About Competitiveness, Cooperation and Grandma’s Pancakes
“We are back at my Grandma’s kitchen in the 1960s, where there used to be a coal-burning clay oven, used for both cooking and heating. There was a ventilation shaft above the oven which my Grandma opened and closed using a long pole. She used to make whole wheat pancakes filled with boiled potatoes or grated cauliflower or grated white radish, and baked them in an iron pan over low heat till they were crispy and golden brown. Then she would put a big blob of homemade butter on top of each pancake while they were still hot. We would finish the meal with a ‘dessert’ pancake, served with a large heap of unrefined sugar that she had caramelised around the pancake,” Sanjiv Suri remembers as one of his first culinary experiences. He grew up as a vegetarian and never tasted meat until he was seventeen.
What are your current eating habits?
I have come full circle and become 90 % vegan once again. But since I’m in the restaurant profession, I eat everything. I’m vegan not for ethical, but energy reasons. It is more or less the way I judge all food. When I pursue a vegan diet, my energy level is at the highest level. It decreases with milk products, goes further down if I add sea fish, further down with bio-chicken and it is absolutely the lowest when I eat red meat. When I am home alone without my children, my only source of nutrition is a soup that I cook using three to four different kinds of lentils, quinoa and different vegetables. Everyone around me then gets a small pot. Luckily for them, it is always a different soup, as I use whatever leftovers I find in my fridge.
Do you believe that some ingredients are a priori good and others bad for people?
If you are happy, everything you eat will essentially do you good as long as you are not stuffing yourself with chemicals that are harmful to the body. But if you find yourself in a negative state of mind, no super or bio-foods can help. The most important thing is what is going on in your head and the feelings with which you eat the food on your plate. It is very personal. Our body is so complex and the hormones we produce at different states of mind are so different that a positive state of mind is vital to physical health.
Has it always been your dream to run restaurants?
For about 12 years, I worked in the hotel industry – always in a large corporate structure – and I never felt very comfortable in the role. There was always too much politics and the customer was seldom the centre of everyone’s attention. I wanted to get away from that. I did not come to the Czech Republic to open a restaurant – it was a coincidence. I had a few free months and my girlfriend at that time was posted to Prague to work at an embassy. I told myself it was a good time to try something new. We established the company exactly 25 years ago, in March 1991. We opened Café Museum under the stairs of the National Museum. Coffee was CZK 4.20 and the most expensive sandwich cost CZK 5.80. My first colleague, Dana, created an ingenious pricing policy. She had three prices for everything we were selling. Coffee was normally CZK 4.20, but if Dana saw a long queue in front of the self-service café, she promptly switched the price to CZK 4.50. If the place got really
crowded, she changed the price to CZK 4.80. The back space was about 4 metres square so our kitchen was in Holešovice and everything was brought to the café by car. With our first chef, we used to walk around the Holešovice market at 5:30 in the morning, looking for fresh ingredients. Three months into the game, we were launching Vinárna V Zátiší. Our strategy was to hire only recent graduates – people not corrupted by experience in other restaurants. For me, character has always been more important than knowledge. People can learn and gain experience throughout their careers. I always tried to select my co-workers based on their human qualities and I think it has paid off. The proof is that many of them are still with us today.
How do you work with your menu?
Our customers are the key – naturally. We change our menus based on their priorities. The system works as follows: If we serve 200 dinners in the course of an evening and there are 10 dishes on the menu, each meal should appear on a table in front of a customer 20 times (fair market share). If we sell more than 25 portions of a particular dish, we consider it to be a star and no one is allowed to change it. I remember that on the original Zátiší menu we had marinated salmon with honeydew melon, beef Wellington and chocolate mousse, and they were so popular that they stayed there for over 12 years. If we sell less than 10 portions, then the dish is ready to be replaced. Since the beginning, we have always offered a “Special of the Day.” If it is sold out by 8:30 p.m., we try offering it again in a couple of weeks. If we sell out the special three times in a row by 8:30 p.m., the dish then gets on a “parking lot” from where the regular menu is created. Every week, we change one item on the menu. If we were to change more than one, the quality of the meal preparation would temporarily drop until everyone learned how to best cook and present it. This way, they only need to focus on one dish. Food is becoming more and more about emotions and the overall experience as well as the quality of the raw materials used. We try to work closely with local ecological farmers and are very particular about the quality of the produce we buy. The whole experience in a restaurant should be about making the guest feel good about himself or herself.
People know you are a spiritual person, that your company donates over 30 % of its profit to charity and, in general, you do not act like a typical businessman. How did this happen?
In 2007, I spent a few hours with the Dalai Lama. One of the things he told me, which still resonates with me, was: “Sanjiv, the people in my life do not get in the way of my spiritual practice, they are my spiritual practice.” So, I believe that I can be virtually anything – a strong person, a tough businessman, a compassionate father – but all in a detached meditative state of mind in which I am not emotionally attached to the things around me. This allows me to stay calm under most circumstances. A business is only a business. The nature of it is to make money or sometimes lose money just as the nature of a dog is to bark or that of a cow is to eat grass. I am passionate about the things I do and care about, but I also try to stay emotionally detached from the result. I would be more content after a race where I gave my best and came last compared to a race where I did not give my best and won. Most of us, quite unfortunately, lead our lives in a very competitive manner, rather than a collaborative one. That is one of the reasons I enjoy golf – as I am only competing with myself and trying to improve myself.
By Sanjiv Suri