PORTLAND Ore. Angling for patrons too time-poor to sit through the typical full-service restaurant meal, the new Blue Sage Café here is using an ordering kiosk networked with an ergonomically designed, high-efficiency kitchen to create a faster, customer-controlled upscale experience.
“We’re offering the convenience of quick service with the quality of a sit-down restaurant,” said Chris Hein, vice president of marketing for The Dussin Group. Blue Sage Café is a likely expansion vehicle for the Portland-based multi-concept operator, which also has four other casual concepts, the largest and best known being the 41-unit Old Spaghetti Factory chain.
Blue Sage targets “the family or the person on the go who has a certain amount of time, but doesn’t want to wait for the hostess to seat them or for the server to take their order or bring their check,” said Hein. Meal pacing is up to the customer. But Hein said he has seen families get in and out in roughly 45 minutes, significantly faster than they might expect in a conventional sit-down eatery.
Key to the dining experience of the 4,900 square-foot, 125-seat restaurant, which opened at a cost of $1.1 million in an in-line retail space in the Portland suburb of West Linn in March, is a circular kiosk in the dining room for ordering and payment. Customers peruse the menu and order their food and beverage from an attendant there.
The POS transmits the drink order to the bar and the food order to the kitchen. The customers are handed a guest-check presenter with two receipts to take into the dining room. They seat themselves and are greeted by a server who confirms the order and picks up the food and drinks just as in a full-service eatery. After the meal, there’s no wait for the check. The customer just takes the receipt, which has never left the table, to a cashier at the kiosk.
The POS system funnels food orders into a compact kitchen that supports fast and efficient to-order cooking while saving steps for cooks. “We have a very tight cooking line,” said Bob Martin, vice president of development. “You can work the front and the back just by turning around — there’s about a 34-inch aisle way.” The equipment package cost about $225,000.
The layout permits the line to be staffed with fewer cooks at off-peak hours, helping moderate labor costs. One cook, for example, can work both the griddle and sauté stations alone. Check averages are $11.50 at lunch and $16 at dinner.
With the menu’s emphasis on grilled and roasted proteins, a radiant broiler and three convection ovens are kitchen workhorses. The broiler, a conventional radiant type, turns out items like Grilled Wild Salmon ($14.95) and Rio Grande Top Sirloin ($16.95), with the convection ovens responsible for the likes of Oven Roasted Chicken Breast ($11.95), Southwest Barbecue Ribs ($16.95) and freshly baked bread. One of the ovens is mounted under a range top on the line; the other is a freestanding double unit used both for prep work and during service. Two banks of six-burner ranges prepare sauté dishes and pastas.
Ironically, the single piece of equipment inspired by the Old Spaghetti Factory — a basket-type immersion pasta cooker — will be absent from future kitchens. “We found that it’s overkill,” said Martin, noting that the sales volume of pasta dishes is sufficient to prepare them with pots of water.
Another change for the future will be the addition of a second split-pot fryer to the kitchen for items like Corn Crusted Calamari Cracklins, sweet potato fries and regular French fries. Split fry pots prevent flavor transfer between foods, Martin said.
With kiosk ordering and efficient layout, the kitchen produces food quickly. So quickly, in fact, “in some instances, we’ve had to slow down the cooks,” Hein said.
Distinguishing the interior are Southwestern-style décor touches like reclaimed antique barn-wood boards, custom-woven textiles and imported Italian cowhide leather. “This is really a comfortable place, much more upscale that fast-casual places around the country,” said Martin.
The Dussin Group would be happy to hit first-year sales of $1.4 or $1.5 million for the initial Blue Sage Café, Hein said. “We didn’t really promote our first opening a lot, in order to work out the bugs.” The soon-to-open second unit in the Portland suburb of Lake Oswego “will hit the ground running.”
With a 5,000 square-foot footprint that fits into suburban retail centers, Blue Sage promises to be much more expandable than Old Spaghetti Factory, which is typically at least twice as large. “We want to be that place that you drive past in the neighborhood,” said Hein. “If we’re local and close, people will think about eating here, because we can do it in their time frame.”
