Mike Fernandez, Dean of Lipscomb’s college of Entertainment and the arts
It is a bit of an open secret: For all of Nashville’s “It City” culinary-scene chops, local restaurant service is not all that. Yes, restaurant food here is among the country’s best, from the variety of offerings to the quality. But service? Not so much. Servers are usually polite — hey, that’s the Southern way — but they may not know what it actually means to offer quality service. Common complaints: One diner is served before the food for the rest of the party has been prepared; one person’s dishes are cleared before everyone else is done eating; tables are forgotten; valets lose car keys.
This might sound like a litany of first-world problems. But when people — locals and tourists alike — go out to eat, good food and service are what they are paying for, what they expect and what they deserve. Part of having an “It City” food scene means more than merely serving hot food hot and cold food cold. While the issue is most acute in restaurants, it can be seen in other parts of Nashville’s entertainment complex, including the growing number of hotels. Service is part of what’s driving the local economy, so shouldn’t we be better at it?
Of course, there are exceptions — some businesses deliver professional service. But the Scene wanted to explore what the Nashville-specific factors are when it comes to the difficulty in hiring, training and retaining hospitality staff, and to look at two proposed university programs, plus some grassroots efforts, to make it better.
Some of the factors that restaurateurs blame for hiring challenges are true in other cities, such as low unemployment and comparative minimum-wage rates. But other drawbacks come together for a perfect Music City storm:
Lack of affordable housing
Yes, that pesky reality pops up here, too. As housing prices in the Metro Nashville area increase, the workforce ultimately must live farther and farther away from the neighborhoods where the jobs are. “It takes them a long time to get to work,” says Erin Kette, director of operations for Marsh House and QED Hospitality.
Public transportation options are limited, particularly at night
This is the corollary to the affordable housing concerns, Kette says. If it is difficult for servers to get home after a night shift or get in from outlying communities, such as Murfreesboro, before service starts, they’re going to look for jobs that don’t pose those challenges, particularly in an environment of low unemployment, where they have options.
The Nashville restaurant and hotel explosion has been heavily weighted on the high end
Nashville has great dives. At Mary’s Old Fashioned Pit BBQ on Jefferson Street, or at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, you expect your food to be handed to you through a window, and you couldn’t be happier. But in a city without tons of mid-tier restaurants, prospective servers may not have experience in a higher-end environment, so they don’t know what behavior to emulate. That’s according to Karen Little, general manager at Josephine in 12South.
“When we hire someone where the nicest place they’ve eaten is Red Lobster, then we need to train them on what makes the experience in addition to the food,” she says. “The flow of service. We need to teach them that they don’t need to upsell on everything like they would at Applebee’s.” Josephine aims to offer high-end service that is not formal or snooty — and instead is friendly. Because of the latter requirement, Little says training is necessary when they hire folks who have come from Michelin-starred restaurants, as well.
There’s not a local culture of career servers
“In bigger metro areas like Chicago and New York, some of those servers can make $100,000 a year,” says Kette, who moved to Nashville in 2016. “Here, a lot of my staff are in health care or are musicians, and that [level of wages for servers] is just not in Nashville yet. People don’t view serving as a long-term career yet.” Indeed, the idea that restaurant service is a transitional job you do until your band takes off is a stumbling block for Nashvillians to start treating service like a professional career.
For all the hospitality jobs, there hasn’t been a focus on locally offered hospitality education
Community colleges Nashville State and Volunteer State offer two-year degrees with some emphasis on hospitality management. The Art Institute of Tennessee, one of the few local options for a culinary degree, will close by the end of the year. But no local universities have had a focus on hospitality management.
Until now. Two local schools are looking to fill that need. The first, Lipscomb University, is launching a multidisciplinary hospitality studies program in its College of Entertainment and the Arts, with input from the College of Business. The program will include undergraduate and graduate degrees as well as professional certificates with four areas of emphasis — lodging, food and beverage, tourism and entertainment — working with local community colleges. Much of the programming will be at Lipscomb’s downtown Spark location. Some of the programming will start in fall 2019, with the rest arriving within the next 24 months, says Mike Fernandez, dean of Lipscomb’s College of Entertainment and the Arts.
While it’s a big undertaking, Fernandez points out that Lipscomb has launched other new programs in recent years, including a pharmacy program. “This is the No. 2 industry in town,” he says. “Other cities struggle with this too, but Nashville is an entrepreneurial city. People are opening businesses all the time. We need to help them keep the machine going in this tourism mecca. We wrestle with hospitality, so much connotation both good and bad. We think we can excite them about hospitality.”
Beth Morrow, a member of Lipscomb’s College of Leadership and Public Service, is working with the university team to launch this program. A Nashville native whose father spent much of his career at the Opryland theme park, Morrow grew up in local hospitality, and sees it as what makes Music City unique.
“You can touch down in Chicago and Charlotte for a convention and find a flavor of each city,” says Morrow. “But when you touch down in Nashville, you have a multitude of choices of real, authentic experiences. When we sell Nashville, we sell a distinct showmanship. There’s a lot of work that goes into that. We think we have the ability to show students the travel tourism, and hospitality market of the future.”
JosephinePhoto: Michael W. Bunch
Fisk University is also looking at starting a hospitality management program, says Vann Newkirk, the school’s new provost and vice president of academic affairs. The school has added a number of majors in recent years, as well as increasing its student body size. The hospitality discipline is a good fit for the school, the students and the university, he says.
“This is one of the ways that we can help the city grow and help prepare our high-caliber students,” says Newkirk. “We can help transition people out of the mindset that hospitality means being a desk clerk. We can show them the careers in management, in accounting, in finance, all in hospitality.”
Fisk is considering a number of new majors and working with the research firm Burning Glass Technologies to make the right decisions.
All of the solutions aren’t on the formal education side. At Josephine, chef Andy Little started what he calls the “Cook YOUR Book” series. For the staff family meal before service, staffers take turns answering the question: If you could write your own cookbook, what recipes would you include? — then making a multi-course family meal with the answers.
“We do not expect that [the staff] will be at Josephine forever, so we think about how do they craft skills,” says Little. “How can we use that to help them be better chefs, sous chefs and cooks?”
Training, of course, is crucial. At Marsh House, located in the Thompson Hotel, there’s a tradition of asking 10 ridiculous questions to get to know a new staffer on their first day, says Kette. Those questions include what salad dressing someone would want with them if they were stranded on a desert island and what ingredient the person would be if they were a food. The questions help lighten the mood in a kitchen on the first day, but moreover, they contribute to an atmosphere of “internal hospitality,” a value QED adopted from Danny Meyer, the Union Square executive who literally wrote the book on restaurant service (Setting the Table).
The staff also pools tips at Marsh House — meaning everyone working divides all the tips evenly. Tip pooling is a game changer, Kette says. Not only does it contribute to that internal hospitality; it also eliminates many of the stresses that can come from waiting tables. Staffers no longer worry that on a slow night they’ll be sent home early and miss out on wages.
Over at Josephine, management makes an effort to treat staff like professionals — even if they don’t yet think of themselves that way … yet.
“Even if you are a service worker who is trying to be a musician, we want you to act like a professional,” adds Josephine’s Little. “We go out of our way to make our staff feel respected, and we think it has made a difference in our culture.”
