Hot Plates: Learning for ourselves

After two years creating tech products for hospitality brands it was time to address the elephant in the room. Besides working as waiters when we were younger, no one on the team had any real hospitality experience. As 2016 rolled around, we decided to change that.

When it comes to adopting new technology within hospitality there can be a bit of reluctance. This is partly driven by tradition but also by an 'us' and 'them' attitude – if you aren't from the industry then you don't know the day-to-day reality and you don't speak the language. When you are part of 'them', it can be hard to portray the benefits of things such as iPad ordering at tables. Fed up of being 'them', we wanted to become part of the 'us'.

So we did what any sensible people running a company full-time would do: we set up our own waiter-less, cash-less restaurant. Everyday in tech people talk about being 'lean' and 'agile', surely we could just transfer that mentality to a restaurant?

What a lean restaurant really looks like

Before starting out on this lean experiment, we decided we wanted to provide an exceptional, technology-driven restaurant experience. That meant no waiters taking orders and an ordering system that didn't require cash. Instead, people order and pay for food through a bespoke iPad ordering system. We'd not long developed an on-table iPad ordering system for Rex & Mariano, so we adapted the system to meet our specific needs.

Digital ordering and payment taken care of, we needed to find a good physical location. We found the perfect place on Great Eastern Street in Shoreditch – a bustling pie shop by day, closed and silent by night. It had all the space we needed and in return for a cut of the bar profits the owners gave it to us at a knock down rate.

Working with our industry contacts, we devised the menu with a professional chef and ex- MasterChef contestant, set out proper operations with an experienced industry manager, and partnered with the Switch Back charity, who provided us with someone to help with the day- to-day running of the restaurant. The only thing left to do was open up shop!

We kept it simple: a prime cut of beef straight from Smithfields, served in five different marinades. Guests had a choice of three sides and three desserts, with snacks to start on the house. To make things a little more interesting we put gas burners on each table, along with cast iron griddles. This meant guests cooked the food themselves, just like at a Korean BBQ.

The restaurant opened for the first two weeks of February and averaged 65 covers a night. Over the course of eight nights we turned over £13,000, which, after all expenses and set-up costs, left us with £2,500 profit. We donated the money to Raise Your Hands, an organisation that supports small, community-based charities that don't have access to larger funding.

Have we gone from 'them' to 'us'?

Having run our own restaurant for a short time, we now know there's a lot more that goes in to the process than everyone thinks. While the lean, technology-driven experience meant we needed fewer people, food still needed to be served to the tables and we staffed the place ourselves each night, doing just that. We learned how to manage a floor of tables, run the pass, and work with the ever changing guest list and having to seat awkward guest numbers.

More than any of that though, we learned how the operations in a restaurant flow. We learned that there are parts of the process that are done in a tried and tested way, not out of laziness or unwillingness to change, but simply because that's the best way to do it. Normally, this would be very low tech methods – such as the timeless pen and paper for taking orders. But our own restaurant experience showed us opportunities for improving established hospitality operations.

Our iPad ordering system was central to this. We received astoundingly positive feedback: 87% of people rated the system 5 out of 5 stars and Jonathan Ross and his wife loved it so much he tweeted all about it.

Aside from this high-profile feedback on our high-tech hospitality operations, running a restaurant every night allowed us to make tweaks to the iPad ordering system. Using what we'd learned from service the night before, we improved the system we'd already built and enriched the guest experience night-on-night.

Being in the thick of it gave us a unique perspective on why we were developing a certain feature of the iPad ordering system, how it was used in practice, and how we could further improve it to provide an exceptional restaurant experience. We understood it from the 'us' perspective and how technology can be used to enhance real-world hospitality environments.

And while it isn't necessary to experience everything you build or work on first hand, it certainly helps to stand on the other side of the fence once in a while and understand how your technology is used in practice.

This deeper understanding has helped us to keep the focus on building quality products and solutions that offer real utility and excellent customer experiences in hospitality. And now we've run our own restaurant, we see that a cash-less and waiter-less ordering system is just one of many aspects of hospitality that can benefit from technology.

For us, this experience was all about learning about our own products, the sector that we work in, and the future of technology in hospitality. If you can have fun and help some good causes while you learn, that's a bonus.