Arth Kitchen + Bar

Restaurant Name: Arth Kitchen + Bar

Owner: Mihir

Location: Culver City, CA

Number of Seats: 120

Number of Staff per shift: 18 Total

4 chefs, 1 dishwasher, 1 kitchen manager (Mom), 4 servers, 2 bussers, 1 bartender, 1 barback, 1 host, 2 food runners, 1 FOH Manager

Busiest Shifts: Friday Night & Saturday Night

Mihir always had a dream to open his own restaurant, but initially chose a different career path: aerospace engineering. In July 2021, he decided to follow his true passion and opened Arth Kitchen + Bar, a modern take on Indian cuisine that focuses on fresh spices and traditional recipes. For almost three years, Mihir worked at his aerospace engineering job during the day, and grew Arth Kitchen + Bar at night – only recently diving full time into the restaurant. It helps that Mihir’s mom is the Kitchen Manager, and she has a business mind – but there are still challenges for Mihir as he learns the ins and outs of the restaurant industry. With 120 seats and a full bar, Mihir is running a huge operation without any experience. Mihir has recently quit his “safety net” job of engineering and without any additional money coming into the restaurant, he has to make it work, not only for himself but for his mother and the rest of the staff who rely on him. However, issues such as poorly functioning bar, backed-up kitchen, angry chefs and bad hosts threaten his restaurant.   

Issues

The chefs can be egotistical, and get offended and irritated easily if servers criticize them or patrons criticize the food. It becomes even worse if they need to do something differently, like remake a dish they’ve already made in a different way! Sometimes there are yelling matches in the kitchen, other times it’s a dead silent stare – which can be deadly!

When servers make mistakes on a busy night, it doesn’t take long for the chefs to get annoyed and start refusing to accommodate their order changes. Oftentimes, Kitchen Manager and Mihir’s Mom, Jaya, steps in and remind the chefs that they must do whatever it takes to please the customer…regardless of how badly the server messed up the order to begin with!

During busy nights, coursing can become a big problem. With 15 tickets at once, the kitchen needs to work strategically to make sure apps, entrees, and desserts are being fired in the proper order.

Servers must be vigilant with their tables, and improve communication to BOH. There are many times that servers will bring food to the wrong table on a busy night, and require the chefs to remake the dish! They should also communicate better to their tables, making sure they track every customization for dishes so that the BOH is aware of how they need to make it.

With only one bartender to serve the bar and the entire restaurant, drinks can get majorly backed up on busy nights. This is a huge problem and Mihir has even had a few one star reviews online for it! Just recently they had to comp over $300 dollars in drinks because the lack of service at the bar!

Staff not showing up. Sometimes specific staff members will not show up to their assigned shift, causing the rest of the team to compensate for the lack of team-power.

Waiters need to improve tableside communication and learn how to better upsell items in order to turn a profit.

General Manager Kanen seems to be prioritizing money-making shifts to the servers that he likes and giving less desirable shifts to people who aren’t his friends. It’s creating tension amongst the staff.

When the servers get busy they deprioritize the dining room experience for guests. For example, they’ll push the wrong tables together for bigger parties, meaning that there is hardly space to walk between tables. Or, they’ll use napkins or wooden blocks to mask wobbly tables instead of the corkscrew that’s meant to fix them. These are huge pet peeves for Mihir and he has to remind staff about them all the time!

Because Mihir is naturally introverted, he has to come out of his comfort zone as a manger in many ways to be able to give feedback when it’s needed. Because of this, he also has trouble delegating – and will oftentimes overwhelm himself with work instead of assigning it to the staff that should be getting it done. He’s also a nice guy and can also be taken advantage of.