You came for bell peppers? You might end up with mushrooms, and maybe you try something you don’t expect and learn something new.”īeuve says people are more forgiving than they used to be, unlikely to throw a fit over missing the bell peppers - so it’s a good time to revamp the business model to reduce the risk of failure. “We don’t overbuy and then have to trash anything, and our customers understand that. “We show people it’s acceptable to run out of items,” said Beuve. The old adage, that the customer’s always right, has given way to a new notion - that we’re all in this together, collaborating on a sustainable restaurant model. Vegetable dishes top out at $15, and that whole branzino is reasonably priced at $38, but when it’s gone, it’s gone. Reasonable prices require smart ordering, and the partners would rather run out than have expensive ingredients go to waste. Lobster grilled with olive oil, and other small plates at Le Great Outdoor.īut be prepared to be flexible. The partners plan to offer the existing Bergamot Café menu during the day, to start, but as soon as they find their feet they’ll switch to their own menu, morning till night. The city of Santa Monica owns Bergamot Station, which means below-market rent in return for meeting the city’s requirements, which include being open during daytime hours to serve gallery employees and visitors. When they finally launched an Instagram account in late May, it was primarily to let friends back home see what they were doing. They prefer their outlier location, nowhere near a restaurant row, because they want diners who intend to eat at Le Great Outdoor - not people who wander down a street full of restaurants until they see one they think they’ll like. Beuve and Mori avoided social media because they wanted a loyal base more than they wanted to be a destination on the must-dine circuit. It’s not the standard way to build a restaurant these days, but that was the point. “Since we opened, the only way we market is word-of-mouth.” You need to know someone who’s been here before to know about it. “The restaurant’s like a tree that grows: One person brings another person, and there’s always a line that connects to one of us. “Since we opened, the only way we market is word-of-mouth,” said Mori, a former bar manager at the Rose, who left college in São Paulo for a six-month English language program in the U.S. The only common denominator to the crowd is that the owners recognize most of their return guests. “Different cultures, a mix of ages, that’s the world we want to live in,” said Beuve, who most recently was one of the chefs at Gjusta, in Venice, and began working in restaurants in his native France when he was 16. On a recent Saturday night, the crowd included a gray-haired foursome (two of them obvious regulars who walked their friends through the menu one suggestion at a time), six young women with a big vocal dog, and everything in between. Pedro Mori (left) and Rudy Beuve (right) of Le Great Outdoor restaurant in Santa Monica. Despite a roller-coaster first few months - Le Great Outdoor opened in January, in time for lots of rain - the restaurant has already built a following. The menu relies on the strategy that won the Chicago Cubs the World Series in 2016: “Do simple better,” with whatever’s fresh rather than whatever’s fancy. Tuesday through Sunday, taking over where the original daytime tenant, Bergamot Café, left off.Ĭustomers order at the front table, order drinks at another station, and wait for their food to arrive, family-style, on quarter-sheet pans, with a pair of tongs to serve it. On June 15, co-owners Rudy Beuve and Pedro Mori will expand service to 10 a.m. Add some little tartines to start, beer and wine, and a simple dessert or two, and you have what until now has been a well-kept secret among neighborhood regulars: The 98-seat Le Great Outdoor springs to life at night on a large patio at Bergamot Station, an arts compound off the Santa Monica Freeway that is otherwise pretty deserted by dinnertime. It makes all the sense in the world, right? Two 30-something guys with no investors, no location, no kitchen equipment, and no social media presence decide to open a restaurant - a tough business even in the best of times, which this is not.īut here they are, serving a grill-centered menu that usually includes wild mushrooms with garlic and parsley, salmon with mustard and dill, and a whole branzino with za’atar and chimichurri.
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