Software acts as restaurants' data Copilot

 
Eli Chait grew up in the restaurant business.

By the time he was 12 he was doing accounts payable in one of his father's 16 restaurants in Los Angeles. A few years later he ran home deliveries for his dad's Spark Woodfire Grill near Beverly Hills. He hired all his high school buddies to run the food around town.

So in 2011, after graduating from UC Berkeley and serving a stint at a venture capital firm, the now-25-year-old and a partner started a restaurant technology and consulting business in his Portola Valley living room. But it wasn't your run-of-the-mill consulting firm.

Copilot Labs created software to analyze 25,872 combinations of "time slices" - everything from sales volume to table turnover - throughout a restaurant's day and uses the data to determine problems and strengths.

"Restaurants are so focused on the day-to-day business that they don't have time to step back and figure out how to grow the business," said Chait, who has since moved his nine-employee firm into an office in San Francisco. "And most restaurants don't have the resources to hire someone to do this for them."

That's where Copilot comes in. And by looking at two years of data, Chait has been able to pinpoint a number of dining trends in the Bay Area.

Q: What's the busiest restaurant day of the year, according to your research?

A: New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day. New Year's Eve will often see sales doubling, some even quadrupling. Valentine's Day is similar. A lot of it is driven by fixed-course menus, which increase the price, and of course demand is higher.

Q: Which day is the worst?

A: That's harder than the first question. Typically it's the Super Bowl, Oscar night, Thanksgiving weekend and the Fourth of July. But the restaurant business is so unpredictable that everything from weather to the grand finale of "American Idol" can take its toll. We have a restaurant in Venice (Los Angeles County) that we work with that says when the weather hits 95 degrees, they're dead. They have air conditioning but no patio. All their diners go to restaurants with patios on the hot days.

Q: So did they add a patio?

A: No. They couldn't.

Q: Which weekday is the best for a restaurant?

A: Universally Friday, if you're located in a financial district or downtown. If not, it's Saturday. No surprise, I've seen those days be up as much as 20 percent in business. Usually, Sunday is the weakest day, especially in a downtown area, but with a good brunch it could be the best day.

Q: So what would be the best day for a diner to book a hard-to-get reservation?

A: For a chef-driven restaurant, Tuesday or Wednesday at 6 p.m. Because Sundays and Mondays are typically slow, management either closes the restaurant those days or the chef doesn't work those days. But the chef will be there Tuesday and Wednesday, days that are still relatively slower, therefore more likely to have an open table.

Q: What's the average tip in the Bay Area?

A: Pretty much in every city in the Bay Area it's 20 percent.

Q: Is that before or after tax?

A: Before tax. But here's the interesting thing. Even when people use coupons, like Groupon, they're figuring out what the cost of the meal would've been before the discount. They're doing serious math and tipping on the original price. One exception to the 20 percent is on expensive tasting menus, or in meals where the diner is ordering expensive wine. Tips in those situations tend to be lower.

Q: How much lower?

A: On average people are tipping about 17 percent.

Q: What's the least profitable item on the menu?

A: Dessert. Often they're brought into the restaurant from off site, not made there, and you just can't charge enough for them. But if you can sell a dessert wine with it, now that's a different story. Coffee is also high margin, but then diners sit longer at the table.