The Unicorn Restaurant
How having a lunch at this restaurant reminds me of The Unicorn Project and gave me scary thoughts about how many companies out there function like this.
I went to this restaurant today and the experience was so funny and reminds me so much of The Unicorn Project (I remember hyperventilating at some point reading that book) and in a sense data/consulting work - that I have to write this down.
Context
So our company have a hybrid day twice a month. The next best thing about working at an office (other than using traffic to remind yourselves why you decide to work remotely in the first place) is that you can strategize where to go for lunch together. That’s what we did. We employed the service of Google map and let our stomach lead the way, to a restaurant within the walking distance from the office.
Today’s particular context is that we didn’t book in advance, and apparently the place we chose is something in high demand, so we walked an extra few 100s meters to an Indian restaurant. The reason we chose it:
within walking distance that has AC
has 4.9 rating on Google Review
The adventure begins!
Entrante
We walked through the streets and the relatively mild heat of Hanoi in June, and found the place. All tables were occupied safe for one. Ah ha! We must be lucky!
The menu lured us in with a false sense of security. Cool images, clear names. We picked the food and now it’s my turn to order, I waved at the waiter who was just a few steps away from me. He ran away behind the counter. At first I thought hmm he must be looking for his notebook (to take the order maybe?), no - he chatted with his friend as if he didn’t see me (he did). I waved at them again and something clicked, a thought must have entered his mind: ‘oh this is apparently a customer who is trying to order’. He ran to the other counter and asked a waitress to come take my order.
Red flag 1: Response time is slow - suggesting SLA failure in near future.
The waitress came to take our order, I assumed they were having this exchange of duties because they assumed I can only speak english. As I started ordering in Vietnamese, the waitress blurted out “Omg (she speaks) Vietnamese?”.
Yeah I get that a lot so I don’t really mind. We had a good laugh, but still:
Red flag 2: Cannot differentiate between things to present to customer vs things to keep internally.
A few ordering later, we started chit chatting. I started looking at my watch to mark the time because I have registered 2 red flags so far and now trying to manage the expectation of my stomach, as any reasonable well-behaved customer should.
I remember us asking the waitress a few questions after ordering:
I asked “Is there a chef?” - to which she answered “yes” with a laugh. Not a red flag.
Alice asked “Will it take long?” - “It might take a bit long” was the answer. I noticed a hint of uneasiness on the waitress’s face, suggesting she too, was unconfident in her own reply.
Red flag 3: When you are unconfident in your delivery of SLA.
The reason why we asked these was because we started noticing that all other occupied tables were actually having sparkly clean empty plates. And I started to pick up hungriness in the fellow restauranteers’ eyes. It’s a survival skill, highly recommended.
Red flag 4: Fellow customers are giving signs of distress.
The wait
I was expecting a 45 minutes window till we have food. I was not off.
Actually, we chatted for a while, didn’t really mind the time, until a few things happened, consecutively, like a chain of domino, like signs from the universe:
the customer opposite of us walked out of the restaurant, empty plate, and surely an empty stomach. He was there before us.
the table next to us called another waiter to ask about the status of their missing dish. The waiter gave some excuses I could not hear but regardless amplified the signal of my stomach that the SLA will be long and blurry.
the waiter who played hide and seek with me earlier seem to still be on a vacation with his mate. No plates served, no running around. I noticed he had a bunch of order slips in front of him, untouched, unserved.
I saw no kitchen and I heard no sound of an operating kitchen. But I saw the hide-and-seek waiter pouring out food onto a plate from a food box - the type that you get when you do take-away from restaurant.
Chi noticed that there was a “bun cha” ordered by another table, in an Indian restaurant, and they still received the order.
How many red flags are those already?
Red flag 5: Distressed customer is now walking away
Red flag 6: You see no sense of urgency from people who are supposed to save the planet from hunger, and being paid to do so.
Red flag 7: You start to have questions about their business model.
The decision
Noticing these signals around us, we applied advanced human learning to arrive at the prediction that we too - will not have food any time soon.
At minute 40:00 - the waiter who received the complaint of “missing dish” from the table next to us, now enters the scene, holding a plate of something and asked if we ordered this dish. We did not.
Red flag 8: They don’t know if what they are producing is what the customer is requesting.
He vanished from the scene.
We looked at the two bottles of water that were (thankfully) given to us from the start - and decided it’s time to ask if they can deliver the SLA or no.
The “bottles of water” moment reminds me of another red flag: When the waiter who played hide and seek with me earlier saw us staring at him intently, came and asked what we needed - we basically asked for cups. I tried to tell him “five cups” before he ran back to the counter at the whisper of “cups”, and returned with four cups. Of course.
Red flag 9: They don’t really pay attention to your needs.
Anyway, continued: us five thought if all these customers have fallen, so will we. It’s better to ask them. “Hey have you made our dishes?”
The hide-and-seek waiter didn’t answer, but asked the waitress who was visibly being busier now. They both could not answer and just ignored us.
We decided to walk.
So walked we did, to the counter, to pay for the 2 bottles of water and cancel our order. The (supposedly) owner now looks at the five grumpy faces and asked what our grievances were. Trung explained our situation - 45 minutes, we still don’t know if you have made our food or not. The guy started picking up his phone and calling someone.
“We have a table here waiting for 40 minutes, where is the food?”
Ah great, they do have a communication channel, I thought.
I didn’t hear the answer from the secret agent / chef on the line, he told us to ‘please go back we are making the food and it will be coming’.
I immediately called it sus in my head - no communication of “order number”, yet they for some reason know that it is our table who is having this question (mind you, other tables are still half empty too). My bullshit antenna was tingling.
We tried asking if they actually started cooking, no answer. We made the deal that after 2 minutes if nothing is coming we are leaving.
