Why is Manayunk a success?

"Rents, especially if you got in early, are much lower than Center City. You want to keep your rent around 5 percent of gross. In Center City it
runs up and up. What happens when it hits 20 percent? You close. Besides rents-unions. In Center City you have to have union labor for almost
anything. Outside of Center City, and it varies from trade to trade, depending on how strong they are in the area, you can get away with
nonunion construction. One town in eastern Pennsylvania, I remember rug- laying was union, metalwork wasn't. Manayunk is still kind of open."

What about discount books?

"All discounts are terrible. The worst are companies that offer restaurants cash for future food. It's like crack cocaine for restaurants. Very
destructive, and very alluring. They say, Here's $50,000, all you owe us $100,000 worth of food. Even successful restaurants go for it. Restaurants in trouble-you're running Quinn's Steaks, the suppliers are yelling, refusing to make new deliveries except for cash. You got tax problems, mortgage problems ... $50,000 sounds like a gift from heaven. Now the company sells a credit card to customers, which only charges them 75 percent of what they spend in you restaurant. The company makes $25,000 - 50 percent on its investment. You get to pass out food. A year later, you paid off the old debts, but ran up new ones. Where will you go? Back to that same company. You're hooked. I tell successful restaurant owners- you're better off charging a bunch of credit cards to the max. At least when you pay them off you're done. You don't owe customers free food. The companies hate to hear me say that. I don't give a shit. Anybody's entitled to make a buck. But not selling cancer.

"Entertainment books-they're not as bad. It's not cancer, it's flu. A very bad case of the flu. They won't kill you because the customer is still
paying you money. You just give them 20 percent off, or two meals for one. You hope you'll get to meet new people and some of them will develop a loyalty to your restaurant. The trouble is, entertainment-book buyers are very loyal-to the entertainment book. They go from restaurant to restaurant, coupon to coupon. They're not looking for food, they're looking for bargains. Here's another trade secret for you-there's no money in money- making schemes except for the schemers."

-The Happy Machine

The Mad Batter became a Cape May legend, but it was really the last great Philadelphia Renaissance Restaurant. Mismatched silver, wobbly tables, hipster waitstaff, white walls and a half-calculated/half-helpless air of inspired amateur expediency.

The Batter, as everybody calls it, was invented by Harry Kulkowitz and his partner, Vickie Seitchik, in 1975. Harry had worked in New York luncheonettes and had run a picture-framing business. When he moved to Cape May to take and teach photos, Vickie insisted they needed something to do. Why not a restaurant? The Batter succeeded because Harry and Vickie are fanatical, inventive, workaholic perfectionists. Things happened at The Batter. A holistic healer wandered into the first professional kitchen of her life to ask about running a seminar in the hotel-and was hired as executive chef. She worked out, too-for a while. Everything worked. It was the '70s, fat times for restaurants, and the fat times lasted well into the '80s. The Batter's food was delicious, its menu was endless-and its service was slow. Because Harry wanted slow service.

"Our service is not just slow," Harry used to say, with a contented smile. "It's famous for being slow. Think about it, who complains about service? Incompatible people. You go into a restaurant, pour a little wine, look in each other's eyes. What's the hurry? It's only when you're bored you look around for a waitperson to take it out on. So our problem is not slow service. Our solution is-attract more lovers to this restaurant!"

Then Harry and Vickie moved, to New York, where Harry is a photographer. Harry's son Mark took over the restaurant.

"The Mad Batter was magic-is magic," says Gorodesky. "But all the magic in the world isn't worth squat unless you can get it to the bank. Imagine trying to run somebody else's dream somebody else's way, and you'll get an idea of Mark's problem. Harry's gregarious, aggressive, always right about everything. The kind of guy who'd be in the restaurant 24 hours a day if he could. Mark is quiet, questions everything, especially himself. He's a sports fan, a real fan. He wants to go see the Rangers, the Mets. He won't put in Harry's hours. He wants a life. Harry and Vickie can't understand. And profits are going down. Harry comes to us. He asks a million questions, he talks to everybody who ever hired us, before he says yes. The toughest client to sign we ever had."

"Now one of our happiest," says Derek.

"Well...profits are way up," says Gorodesky. "It's been two years since we started. Mark set a record for profits the first year, and broke his own record the second. The Batter turned into a special relationship. I told you we try to work our way out of restaurants. Mark and Harry have a contract between themselves-a formal contract. There's a clause that says, if they disagree, Restaurant Advisory Services decides. The Batter has changed-but hopefully, you won't even see the difference. The menu's the same, a lot of the waitstaff is the same, but we did our job. Thanks to Mark. When we talked to Mark, he said, 'We need help. Harry and Vickie know that, I know that. So there are no sacred cows here. Not even me. Maybe I don't belong in the restaurant business.' Mark does belong in the restaurant business. He just needed help meeting Harry and Vickie's expectations-while meeting his own. He had to make The Batter into Mark Kulkowitz's restaurant."

We sit on the famed Batter front porch, shady but sun-surrounded, with platefuls of the famed Batter salads, grilled and smoked fish, fresh-
squeezed orange juice, coffee, fruit-filled pancakes, homemade jams and jellies, bowls of ripe berries and mangoes and peaches, six kinds of
homemade bread. Mark Kulkowitz is still being teased, and teasing himself, about the Flyers beating the Rangers in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

"I saw every game," Mark says, laughing with what is still real psychic pain. "That last game, I drive home-four hours from New York. Three a.m. I'm wiped out, throat sore from screaming. I get to town, a cop car flashes me. I pull over. The cop's a young kid, he says, 'You're driving in a very erratic manner.' I say, 'I'm a mess.' He starts writing a ticket, another cop drives up, takes a look at me, and laughs. 'He's not DUI. The Flyers kicked the shit out of the Rangers, is all. Don't you know Mark Kulkowitz?'"

