The October 25 Sunday Oregonian carried a story about the company that two years ago bought the Stanford's restaurant chain and the others under common ownership, including the Portland Steak and Chop House, Manzana, and Newport Bay restaurants. The gist of the story was that the buyer (a private-equity firm and not a restaurant company) has at last figured out that it drove away the loyal customers by jacking up the prices and changing the menu. The author says that Stanford's removed from its menu the cheese bread, the house salad, and the prime rib sandwich, favorites of its regular customers.
I hadn't noticed those changes, but I had noticed one other that irritated me: they changed the mints. The hallmark of the restaurants in the Stanford's group was their after-dinner mints: not the little disc-shaped peppermints that have the peppermint color but not much flavor, and not the even smaller things that are so small as to be barely noticeable, but stout barrel-shaped red and green mints that no other Portland restaurant served. Stanford's and the Chop House kept them on display in gargantuan brandy snifters, and I never left the restaurant without pocketing three or four for later. They were the best restaurant mints in town; no one else came close. And they were famous: if I put one or two on my desk, my co-workers would nod knowingly and say, "Stanford's for lunch again?"
With the buyout went the barrel mints, replaced by the smaller and presumably cheaper little discs. It was a little thing, but enough to tell me that the new management cared about cost and not about value. I went from 15 visits a year (always with guests) to one.
The lesson for restaurateurs, and in some form for anyone in business, is that if you become known for doing something (in this case mints) better than all of your competition, don't change it just to save a few cents.
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