A Recipe for Profits : Good Food Isn’t Always Enough for Restaurants These Days--Business Courses Can Be the Key Ingredient for Success

Fernando Barrera has been working in restaurants since he was a teen-ager, and his father, Froylan, has been cooking restaurant meals for more than 30 years.

Despite their wealth of experience, the Barrera family is scrambling to keep La Zorrita, their family-owned Mexican-style restaurant in Lake Forest, profitable in the face of increased competition.

“Good food isn’t enough anymore,” said Barrera, 25, who recently began taking classes at UC Irvine Extension to learn more about the business of running a restaurant. “You’ve got to know how to package it, to market it.”

Barrera isn’t alone. Increasingly, the recipe for success in the highly competitive restaurant industry includes business books as well as cookbooks and paying attention to financial ledger entries as well as dinner entrees.

“The days of the knife-throwing, temperamental European chef are gone,” said Taroon Kapoor, a hospitality industry professor at Cal Poly Pomona. “Today’s successful young chefs are not that different from business managers. They’re very calculating, smart and well-educated.”

Chefs might wear the traditional hats, but many now answer to the title of kitchen manager. “They do more than culinary creation,” Kapoor said. “They manage resources.”

Interest in cooking schools, restaurant management courses and hospitality degree programs is soaring, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education.

The number of baccalaureate-level restaurant and hospitality programs has mushroomed to about 160, up from 30 in 1965, and the number of post-graduate hospitality degree programs has swelled during that period to about 30 from just under a dozen. Growth has been as explosive at the community college level.

In Orange County, for example, UC Irvine Extension recently added a series of courses designed for the restaurant industry. The courses, which cover management and safety issues and how to track profit and loss, cater to entry-level personnel, but they also apply to would-be restaurant owners and operators.

“It seems like every Californian’s dream is to open up a restaurant,” said Phyllis Ann Marshall, a co-owner of Mr. Stox restaurant in Anaheim and an instructor at UC Irvine Extension’s new restaurant management program.

Marshall believes the UC Irvine Extension program will attract older workers who are using severance checks to finance a restaurant career after being pushed out of longtime corporate jobs.

“All the people in [corporate] outplacement programs seem to be signing up for restaurant franchises, and all the training they get is [a few weeks] in franchise school,” Marshall said. “It’s frightening, because too many people are paying rent that’s too high or buying equipment they don’t need.

Continuing education classes often serve as a reality check for newcomers whose only credentials are the fact that friends and family tell them they’re good cooks, said Bill Barber, a certified chef who teaches culinary arts at Orange Coast College.

Barber’s students cook up fare that’s served in the college’s Costa Mesa campus cafeteria, but business aspects of operating a restaurant aren’t ignored. “Taste, presentation and nutrition play an important part,” Barber said, “but we want people to be aware of the bottom line.”

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Restaurant industry observers say that education is gaining in importance as major chains, such as Irvine-based Taco Bell Corp., are redefining how the industry works. The Mexican-style fast-food restaurant company has hired more than 100 MBA graduates in recent years to run its restaurants--and pays them upward of $50,000 a year, including bonuses.

“Look back a few years--not that far back into Taco Bell’s history--and you’ll see that food preparation occupied a much bigger percentage of a manager’s time,” said Taco Bell Vice President David Pace. “It was how you sliced olives, shredded lettuce--all that work you did manually in the restaurant kitchen.”

Taco Bell has used new technology to shrink the amount of time its managers spend on preparing food. Now, Pace said, “the emphasis is more on making sure that guests have positive experiences” while eating in their restaurants.

As national chains like Taco Bell standardize service, food quality and prices, independent restaurants are realizing, Kapoor said, that success “takes more than just the ability to cook or be a good host.”

That’s why Barrera, whose family owns La Zorrita restaurant, recently signed up for classes at UC Irvine Extension. He says the industry is awash in change: “For 2,000 years, restaurants didn’t change very much. Now it’s all computers, consultants. And, as the bigger chains move in, it’s getting even more sophisticated.”

UC Irvine Extension instructors helped Barrera study La Zorrita’s spreadsheets and determine which entrees generated the fattest profits. Barrera now showcases those items in his menu to ensure that they’ll catch the eye of hungry diners. He also revamped the dessert menu, replacing less-than-savory photographs with new art that makes the dishes more appetizing.

The changes suggested by the instructors are “all very subtle, and it’s not going to make us a lot more money,” Herrera said. “But you need to be smart in how you package and market things, because that’s what the chains are doing.”

Kristin Tran, 28, credits instructors with helping her to fine-tune management of Binh Ban,the Vietnamese restaurant that her family opened a year ago in Westminster. “It’s easy to think up something, but the question is: Can you sell it to people?” Tran said.

Like Barrera, Tran has no shortage of culinary ideas. But she welcomed the advice offered by established restaurateurs who are affiliated with the UC Irvine Extension program. “We did field trips to local restaurants like Mr. Stox and Planet Hollywood,” Tran said. “And we had guest speakers almost every other week who were great resource people.”

Marshall bluntly tells her students to pay attention to business while they’re dreaming up savory dishes.

“Chefs never felt they needed to understand profitability,” Marshall said. “They felt they were artists, creators of delicious, beautiful food, and that they didn’t have to be a profit center.”

But the days when chefs and owners could ignore the bottom line are gone, Kapoor said.

A popular chain like Irvine-based Claim Jumper might generate a 15% operating profit from each dollar that a diner spends, Kapoor said, while marginal players squeak by on a 3% to 5% margin.

“In the old days, if you built it, they would come,” Marshall said. “But it’s different today. You have to balance the menu and profitability. If you don’t keep the ship up in the water and moving forward, it’s the Titanic.”

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More Restaurants, Flat Sales

The number of restaurants in Orange County increased nearly 8% from 1990 to 1994, while sales were up only 4%. Number of restaurants, and total sales in millions:

Restaurants:

1990: 5,541

1990: $2,296 Sales:

1994: 5,969

1994: $2,387

Source: State Board of Equalization; Researched by JANICE L. JONES/Los Angeles Times