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| Synergy In The New South
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Robert St. John credits New South managers with the success of the company’s restaurants.
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Owner and president: Robert St. John
Company: New South Restaurant Group
Restaurants: five total: Purple Parrot Café, Crescent City Grill (two), Mahogany Bar (two)
Locations: Hattiesburg and Meridian, MS
Web site: www.nsrg.com
Concept: three different ways for customers to enjoy authentic and modern Southern cooking
Annual sales: $6.5 million
Key personnel: Clint Taylor, managing partner; Steve Smith, operations manager; Stacy Andrews, marketing director; Linda Nance, chef at Purple Parrot; Undrell Covington, chef at Crescent City Grill
Founded in: 1987
Check averages: Purple Parrot Café, $12 for lunch, $25 for dinner; Crescent City Grill, $8 for lunch, $11.50 for dinner
Number of employees: 220-230 total
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| How can multiple concepts fuel and complement each other? - Questions & Answers
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What are the three New South Restaurant Group concepts like?
We began with Purple Parrot Café, a relatively small, white tablecloth restaurant featuring new Southern cuisine. And a couple of years later, in the same building, we opened the Crescent City Grill, a high-volume operation that focuses on the food of nearby New Orleans. The Mahogany Bar is also in the same building, and we serve food there, too, along with premium wines and cocktails in what we call a “speakeasy” setting.
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So they’re all in the same building? Does that mean the restaurants share a single kitchen?
Here at our main building in Hattiesburg, yes. We basically run two kitchens together. The grill is in the center, with two cooking lines on each side, one for each restaurant. So we have two separate expediters, two separate sauté stations. But we have some crossover in the salad and pantry stations. And then we share storage space.
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Is the kitchen staff cross-trained?
It’s fairly complicated, but yes, everyone is. Because we make everything – stocks, soups, sauces and desserts – from scratch, there are some basic preparations that all restaurants can use. The prep is real intensive, but this set-up helps us keep labor costs at about 35 percent.
In fact, if the Purple Parrot was a freestanding restaurant we probably wouldn’t even be open for lunch. Hattiesburg is a fairly small town and in order to open the doors, the return has to be worth it. But with our arrangement—and the high lunchtime volume at the Crescent City Grill – we offset enough operating costs to make both lunch and dinner at the Parrot possible.
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What would you say are the top three secrets of your company’s success?
Number one: management. Number two: management. Number three: management. I’ve been in this business 22 years, and every problem and every solution goes back to management. We are so lucky to have strong managers with terrific operational and training skills to make this all happen.
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How do you recruit and hire new personnel?
Over the years we’ve devised a system. One very simple thing we did was to streamline the application interview process. With people coming in and going out all day long, hiring almost was running us instead of our being in control of it. You need people, so you wind up dropping everything to meet with applicants.
So now we take applications only from 8:00 to 9:30 a.m. on Tuesdays. This immediately takes care of a couple of things. It weeds out people who can’t get up in the morning. And it allows our managers to make a commitment to the process, too.
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And then what happens?
We really promote only from within. In the kitchen many of our cooks started as dishwashers. In the dining room, you can start as a hostess or a busboy. Then you work your way onto the floor to serve tables and get more responsibility and make more money. After that, you can be moved into the bar and take on even more responsibility and earning power. Then we pull our managers from that crew. I think there have been only two cases where we hired outside that system. It works really well for people who want to make a career out of foodservice. And our customers benefit from the level of professionalism.
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What sort of training tools do you use?
Our program constantly is being upgraded. Generally, new staff members train for two or three weeks before they ever get out on the floor. We have videos, a manual and one-on-one sessions.
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Are you still involved in day-to-day operations?
That’s the great thing about great management. I’m here, but I’m also free to expand the business and do other things to increase our visibility.
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And judging from your Web site, you manage to stay pretty busy, eh?
A few years ago I started writing a food column that appears in 22 newspapers. I’ve also completed two cookbooks. “Deep South Staples” is the most recent, published about five months ago. It’s all about Southern home cooking, legitimized by my 42 years as an eater. The earlier book, “A Southern Palate,” is drawn more from my experiences as a chef. We sell them in the restaurants and online.
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How does all this come together into the customer experience?
There are a couple of ways we work on this, every single day. First, we live and work in the community. And we listen to our customers. The public may see our operation as three distinct concepts, but we run it so that the food quality is always at the same level, no matter where they decide to dine. The restaurants complement each other – not only in terms of labor, cost and menu – but they complement each other’s image as well.
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