In 2018, Scott Dolch was recruited by the Nutmeg State’s restaurant trade association as its new executive director. This was in light that he brought absolutely no direct experience in the foodservice industry to the table. In a state that knows all about gambling, the bet that the Connecticut Restaurant Association board made on an untested executive has yielded a big payout.
Under Scott Dolch’s leadership, the CRA has forged relationships over the past two years with Connecticut’s Governor Ned Lamont and state legislators. That has enabled Dolch and the Connecticut Restaurant Association Board to move mountains and facilitate the opening of the State’s restaurants for outdoor dining in May and in dining rooms later this month.
Amidst his busy agenda, Total Food Service was able to speak with Scott Dolch about how he and his CRA team were able to orchestrate the re-opening of Connecticut’s restaurants.
You are about to celebrate your second anniversary as head of the CRA. I suspect it was a pretty good bet that when you were looking at this position, they never talked about managing during a pandemic. Would that be accurate?
It would be one hundred percent accurate. I try to give credit where credit is due with what the Governor and our members are having to deal with every day. I don’t think anyone could have prepared for what we are going through right now.
When the apocalypse struck in mid-March, what were your thoughts and how did that lead to what this vision has become that you’ve been able to execute?
To be honest, it started a little bit before that. I was in Washington, DC for meetings March 3rd to the 5th. I’ll probably never forget that because the 5th was my birthday and I was flying back. We were with the National Restaurant Association and meeting with one-on-one interviews with Senators Blumenthal and Murphy, and all of our reps for our annual visit. I had several board members with me, and it really was interesting because as we went into it, they were hearing about this virus we’re hearing about on the West Coast and how it was impacting.
I was having drinks with the head of the Washington State Restaurant Association Anthony Anton, the first night I was there. That really gave us a sense of it, so that kind of really opened my eyes quickly to say this has a very strong potential of getting here. What does that mean? What is the impact?” I’ve gotten to know him in the last couple of years he’s someone that I started calling right away through the process who was saying, “What did you guys do first? How did you deal with this? What about your Stay at Home order? You still can’t prepare for March 16th when our members were told to shutdown restaurants. It wasn’t an ask, it was an executive order.
It was tough to see but my vision started well before that moment. I always use the analogy of building the plane as you fly it because no one has gone through it before. I’ve tried to take to heart my experiences in other roles that I’ve had and when you do something for the first time you don’t really have a playbook to look at. I remember when I worked in the golf industry at the Travelers Championship, we never had a crisis communication plan. In my second year there, we built a plan for a natural disaster or terrorists attack. I was able to take that experience and add it to my process. You realize that it is all about communication.
Growing this association really comes down to the ability to get the right message out to membership. The immediacy and importance of the message over the last eight weeks has been vital. I have also been able to lean on my 51 colleagues across the country that run the restaurant association in other states. Many of them have been doing this a lot longer than me. I view them as mentors and can’t begin to tell you how valuable it has been to be able to call them late at night on a cell phone. They’re all dealing with the same thing maybe in different stages.
Your two years have been marked by significant changes in how our industry lobbies in Hartford. Can you take us inside the Capital?
I don’t think it’s just me, it takes a lot of teamwork. I give a lot of credit to Nicole Griffin our contract lobbyist who used to be CRA’s executive director when she was trying to juggle a lot on her plate. That being said, I brought my leadership style into play. It starts with meeting with anybody whether, they agree with me or not. I want to have that conversation. I say it all the time to our restaurant owners/operator I don’t look at right or left or republican or democrat. At the end of the day you have to be willing and able to have a conversation with everybody. Not everyone is going to agree, some people are coming to the table with some other view points. But my job is to at least express in a professional way ours, and why we view it some way and not everyone is going to agree and I think a lot of that has helped us. The work Nicole did and with Lamont taking office has had a tremendous impact on our seat at the table. His team has worked closely with us through this pandemic. We trust each other and seem to have the best interests at heart of our restaurants and our employees and even our customers.
One of the challenges, we spoke about early on was the importance of building a CRA voice in Fairfield County.
We’ve been successful there recently. I’ve had a couple of board members that have said, “Thank God, we have the association where it is compared to where it could have been two years ago with this” but it’s still a conversation I had earlier this morning with someone in Fairfield County and they want to get more involved and they didn’t realize all we were doing, but there’s still many more people that we need to reach. This Pandemic is obviously showing up more than ever how important our industry is to the state, and we need to always be thinking about the impact any decisions that are made can have on the restaurants.
You have a unique advantage of having restaurateurs who are both members of CRA serving as State Senators and reps.
It’s been a tremendous advantage as we try to educate. We have Senator Christine Cohen who owns a bagel shop in Madison, and Senator Kevin Witkos that has a family owned restaurant in Canton. Paul Formica is a senator representing the 20th District who has owned the Flanders Fish market for years. It makes a big difference when you need to get a point across to the rest of the house. When Senator Cohen explained the stress over social distancing, it clicked with him. Many of the legislators have never owned a small business or restaurant to know what the impact is of Covid. I know Paul did it yesterday when he was talking about how restaurants approach safety and sanitation.
What is your read being on the ability of takeout and delivery to sustain the industry?
Let’s start by assuming that takeout and curbside on an average prior to this Pandemic was about 10% to 15% of a restaurant’s revenue. First and foremost is takeout and curbside has allowed restaurants to stay open and support the community and keep a couple of people on staff and pay some bills. It’s not a business model that’s going to work long-term, but it is in a sense this new reality that we are getting into with restaurant life during Covid. Certainly takeout, and curbside needs to be a big part of the conversation moving forward.
