48 - Lessons from Restaurant Lume, the best Restaurant in Australia that you've never heard of.

We talk about Kalimera Souvlaki Art, which was recently written up in the New York Times by Sam Sifton. How does a Souvlaki Restaurant in Melbourne Australia get written up in the New York Times?

We talk to Veronica Fil, the Business Manager at Restaurant Lume. Lume was voted the Gault and Millau Restaurant of the Year in 2016.

Lume works very hard to create unique experiences for diners. They use actors, script writers and use psychological tests to work and are pushing the boundaries in the way that food is experienced in their restaurant. The are attracting a significantly younger audience market than a traditional fine dining venue.

Understanding their customers is a critical part of the Lume experience. With a high percentage of customers from China, they learned that many were not drinking wine, so they created a tailored mocktail drink pairing with their meal.

Lume has adopted Virtual Reality to push the boundary on the way that their guests experience their food. They have created VR experiences that significantly pushes the limits of multi sensory dining. By combining the story of the ingredients, the preparation and the restaurant into a Virtual Reality experience with scents, auditory cues and tactile sensations.

Restaurant Lume has reduced No Shows to zero in their restaurant. This is a phenomenal result because No Shows in fine dining are especially expensive in fine dining. They adopted Tock as a booking engine that takes pre bookings. They were losing up to $3,000 a week to zero. This is the difference between Lume surviving through to the point where they are very popular and having run out of cash and going out of business.

Lume has a reputation of providing some of the best Corporate Event experiences in the country. Large corporate customers looking for something to WOW their customers with and provide their customers with a unique experience have becoming For one event they created a perfume for the event, a bespoke menu based on local ingredients of the customer, they had a photographer at the event and used those photographs to create a cook book of the recipes from the event with photos of the participants in it. The diners get a memento of the event, a cook book that features photos of themselves delivered to them weeks after the event, reminding them of it. The customer gets branding that will stay with the customers.

Lume is continuing to create cutting edge multisensory dining experiences, starting to work with augmented reality.

All of the experiences have the foundation of Chef Quade and the team creating amazing food. We will talk to Chef Quade in a future podcast about his journey and his approach to restaurant creativity and innovation.