Class a-team
Where wine is concerned, a focus has been getting the team to know what it is selling and what flavour profiles it works best with.
“The most important thing for me is that I don’t want to be the only person that can talk about wine,” says Beer. “One of the great things I’ve seen over this last year through training is the guys were a bit apprehensive; they didn’t even want to talk about wine by glass to begin with. They had the knowledge but weren’t confident in that knowledge.
After the training sessions we’ve done – they are happy to sell up to AED500 ($136) on their
own.”
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And this also applies to the bar area too, which has seen cocktail sales rocket. But you need knowledge across the board to be able to boost sales says Brett Bell, head bartender and mixologist at Okku.
Bell joined the outlet as floor staff when it opened. This experience has allowed him to train the bar team on the food and what flavours work well with which drinks.
“We went along the lines of using similar ingredients they used in the kitchen such as yuzu, for example. A lot of the cocktails use yuzu. If they [customer] have a cocktail there are going to be certain ingredients that hint at dishes. All these Japanese products are very rare in other places in the world so we are lucky to work with this stuff.”
As part of creating unique flavours, Okku has started phasing out the use of syrups.
“When you are drinking something – you want that freshness – it might not taste the same every single time but if you were to add a syrup or puree you kind of get the same thing all the time and people get bored of it – it has been very successful and people are responding to it,” says Bell.
The cocktail sales increase is down to the bar team being given the freedom to work with chefs and play with different flavours, believes Eggberry.
“All the new ingredients we are getting mean we are all able to be that bit more creative. For example we got asked to make a Japanese Bloody Mary so we played around with flavours.
This drink is creating such a buzz in the bar that the guests are picking up on it,” he says.
But it’s not straightforward to have both the bar and restaurant operating with equal strength: “It’s a huge challenge,” says Thesleff.
“In the first year it was like are you a restaurant or a bar? When you go to London, Paris, New York – they have both. Not having the right spirit behind the bar would be like not having black cod in the kitchen. They go hand in hand – it’s the complete experience,” he adds.
Thesleff says this rigid black or white attitude surprised people when Okku was hitting the numbers it was for both F&B: “People were like this can’t be right – you’re either one or the other. But actually no, we were right down the middle.”
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