Restaurant Brand is Shifting: Red Coach Inn
We decided on Friday to drive across the border to have dinner in Niagara Falls–the American Side. It is an hour drive and we wanted to pick up some mail at our post office box. We have been traveling and using Trip Advisor to pick restaurants and have found it to work fairly well. We wanted to try it out near home as well. We try to eat in a restaurant that is in the top 20 restaurants on Tripadvisor and although we are sometimes disappointed, our hit rate is much higher using this strategy than just looking around and picking a restaurant. I have a corn allergy which is making it harder to eat out, so I have to try to find restaurants that can help me get a meal that will work for me.
On Friday we decided to try the Red Coach Inn. It had some good reviews and I looked at their menu online. It looked good and very reasonable in terms of price.
Amazing fireplace in the dining room.
We got there and it is lovely. The location is great. The waitress did an amazing job of taking care of us and of managing my corn allergy. She went to the kitchen to ask questions, looked at labels and generally was kind and helpful. We ordered a shrimp cocktail, a Caesar salad, and a house salad that comes with almonds, blue cheese, and strawberries. Our kids ordered a lobster trio and we each ordered the surf and turf.
While the service was outstanding, our meal just wasn’t up to the standards we expect when we spend $180 for dinner with tip. We want something better than average. My frustration was with the amount of food the kitchen was serving that they don’t make on-site. They don’t make their salad dressings, they don’t make their wings, and they use cornstarch to “hold” their Bearnaise sauce.
We had an opportunity to speak to the manager. He came to our table to apologize for a very small error with my meal (this error was really no big deal—happens because of my food allergy). When we talked with him, he shared some of what was going on in the restaurant. Apparently after many years, they had hired a new chef and were trying to make some changes. He shared all of this when I mentioned my challenges in trying to find something to eat that wasn’t made off-site.
This is a restaurant in need of a slight re-tweaking of their brand. They are an old-school standard and it is time to update their kitchen to be current. This is more difficult than it seems. They are busy, they are probably profitable, a change would probably necessitate raising their prices. I am not sure if Niagara Falls will support a price increase. But the world is changing when it comes to high end restaurants. People have a choice, they read reviews, they have access to information that simply wasn’t available 5 years ago. But it is so hard to change when things are mostly going okay.
What I would like to see to improve the brand:
1. Keep doing exactly what they are doing with service. This is working. This is a huge asset.
2. Convert to an “eat local” seasonal menu. This would mean no strawberries in December but maybe beets. I would recommend locally sourced beef. Create alliances with Niagara Farms to have the best meat products the Niagara Falls region can offer. Name the farmers on the menu. People are wanting this sort of relationship with food.
3. Make the salad dressings. Bottle them. Create 4 and figure out how to bottle them to go. As an inn in Niagara Falls, there is a great opportunity to have people buy products to take home with them. You could also have pancake mix, maple syrup, and granola–all made in small batches.
4. In fact, make everything on-site that is served. People are paying good money to eat in a restaurant. There is an assumption that you are cooking for them.
5. Downscale the menu. Here I would like to see more of a bistro menu. They could offer exceptional local beef, pork, chicken and lamb that would allow prices to stay the same, raise food quality and keep profit the same or higher. When they are doing lobster and surf and turf they are importing with high food costs and their quality suffers. A local menu would showcase Niagara to a clientele that are visiting as tourists. If they are serving lobster and seafood, how can they create dishes that showcase the Niagara region? Maybe Niagara scampi made with shrimp and fiddleheads?
6. Hire a chef with a brand. That is, someone with a resume and the potential for a following, and then promote that chef (I mean market him—not give him a raise). If the chef they hired doesn’t have a brand, they need to create that brand by marketing that chef. Make the kitchen the center of the restaurant with the wait staff serving gorgeous food to happy patrons. Advertise that chef to your guests in the inn and tell that chef’s story. People want that kind of connection when they go to a restaurant. This trend will grow as information continues to be more readily available.
This is a restaurant with incredible potential. I hope they will make some changes to modernize. Jason, the manager, told me they have hired a new chef after a long time. They are hoping to make changes. I hope they are brave enough to make the changes to make this restaurant something truly special.
