and a promoter of local and seasonal foods for more than 20 years. The French Culinary Institute-trained chef has been the executive chef of his former restaurant, Harvest, and now his Chevy Chase eatery, The Sage Rabbit, in Lexington.
To read more from Chef John Foster, including his recipes, click here.