Barcelona Wine Bar CEO Adam Halberg focuses on memorable experiences
From music and lighting to food and service, everything needs to work to give customers a great time
Bret Thorn
Hospitality means different things to different customers, or even to the same customers on different occasions.
Maybe during a dinner with friends they want courteous servers who make eye contact and amusing banter — along with order accuracy and prompt service, of course — but at the drive-thru during breakfast they just want speed and accuracy. For lunch, they might just want the bowl of food that they ordered online to be waiting for them on a shelf when they arrive at the restaurant, ideally without having to talk to anybody.
Adam Halberg is an expert in the full-service experience. He’s CEO of the 22-unit Barcelona Wine Bar, based in Norwalk, Conn., and he’ll be discussing his approach during an Ask The Experts Panel titled “The New Rules for Hospitality” at Nation’s Restaurant News’ CREATE Event for Emerging Restaurateurs Oct. 9-11 at the Omni Hotel in Downtown Nashville.
Halberg said he agrees with the assertion that people want more than just food and service when eating out. They want an experience. But that experience needs to be genuine.
“There's a degree to which ‘experiential’ in some cases turns into a distraction,” he said. “It's a game, it's something that's theatrical, it's putting an old movie up on the wall … almost like a theme park of a restaurant.”
Halberg’s approach is to provide great hospitality in the classic sense, but dialed in to modern demands.
“We know that people don't go out to eat in restaurants because they're hungry,” he said. “There are so many places you can get food … You can have it delivered to your lap if you want right now.”
So going out has to be fun. That means great music, nice art, lighting that makes everyone look good and service by staff who are so charming that you would want to hang out with them after dinner, too.
Halberg said he wants his restaurants to feel cinematic — theatrical in a sense, but in an authentic way.
“We’re really after curating spaces where people know they're on stage,” he said. “And it doesn't mean that you can't sit in the dark corner somewhere and have a great conversation with somebody. But we are a place that people go to see other people,” because other people are interesting.
Every Barcelona location is different. Chefs are empowered to change the menu on a daily basis, and the spaces are designed to make use of the bones of the building and to suit the neighborhood they’re in.
Halberg doesn’t like to talk about how many Barcelona locations there are, partly because the only people who care are reporters, bankers, and parents who want to know what kind of company their kids are working for.
There’s no uniform logo for Barcelona, and in fact the Atlanta location, which opened in Inman Park in 2011, doesn’t even have a sign; people just know that it’s there.
Many of the restaurants do have horseshoe bars so people can see each other, and Halberg uses them to help set the stage.
“One of the last things that we do before we open a restaurant is … we sit people in the evening hours on opposite sides of the bar and raise and lower the lights,” he said. “How do we get it to a point where you look good?”
Looking good makes you feel good, and setting a scene where everyone looks good elevates everyone’s mood.
So does the attitude of the staff, who are encouraged to show people a good time: If they’re waffling between two glasses of wine, give them tastes of both. If they order one dessert but were clearly thinking about another one too, give it to them for free.
“We often tell the team that everybody who comes into Barcelona should get something that they didn't expect,” Halberg said. “That doesn't always mean something they would have paid for — a drink or a plate of food. It might be a story. It might just be an experience that you're sharing with them. We have people every once in a while who get on tables and pour wine out of a porron into people's throats. There's all sorts of crazy things that may happen in the restaurant, but something should happen that you didn't expect because that's the real reason why people went out to eat.”
Barcelona even has different playlists based on the time of day and mood of the restaurant, including a “turbo playlist” that managers are encouraged to play at the moment guests are deciding what they’re going to do next.
“You hit that moment at the end of dinner where everybody's finishing up their last bites … and having that conversation — what are we going to do next? That's when the lights go down; the music goes up.”
“It’s really an old-school way of approaching hospitality,” Halberg said. “And not just hospitality in the formal sense of picking up a napkin and folding it, but ensuring that you've got a great time going on, and that I fundamentally care about how you feel about that experience.”
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]
