"When we look at an operation," he says, "we look at the prime cost-the cost of food and beverage and the cost of the labor to produce it. Those numbers together make up most of your real costs, your controllable costs. If your prime cost gets too high, you can't make money. And in an operation where you need a certain level of labor to produce a Pomodoro's menu and you need a certain level of product to produce a Pomodoro's menu and you have a lot of rent to begin with, it becomes structurally impossible to be profitable unless volume is really high and that was just not going to happen at that location."

The switch from Pomodoro to Marabella's, another Neil Stein concept, was a good one, he says.

"Marabella's has a lower prime cost-the cost of the menu is lower than Pomodoro's. And you can do more business. You might turn the tables at
lunch at Pomodoro 1.2 times, but at Marabella's, you get a longer lunch period because of the kind of food you're serving and the faster service.

"They have the opportunity to do much better with Marabella's there," he says. "They'll do very well."

The Doctor's life-saving skills came in to play recently when Gorodesky was hired to help the ailing Tudor Rose restaurant, located just outside of Hershey Park.

"The restaurant was a real loser," Gorodesky says. "It was a fine restaurant at the entrance to an amusement park. It made no sense.

"We recommended a change to a new concept-fast service, a more family- oriented concept." The name was changed to Pippins and the rest, as they say....

Wait a minute! Isn't it obvious that an upscale restaurant wouldn't work at an amusement park?

"It might be obvious to the customer," says Gorodesky. "It might not be obvious to the owner."

"We just couldn't see the forest for the trees," says a spokesman. "We were making adjustments to the basic concept without realizing, until Ron came in, that the concept itself was flawed."

Basically, Gorodesky is a numbers man. He says he can look at a menu and tell within a point what the restaurant's food costs are-or should be, if it's run efficiently.

He publishes an annual Pennsylvania Restaurant Operations report, which he sells to anyone who needs to analyze restaurant operations. Based on a survey of some 150 restaurants around the state, it provides high, low and medium figures on everything from table turns per day to compensation and benefits for chefs. It's not meant to set industry standards, but rather to serve as a tool to help analyze a restaurant's operation.

"Food costs," says Gorodesky says, "usually run a narrow range for certain types of restaurants. When you see exceptions, you know there is a definite problem.

"And it almost always involves employee theft. Theft totals as much as five percent of gross. I challenge you to find a restaurant employee who hasn't stolen something, who hasn't hauled off a prime rib, or, worse, cash. That's why good management is really so important.

"A lot of restaurateurs have no idea what it costs to produce an item on their menu," he says. "It's like Chrysler not knowing how much it costs
to produce a single car.

"I tell them: 'Take a recipe, cost it out, multiply it by the number of times you sell it and you can develop a food-cost potential.' Sometimes
their costs are much higher. It could be because of over-portioning, it could be excessive spoilage and it could be food walking out the door."

Don't get the wrong idea, though, Gorodesky says. "There's money to be made in the restaurant business if you do it right."

He is watching the bartender now, watching him scoop up cash from the bar, watching him put it where he's putting it.

"It's like I always tell people entering the restaurant business," The Doctor says, "'You can call me now. Or you can call me later.'"

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Secrets of Success: Ron Gorodesky

He has been enamored of the restaurant business since he was a teenager earning $2 an hour washing dishes at Barson's in the Northeast. He has a degree from the renowned Penn State Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management Program, he trained with the Marriott Corporation, the most sought-after training ground for food-and-beverage professionals, he quadrupled Laventhol and Horvath's food-and-beverage division revenues in a few short years.

And now, as president of Restaurant Advisory Services, Inc., Ron Gorodesky is known as The Restaurant Doctor, the man who knows the restaurant business inside-out.

What's his bellwether for a well-run restaurant?

"I check the bathrooms," he says. "You can really tell a lot about management by looking at the bathrooms."

So You Want to Open a Restaurant!

There's a lot more to running a restaurant than making a great Veal Oscar.

"It's a very tough business," says Ron Gorodesky. "The average restaurant in Pennsylvania in 1991 had a bottom line of 6.6 percent before interest and depreciation. After interest and depreciation, it was 2.6 percent. That doesn't leave a lot of room for error."

One of the biggest issues facing those in the business today is the FICA tax on tips. Until a few years ago, restaurant owners had only to pay FICA taxes on base wages. But wait-people are now required to report their tips, and their employers are required to pay taxes on them.

"That increased restaurants' employee benefits expenses by a full percentage point, " Gorodesky says. "If your average restaurant makes only five or six percent profit, cut it by one percent and that's a 20-percent profitability cut."

Things can only get worse, he says, if restaurateurs have to start providing health benefits for their employees. Few of them do now. "They can't afford to," says Gorodesky.

"The restaurant business is a very serious, very difficult business," he says. "You have an unsophisticated workforce that will steal from you.
Purveyors will prey on you and customers will send things back that are fine. And if, God forbid, somebody gets food poisoning, you're out of
business forever."

"Only do it if you have something burning inside," he says. "You got say, 'This is something I love.'"