Red flag 10: If you ask them what is being done and what’s the progress of things, you don’t get a straight answer.
The food
Now, the good thing about this whole experience is by the time the food actually arrived (minute 56:00 of operation Overcook Ultimate Supreme) - we were quite hungry, the food tasted good, and thankfully they did arrive in full order within a timeframe of 5 minutes.
You may have thought this is the end to the story. You are wrong.
The waiter brought us a small pot of soup - not in our order. Since I have observed them delivering wrong things to customers twice within the last 60 minutes alone - I had to ask what the dish was. The response “I don’t know”. Again, red flag #8.
Well to give him credits, he did turn to the waitress (again) - asking her what the food is. She ran pass him ignoring the question. He ran away serving other customers. Few moments later he circled back, same question, same answer, he chased another staff now - this guy is Indian so surely he must know what the dish was.
A lot of running and ignoring later, he managed to arrive at the conclusion that was not a dish we ordered - so he took it away. Now, either it was from some distressed customer who walked away earlier, or - it was from some poor souls sitting at other tables waiting for their food.
I thought to myself it’s funny that the food was actually good, but the operational disaster that they are maintaining is NOT curable by good chef talent. I will not ever revisit it for food, nor will I recommend it to anyone else.
Operational disaster overshadows your product, no matter how good it is.
Eureka
You thought that was it didn’t you. The Eureka moment arrived when another lady popped up on to the stage, she arrived out of nowhere when we were munching on chicken, and started yelling at the staff.
Based on non-discretional method she applied by not lowering her volume at the only capable staff in the operational dumpster-fire (the waitress) - we deduced that she was about to take in a large group of customers on the second floor, and she was urging them all to go take care of the preparations.
Few minutes later, a bus of obvious tourist group arrived. Our Eureka moment.
All this time, the chef (or chefs?) had been cooking for these bigger groups, and not walk-in customers like us. We were not expected.
But that still didn’t excuse the “I don’t know”s and what transpired later.
The mismatch in resource planning (big group vs walk-in) contributed to the operational dumpster fire.
What transpired later
At the end of our Unicorn Restaurant authentic experience, we went to the payment counter. What happened next was truly something.
The waitress (the only one capable so far in my eye, next to the communication mystic guy) - asked me to confirm the order.
Result: they actually missed out on (costlier) order items and had a wrong bottle of water in. Now this step is standard in all restaurants. But it is to make sure the customers have no complaints later, not as a fool-proof way to counter your business's error in operation. 100% of the time their staff asked each other if this food belong to which table, they don’t know what each table order, and now they don’t keep track of the order in POS properly.
Now this is quite evident throughout the adventure already. But I will put it into the quote for extra yelling effect
TRAIN YOUR STAFF!!!
Train them to distinguish the foods, familiarize with the menu, communicating with customers, logging in order slips, keeping count of orders, checking in the POS, having ownership, delegation, etc. All of that. So many things! They obviously did zero to minimal training for the staff, and just threw them into the swimming pool and yelled at them to paddle.
I think you can translate this to any work you do.
Takeaways
Throughout the whole adventure of observing this chain of chaotic events, we started gathering our intelligence on this Unicorn Restaurant, doing a retrospective on the spot, like any principled engineers. Our takeaway:
They should play Overcook - an operational simulation game that I wish I have invested some stocks on after writing this blog.
I will revisit this restaurant in 3 months and see if it’s still here (for science, not the food).
Google Reviews is fake.
As a product/ business owner:
Operational disaster overshadows your product, no matter how good it is.
The mismatch in resource planning & lack of training led to the operational dumpster fire.
Mismatch in resource planning at this Unicorn restaurant manifested itself in several ways:
They have 4 waiters/waitress - serving about 20 walk-ins and 30 tourists coming in group - within 1 hour.
They have 2 bosses, one yelling, and one picks up the phone.
They have an unidentified number of chef - I should have asked. They really picked my curiosity. I also don’t know the capacity of their kitchen, for all I can assume it might be just four stoves and a grill - which gives 2 cooks room of movement and render a third (if exist) useless. I spent a fair share being yelled at while playing Overcook to know this.
They also don’t seem to have a clear business model. I’m pretty sure they bought bun cha from the restaurant nearby. What happens if it gives the customer food poisoning? Who will be liable?
Train your staff for the sake of hungry people.
You may opt for paid Reviews/ Ranks/ etc., but it won’t work in the long run.
As we role-play the customer for a day, it reminds me of my role as an engineer
(this can be just as applicable to non-engineer as well)
Our team is no operational wizard, just regular customers - and can already sniff out these many problems - which I think serve us lots of foods for thoughts for our day to day work in how we manage expectations and work with stakeholders.
Having clear priorities, processes, roles and responsibilities and ownership - is vital.
Building trust through:
knowing the product (or whatever it is you are doing)
understanding your customers’ needs - pay attention to their needs! (five people sitting at table - not four, be responsive).
managing expectations & communicating is important. If you can’t deliver, be honest, if you can deliver, give realistic estimation & explain the conditions involved. If you cannot even know what you are doing and/or when you can finish, revisit point 2.
having a commitment to delivery time and make it known.
As customers
I think we should learn to read distress signals from fellow customers and trust our gut, literally.
Have a walk-away threshold, like “I’m getting out of here at minute X if you cannot tell me what stage is the chicken being cooked at” (you get the idea).
That is it. I didn’t expect to have a full blown retrospective over a lunch, but this experience reminds me of unhappy thoughts about the potential Unicorns out there in the wild wild world. Rate 1/5.
************** If you enjoyed reading this **************
…and have extra coffee budget, you can buy me one too! Just so I can occasionally be surprised about a surplus in bank statement, and in case AI sends me to unemployment.
Thanks again, and please tell a few friends if you feel like it.