Have you ever wondered how you can drive revenue on the slowest day of the week? Generally speaking, Mondays and Tuesdays are your slowest days, and while we all wish we had the power to turn Mondays into weekends, a more realistic alternative is to hold master classes. A master class is a lesson or class that you open up to your customers. You choose an education topic for the population and use a combination of wines and food to make the classes; often it was almost like a degustation menu.
Working with your suppliers and chef, you can identify what is trending that suits your business and create a class menu and curriculum to support it.
A master class is for the popular. What style of restaurant you have, style of food you present, style of wines you serve, very much determines the calibre or the menu choice for your customers. So if you have an Italian restaurant, you might do five or seven wines to start off with, with five or seven dishes, and you would have an antipasto then you will have a starter or two, two main courses, one dessert. And you would ask your wine supplier for specific varietals from Italy to accommodate those food choices or if you had the wines, you would sit down and you would create a menu designed around the wines that you wanted to push.
Once you’ve designed the menu, you’ll want to ask a supplier or expert to help speak on it. And don’t skip on staff education – the point of the class is that your customers not only get a great meal, but a fun, interactive, educational experience, so everyone working it should be able to speak to all the topics that you will cover and customers might ask about. Remember, when designing your Master class size is irrelevant .The smallest master class we did was for five wines, the largest we did was for twelve. That one was a particularly special one because the chief wine maker from the vineyard Domaine de la Romanée–Conti was the guest speaker and we had a celebrity chef from the UK come and design the menu. The entire menu was designed around the DRC wine selection apart from the dessert wine which was a Château d’Yquem.
Holding a master class thus allows you to add business to days with lower volume, as well as drive future business. Let’s say, your restaurants seats 90 people and you are able to fill it at $65-$70 a head, you have made a significant amount of business on a slow day, but you are promoting what you want to sell in the future. Because you are teaching about it, your customers see you as the expert in the dishes or wines offered. So let’s say you know that you are getting a special on a particular Barolo and you want to push that wine for the next six months to nine months, you could absolutely have a main course designed around that Barolo so that when those 90 people come back to your restaurant (you know that they are going to because your master class was so successful), half of them would probably buy a bottle of Barolo simply because you had it on the master class menu. It’s all about driving profit. It’s all about making sure that you are able to hit the bottom line.
Master classes are a fantastic way to have your community or your customers involved and really get a sense for you as a restaurant as a restaurant and as somebody who is passionate about how you deliver, what your food and what your wine represents to you.
Story
We would come up with our master class plans by starting with speaking to a wine supplier and look for what was trending. Then we would get samples of those wines and sit down with the chef and supplier, taste the wines and discuss how the chef could come up with some food compatibility. The wine supplier would come and speak on the different wines that were being presented. The waiters would then train on the food and we would really hone our skills as far as presenting the dishes and speaking about the dishes confidently so that when the wine maker or the viticulturist or the supplier was discussing his wines, the customers who had paid for the privilege of this master class get a great understanding of the comparison between the wine and the food.
This was a sell out every time we had one of these master classes, we would saturate it. It would be done maybe once or twice a quarter and it was extremely seasonal. The smallest master class we did was for five wines, the largest we did was for twelve. That one was a particularly special one because the chief wine maker from the main Romania County was the guest speaker and we had a celebrity chef from the UK come and design the menu so the customers got a really special experience, an expertly crafted menu and 12 incredible wines.
