Michael Gokhner: "You don't score a goal, so you get scored on"

The owner of MGR Group (Mikhail Gochner Restaurants) told Gleb Korolenko about support from the state and resolving issues with landlords, and also shared his forecast for the development of the restaurant industry in the next five years.

Michael Gokhner's key restaurants: Bocconciono, El Gaucho steakhouses, there is also a Bocconciono in London.

I tried to make time for sports every day. As soon as it got warmer, I started cycling, walking in the woods and working out with dumbbells. That's how the "Groundhog days" went by. It was important to keep myself busy so as not to go crazy. Time passed slowly. In April it was easy, and in May it became a bit hard. On the business side, the only thing that was working was the delivery service, and I immersed myself in that.

We've had our own delivery service in Bocconcino for about five years now, but it's always been a car that drives itself, and I haven't done much with it. But here I had to dive in, and I learnt about Facebook advertising, all kinds of targeting, in short, I educated myself in this area. At the same time, we were building a restaurant in Aviapark, we will finish it and open it in August. I also learnt how to hold Zoom meetings with the builders and with my employees. In addition to that, I have tidied up the websites. We've had both Bocconcino and El Gaucho websites for a long time, but I didn't pay much attention to them before.

That percentage seemed barbaric to me too, until I set up my own delivery service. The overheads there are really very high. The main problem with aggregators is that they mostly employ young guys on bicycles, and they deliver your pizza to the client upside down, in an unmarketable state. We, unlike them, deliver in cars. The roads were free during the pandemic, so in terms of delivery time and quality, our own is better. There are also savings, but not significant, about five per cent.

I only closed the Bocconcino restaurant in the City, but I was planning to close it even before the coronavirus. Instead, we are opening a venue in Aviapark, and have recently started renovations there. The losses, of course, are primarily financial. In general, the business is now unbalanced, and it needs to be tuned back up like an old piano. There are debts to suppliers. We have not done without personnel losses. Some employees can't get into the rut, and we work as a team - the links are falling out. There are plenty of problems, but all of them, in general, are secondary. Revenue is primary.

Yesterday, Deputy Mayor Efimov (Vladimir Efimov, we are talking about the speech on 30 June - Editor's note) spoke and said that restaurants make the same revenue as last year, or even higher. I was reminded of "two worlds - two Shapiro's", as if we live in different countries. Revenues are down, of course, and shopping centres have been particularly hard hit. Restaurants in the centre - Strastnaya, Patriki, Paveletskaya - are working more or less normally. But in the shopping centres, like Oceania and Metropolis, where there were always a lot of people, now there is no one. We have been working for a week now, people are slowly coming back, there is an increase in revenue, but things are not easy for restaurants in shopping centres.

They say that mid- and low-segment restaurants suffer the most, while the more or less luxurious places stay afloat. Is this true?

What is luxury today? Everything has changed so much now that in the past luxury for us was a Rolls Royce, and now it's a dream of a Mercedes. So we still have to decide on that.

Do you follow the recommendations of Rospotrebnadzor, which were developed for restaurants to come out of isolation?

Of course! Here, look (turns the camera into the hall), everyone in the restaurant is wearing masks. This is a serious issue. I realise that the virus hasn't gone anywhere, and there's no telling what the future holds.

Some doctors predict a second wave of the virus in October. There is an opinion that in such a scenario everyone will close down.

I wouldn't be so categorical. During the isolation, I called many comrades, and in the first month we had a common opinion that no one would go to restaurants anymore. We thought that everyone would stay at home and be afraid of getting sick. We were sure that everyone would avoid restaurants and shopping centres until everything started to open in Europe. It turned out that no one is wearing masks, everyone has forgotten about them, as if nothing had happened, and restaurants are full of people! The only question is money. It is important that the consumer has something to pay with.

If there is a second or third wave, of course it will be hard for many people, I think. We will not go bankrupt, we have a safety margin. But there are many companies on the market (I will not name names) that are heavily indebted, or those who do not have their own funds, or those who developed just to develop and did not care whether there was profit or not - all of them are more vulnerable. We are a fairly small company and we don't have any loss-making restaurants.

We had a non-profitable restaurant in the City - but as painful and unpleasant as it was for me, I recorded a loss and closed it down. I hope that after all this, many restaurateurs will stop investing money recklessly, build up a margin of safety, and strive not to have a debt load. Such companies will survive the second and third waves. It is important that after all these waves the guests return. If the restaurant stands empty, that is a sad thing.

How did you resolve these issues with the landlords?

At first, none of the landlords wanted to talk about any support measures - just pay and that's it. But reasonableness came as the number of "patients" increased. At the end of April all shopping centres sent us letters saying that we were exempted from rent, but they have a tricky system of rent payment, there are maintenance payments and something else... They still left us 15 per cent.

As for the restaurants on the streets, it is much more complicated. The landlords there are private, uncooperative - pay or I'll rent to someone else. However, in the first half of May, their position also shook. We got normal discounts, we even agreed on three months' rent in advance. It is also important to say here that our restaurants on Strastnoy and Patriarshie were working on delivery, and were generally busy from morning to evening. The landlords saw that the establishments were working, and it was impossible not to pay them.

How did isolation go at your London restaurant Bocconcino?

Bocconcino in London doesn't open until the 4th of July. In terms of finances, things are softer there. The state gave us 80% of the employees' salaries every month, about £40,000. In addition, there's a federal law there that you don't have to pay rent. But, interestingly enough, the owner of the premises is still demanding money. Hopefully that will be resolved. We didn't have a delivery service there at all, we launched it sometime in May. It is swinging hard, but there are orders. If in Moscow we made 20-25% of the restaurant's turnover on delivery, in London it was less than 10%.