Our placemats are maps of Cape May with famous landmarks in cartoon and arrows pointing to other places of interest: like New York City, home of Harry and Vickie-and the Knicks and Rangers and Giants and Mets. There's a Phil Rizzuto corner just inside the front door.

"I met Phil Rizzuto," says Mark. "He's a wonderful guy. My father thought this was terrible, a baseball player instead of art. But we still have
paintings on the wall. We just expanded our idea of what art is. We expanded our idea of color, too. We got rid of the white walls-some people
don't like the new pastel look. One woman called it New York colors. I tell her it's actually Key West colors. My restaurant manager loves Key
West, and if he wants to paint the walls to remind him of where he spends every winter-why not? He works hard, he deserves a chance to enjoy his own creativity. She says, 'I'll never come here again.' Well..." A contented smile. "You can't please everybody, so better make sure you please your staff."

Other differences are more subtle. The tabletop has lost its amateur standing.

"We came in and ordered a meal," says Ron. "We started asking questions. Are these knives and forks supposed to be all different? And sometimes bent? Is that water glass supposed to be on top of the knife blade? If not, why is it happening? I talked to waitstaff and kitchen staff. The frustration quotient was not low."

"It used to be, waitstaff almost never came back for a second season," says Mark. "Every spring we open up a completely new restaurant, training a completely new staff. It was crazy. Now most of them come back every year. We had a breakfast chef-breakfast is our biggest meal still-who said, I refuse to cook for more than 75 people.' Last Saturday we did 750 people, 300 of them for breakfast-750 people in a 170-seat restaurant. And it was a pleasure. It was leisurely! I'm walking around from table to table, getting kidded about the Rangers. We don't rush anybody-but customers? The more they come, the more they come, the more we eat them up. Like Pac-Man."

It finally occurs to me that the big difference at The Batter is... everybody's eating. Nobody's waiting for food.

"Slow service is gone forever," says Gorodesky. "And see how long it took you to realize it? All we did was..."

"We redesigned the kitchen," says Derek. "All I had to do was count the steps it took for waitstaff to walk in and order, walk out and deliver food to the table."

"We redesigned the computer system," says Ron. "We made it easier for waitstaff to order. And we set up a system of flash reports for Mark. He doesn't want to be here 24 hours a day, why should he be? He needs a system of reports that give him early warnings when anything's going wrong. He can come in, fix it, leave, go watch the Flyers kick the shit out of the Rangers."

That's what the staff tells me," Mark says. "Go home. What's the matter, you don't have a ballgame? No Knicks? No Giants? If you can't afford
tickets, we'll take up a collection. I tell them, Okay, have fun. And leave. This place is like a machine now. A casual, happy machine. Thanks to the restaurant manager-who Ron and Derek helped hire. The secret of business is, find people smarter than you and hire them."

The redesign is so thorough and so invisible that it's hard to describe. The new kitchen gleams in organized stainless steel splendor-dirty dishes
here, clean ones automatically ready for buspersons, a real turnout line, and at long last, a cold side for salads. A new doorway was cut through
Victorian walls so waitstaff can reach the main dining room without walking 50 steps (counted by me) around the wall where the old breakfast stoves stood. Fifty steps, times two for both ways, times three courses, and twice more for coffee and at least one refill is 500 steps per table times ten tables is 5,000 steps times two and a half feet per step is around to extra miles a night, by my count. No wonder waitstaff left. No wonder they come back now.

"No more weeded waiters," says Mark. "Waiters like standing in a corner of the kitchen refusing to look at anybody, like `I'm so deep in the weeds, there's no way out.' Waiting for the rescue helicopter or death to come. But it wasn't just spending all the money-and it was a lot of money-on redesigning the kitchen and cutting the world's most expensive door. It was little things, too. We used to have 40 syrup jugs for breakfast. Now we have 100."

"You don't want staff running around stealing syrup jugs, hiding syrup jugs, worrying about syrup jugs," says Derek. "Buy enough syrup jugs. Customers can read frustration in staff body language. And they don't like it. No matter how good food is."

"And there are bonuses," says Gorodesky. "For key personnel like the restaurant manager and head chefs. They're based on how The Batter does. Like profit-sharing."

"We rarely see meaningful bonuses paid in restaurants," says Derek (who eft Restaurant Advisory Services in October for a restaurant management job in Newport, Rhode Island). "Instead, we often see workers wondering What am I doing this for?"

"Well, it's my family upbringing," Mark says. "If people are working for you, you have to find a way to say thank you. I mean... what do I need? I have a wife, kids, a station wagon, season tickets and a pretty good cheap stereo. Some of my friends with BMWs and home entertainment centers, I think the perfect gift for them would be a remote-to find the remote. I don't need a remote to open my station wagon. I don't need a BMW, I don't need a $4,000 stereo to listen to Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin."

"Nothing wrong with Led Zeppelin though," says Ron. "What's your favorite song?"

Mark doesn't seem to hear the question. "The thing is, bonuses are good business," he says. "They give people a stake in the season. And with the flash reports we all get from the computer, we can set goals week by week. We come together, we have facts to talk about. We can see what sells, which gives us the freedom to try new things. Put them on the menu, take them off if they don't work. Chefs come up with ways to improve the look of the plate, add a vegetable, make the customer happier. It's money in their pockets. ...Sure, I had issues with these guys. I'll have more issues. But look at me, I'm happy. I used to be miserable. They didn't redesign the kitchen. They redesigned my life.

"Of course, to answer Ron's important question, my favorite song," says Mark, "the one I play over and over on that pretty good stereo, is still
`Dazed and Confused.'"