How the best restaurant in Las Vegas overcame its lousy location
A story of teamwork and a service version of the "Statue of Liberty" play
One of the greatest privileges of my corporate career was having the opportunity to travel. Even better were the times when Kirsten could accompany me to conferences and corporate events.
While they owned our brands, the annual conference for Carlson Hotels often fell in February and brought together a few thousand hotel managers, owners, corporate colleagues, suppliers, and vendors.
Kirsten’s birthday is in February and sometimes the conference and her birthday overlapped.
Sneaking out to an off-site restaurant so we could celebrate her without being interrupted by conference attendees that wanted to talk shop was a goal when that happened. (I won’t tell you about the time we did unintentionally bump into colleagues only to have them see my embarrassment when my credit card was declined at Kirsten had to pay for her birthday dinner - it was the card issuer’s fault…)
In 2008, we were headed to Las Vegas for the annual conference and Kirsten’s birthday landed right in the middle of it. I googled around to find a match for “good restaurant” and “off the beaten track” in the hopes of finding a place we could celebrate her in style without meeting any of the other few thousand conference attendees.
Rosemary’s Restaurant seemed to fit the bill. It was consistently on top 10 lists and reviews said things like “hard to find” or “don’t let the location fool you”. I booked it.
The taxi driver that picked us up at the Bellagio said he’d heard of it, but didn’t exactly know where it was. He radioed back and forth with his dispatcher and after a good while, we ended up in the dimly-lit parking lot of a strip mall.
It had seen better days. Some of the stores were boarded up and the rest were closed for the day, but there was a little light coming from what we assumed was the restaurant.
Some people say the first impression is everything. If our first impression, the parking lot, wasn’t exceptional, our second impression, when we opened the door, wasn’t any better. The door led to a cramped bar full of Nevada cowboys. It was dark and every seat was occupied by a scruffy-looking fellow. A busy young bartender was pouring drinks. Before we could turn and run, a hostess approached and said, “You must have reservations for the restaurant. Follow me.”
The third time’s the charm they say, and thankfully our third impression was much better than the first two.
We were seated in a very romantic, quiet corner of a restaurant that seemed to be in a different world. Our server’s first words were “Happy birthday!” and we were off to a much better start than we had feared when the cab pulled into the parking lot.
After explaining the menu, the waiter said he would fetch the sommelier. He didn’t want to help us choose wine on a special occasion.
The sommelier looked like he was hardly of legal drinking age, but he seemed to know his stuff. We aren’t wine experts, and we appreciate it when a server or sommelier can help us out. Good ones help, the not-so-good ones try to maximize margins and profits without the customer catching on. (Note to all: the customer always catches on.)
Our sommelier was a good one. He asked us what we liked. He asked us where we were from. He didn’t ask why we were there, because he already knew it was Kirsten’s birthday. He apologized for not having wine from British Columbia, where I’d grown up, on the menu. He suggested a wine from Washington state. “That’s as close to local as we can get for you,” he said. It was exquisite, reasonably priced for our budget, and paired perfectly with the lamb we had for dinner.
We could see the entire restaurant from our corner table, and we noticed how the hosts, servers, and sommelier, worked together to create an incredibly smooth, seamless service at every table. Nothing was rushed, yet no one seemed to have to wait for anything.
One of the most impressive, almost-undetectable things we saw was something we decided to call Rosemary’s “Statue of Liberty Play”.
A group of eight or ten people were enjoying their evening at a table not too far from ours. When the server was collecting their plates after the main course, one of the guests at the table had a question. The server leaned down to chat with the elderly guest, and as he did so, the hand in which he was holding the three or four plates he had already collected rotated so it was behind him. Within seconds, one of his colleagues had taken those plates and proceeded to remove the remaining plates from the table. Both the conversation the server had with the guest and the table clearing continued uninterrupted.
Service can be as easy as showing care, empathy, and attention to detail, but when teams perform as they did in Rosemary’s Restaurant, great service takes on a whole new dimension
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