Lindsay Tusk has been running the three-Michelin-starred restaurant Quince in San Francisco with her husband, the chef Michael Tusk, for the last two decades. Two winters ago, the restaurant underwent a full transformation and redesign—shutting down for almost a year before reopening in November 2023. But it wasn’t just aesthetics and new kitchen equipment that had been refreshed; it was the entire guest experience, down to the menu options and overall accessibility. Here, Lindsay Tusk talks about the importance of listening to customers, prioritizing relationship building, and other key changes that have allowed them to evolve their understanding of what great hospitality should be—and how to execute it.
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“Pre-renovation, Quince was categorically typical to what you would expect of a destination, special occasion, fine dining, three-star Michelin restaurant. It was a fairly structured dining experience with only tasting menus. Aesthetically, it was dark, it was more austere, it was formal. It was what Mike and I thought people wanted from a three-star Michelin experience in a city environment. Where we are now is radically different—dark to light, literally and figuratively.
“We recognized that people did not want to spend three hours at a table. They wanted a lot more flexibility in their format when it came to dining options. Some people certainly love a tasting menu and love to eat that way because they get to experience a lot of different tastes and flavors—it can be very immersive. And that component still exists if someone wants to dine that way. But it was very important to us to—I wouldn’t say make the experience more casual, [but] I would say to make it more relatable, and to make it a little bit more fun. Sometimes I felt like the more you spent, the less fun you had in terms of a dining experience. So this was a way of bringing it into a little bit more of a contemporary mindset. And, most importantly, giving people flexibility, allowing people to dine for however long they wanted to, whether that’s three hours or one.
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“Having a real bar and salon where people can have a complete experience and not feel that it’s diminished by not being in the dining room [was very important to us]. We observed that diners were fatiguing on tasting menus and the structure of the tasting menu and the length of the meal. So [we] really listened to what guests were saying, how they were behaving. That salon experience has the same attention to detail, that same care and craft and hospitality that you would get in the dining room at a lower price point. It makes it accessible for, say, a younger diner or someone who doesn’t have the budget to eat the full experience in the dining room.
“These changes were really a response to existing guests’ desires; we weren’t worried about losing business. We were in regular communication with people while the restaurant was closed. Because Cotogna is in the same building as Quince, it’s not like we went dark, and no one saw us for months. We also have a very extensive database that goes back 20 years of everyone who’s dined at the restaurant—we take notes on their experience and who they are and their family. It’s a real compendium now. And that’s not only at Quince, but also at Cotogna and Verjus.
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“We have every manager at each restaurant look at every reservation at all three restaurants every morning, on a daily basis. That means that every manager has an opportunity to add their notes, their perspective, and any additional information about the guest. For that reason, every restaurant manager is aware of where the guests are at each restaurant at any given service. The book is then discussed at our pre-service meeting every day.
“We typically know their preferences when it comes to wine, we know how quickly they want to dine—and it’s not that it’s transactional in any way, but it’s really just so that we can recognize and personalize and tailor the experience more for them. It’s all about relationship-building, and has been from day one.”
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
—Lindsay Tusk, as told to San Francisco-based writer Omar Mamoon |
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