Many of my board members pushed back initially saying “Hey, takeout and curbside is a model that doesn’t work for my business”. I’ve had to have some tough conversations to say ‘Listen it can’t be all of your business, I get that. But you are foolish to not try to make it work for you in a larger way for an extended period of time. You are not going to be able to have 100% capacity in your dining room, so why not look at it as part of the normal of a restaurant routine?’
As an association, we want to be there guiding you and put you in touch with some of these restaurants that are using takeout and curbside to their advantage.
We are hearing the word pivot everywhere. What does it mean to you?
Here’s a perfect example. Jeff Lizotte earned our 2019 CRAzies Chef of the Year Award. He owns Present Company right up the road from me. It’s a high-end fine dining establishment that only seats about 40 people with a lot of overhead, but it only had about a 25 person staff that he had to unfortunately let go.
Jeff could have shut his doors, but he didn’t want to do that. But his menu doesn’t carry for people going home who are going to get this high-end food. Instead, he’s making fried chicken, salad, lasagna, high-end meat loaf and he made a great point to me a couple of weeks ago: “Scott, you have to realize with takeout and curbside you’re not only cooking for those couples that would have come out and had that romantic dinner or anniversary, but you’re now having to cook for their kids at home. So, your menu has to be creative for that family of 4 meal-side and people are tired of going to the grocery store. I am a chef and I have a quality that most people don’t have, and if I can make it easier for them at a similar price point to the supermarket then we have a win-win.”
Another great example of pivoting is Phil Barnett at Wooden Tap. He opened four of his restaurants for delivery that had been fully shuttered. He told me: “Scott, last night was a cluster! Our phone was ringing off the hook to order, so we need to rethink this.” This pivoting is going to give our restaurants new revenue sources that they never thought were possible.
Our industry was pushed to the brink. Rather than running to the hills, they took the approach of how we help others. Did that surprise you?
No, it didn’t surprise me one bit. I know our industry and that is why I’ve loved this job for two years. I knew in the face of the toughest day you know people always said to me Scott you’re working so hard how do you do it? I get up every day and I know I’m fortunate to have a job and fortunate to fight for an amazing industry. When March 16th hit, I dealt with phone calls for over a week with restaurateurs who were crying to me on the phone saying, “I’ve been in business 30 years, and I had to let 85 people go.”
Somehow in those same conversations, at the same time, they’re worried about their own future. They were telling me that they were going to cook for their employees. On top of that, they were going to give them and their families food so they can survive this. Even that wasn’t enough, they started cooking for front line workers. They might not be able to pay their own bills, but they are more worried about their own staff and feeding them and these front-line workers. Some of these chefs are now working sixteen/eighteen-hour days and they’re not making anywhere the kind of money that they might have been making before COVID. But they are doing it because they know that they are trying to make a difference in the community, and they know their community needs them to stay open. Our association has also been able to create a fund for restaurant employees that just hit a 100K last week.
One of the key moves to getting reopened was CRA’s reopening manifesto. What impact did it have in getting the go-ahead from the Governor?
Our industry promise showed that our restaurants care deeply about their employees, customers, and the communities they serve. It evolved from an outline for the new norm to a real pledge. We have 400 restaurants that have signed on to provide everything from extra training to special signage. What started as a discussion about decals which you will see in our restaurants evolved into a true Best Practices manifesto.
The next issue on the table is getting the governor to sign off on re-opening dining rooms. Can you take us behind the scenes?
Restaurants across Connecticut began outdoor service, and they’re doing it safely for both customers and employees. Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo announced that restaurants in our neighboring state will begin restricted indoor service on June 1. Governor Lamont has repeatedly stressed the importance of coordinating our reopening effort with neighboring states, and this move is a clear sign that Connecticut can and should allow similar indoor dining beginning June 3. This date would be two full weeks after many other Connecticut businesses were allowed to begin operating indoors, and two days after Rhode Island. This won’t be a return to normal — like Rhode Island, Connecticut can take this next step with many added safety precautions, such as limiting overall capacity to 50 percent, no standing room or bar seating, added use of gloves and masks, and much more. Moving restaurants to restricted, safe indoor dining on June 3 will be a critical point in Connecticut’s recovery, and a great thing for our state economy. After all, Connecticut’s restaurant industry employed more than 160,000 people before this pandemic hit, and we need to get all those people back to work if we want to restart our economy. We look forward to continued productive and cooperative work with Governor Lamont, Commissioner David Lehman, and others in the administration to ensure that Connecticut remains competitive as we reopen.
Our industry is so much more than just restaurants.
I had a call last week with the 15 top lead caterers in our state on Zoom and it wasn’t a fun call. They want to know what the Governor is saying and I kind of had to bring them back to reality and say listen there isn’t a state across the country that has been comfortable with the speed of reopening. Rather than just venting, let’s see what we can create? Maybe weddings aren’t a realistic possibility in the short-term, but can you do a farm dinner? Can you do a graduation? Things people need now and the whole fact that people aren’t in school. Can you do a baby shower? Our goal is to help negotiate the differences between a social public gathering and a private event.
Our perspective from down here is what you’ve done is amazing because New York and New Jersey are weeks/months away from anything close to this. I look at it as the CRA for the first time taking a true leadership role.
Thanks, but It’s always about moving on to the next thing never getting too high or too low. I think it’s my sports background as a Quarterback with a short memory. If you throw an interception or pass for a touchdown, you have to let it go and move on to the next challenge. We are appreciative of the Governor working with us but at the same time we still need to continue to work through what the logistics are.
To learn more about the Connecticut Restaurant Association, visit their website.
