AT A GLANCE
Rezdora is a high quality made-from-scratch pasta fast food opening in New York City in 2017. Optimal location will be 500sf to 1000sf. We want to develop a unique and warm format, replicable in retail (city neighborhoods) and high-traffic (motorways, airports) settings. We are hospitality minded, community and environmentally driven. We provide excellent made-from-scratch pasta made right in front of our customer at a very reasonable price, to eat with either the best sauces or soups from the great Italian culinary tradition.
Key words: authentic, natural, warm, organic, wood-centric, welcoming, no innovation without tradition, environment sustainable, healthy, excellent for solo diners
OUR PILLARS
Our format should reflect our five business pillars that make Rezdora unique, beside the quality of the food it serves.
PILLAR 1 – QUICK.
Waiting for a warm, fresh meal shouldn’t mean a long wait.
We use a single pipeline serving process where the customer goes through three different stations in one linear countertop (see layout to have a better idea). We want to serve the best pasta in the smallest amount of time.
PILLAR 2 – ENTERTAINING.
Making pasta is fascinating.
For this reason, we have developed a customized and automated pasta machine, where the customer will observe the pasta being made while waiting in line or simply by walking on the sidewalk through the front window.
PILLAR 3 – CUSTOM.
Your Pasta, Your Way.
Customers will be guided through different steps during the serving process. For this reason, the format must help the customer to easily build his/her own plate of pasta.
PILLAR 4 – AUTHENTIC.
We are the pasta guys.
If you want to have great pasta, either you go to your Granma, to a 3-michelin star restaurant or you visit us. We make the best pasta you can have at an affordable price.
PILLAR 5 – SUSTAINABLE.
Pasta is nutrition and caring for the environment.
Our format should convey our strong focus on the environment by giving a sense of recycled materials and use of high quality, natural ingredients.
HOW IT WORKS
Do you know Chipotle? Well, we are the Chipotle of fresh pasta. Let’s see how it works (it works with a single pipeline serving process, which means one customer at a time going through three stations):
STATION 1 – The customer select the dough and the size, then the shape (it’ll be cut in front of him/her).
STATION 2 – The customer will choose sauce and/or sauce to match with the pasta just cooked, and add a topping. At the end, before handing the to go box to the cashier, the operator will put a leaf of a fresh herb on top in order to garnish the plate and add flavor. This is a vital step in the process since it gives a human touch to the plate, making it more natural.
STATION 3 – Check-out.
The process is simple and, after check out, the customer will fill up his/her drink and take a seat. There’s no service table at all, like in a real fast food. For this reason, our focus is to have a high turnover and reach 50% of our revenue in to-go orders by 2020. As seen in the layout (see attached), a customer will be able to pick up his/her order if ordered online in a special “to-go area”. All food is given in a customized, environmentally friendly packaging that will look like a flower, a bowl that the customer will be able to open (it will become like a plate). We don’t use dishes, silverware etc: everything is disposable and recyclable (please do not draw silverware and plates in the render)
PHILOSOPHY
We are the pasta guys.
If you want to have a great plate of pasta, either you go to your grandma’s place, an expensive Michelin star restaurant, or at Rezdora. People today associate the word “authentic” to ethnic, healthy food that uses only genuine and fresh ingredients. Unfortunately, people associate healthy with expensive and not super tasty. We are here to break this misconception: our pasta is the best you can get, at a fantastic price. We care a lot about sustainability: we want to associate our customer experience to warm materials that respect the environment, warm lights, and we want to convey our focus on limiting our trash output and the use of genuine ingredients (i.e. free range eggs, organic flours, meat with no antibiotics etc.). As for an example, see our drafts on how we would love to communicate our strong focus on sustainability (see attached).
WHAT WE ASK
We need a warm environment that is functional for the customer and practical for the operator, that reflects our focus on tradition and sustainability. For this reason, we expect our entries to exceed our expectations. Our concept will be developed in North America and it must be tailored-made on our processes. Here are some key points, to be read after having seen the uploaded pictures:
• Entertainment is key. We have a proprietary machine that will be displayed in our store window (please see pictures attached). The main purposes of this machine are 1) to make the best pasta 2) to draw customers since pedestrian will be able to see the magic of making pasta from scratch 3) to relief customers waiting in line while waiting to be served. Rezdora is the format in which a customer, when he/she gets in, has three views: the pasta being made on the left, the customer ordering in the front, the customers eating it on the right.
• We want both chairs and stools. Since we would love to have high customer turnover, we prefer stools (but we want both)
• If we have a very large window (like in the layout we have proposed), we want the pasta lab to stand out (it looks like it is “Leaning out”) and, in the other one people eating on a stool
• Keep the manual pasta machines in the window.
• Chairs and furniture must be stain resistant
• The layout MUST BE useful for our serving processes. As for example, in the other layout there’s no room for the waiting line. Furthermore, the counter must be straight.
• The place must be great and welcoming for solo diners
• There should be something that indirectly reminds of Italy and the tradition of welcoming people. It must be a hint (NO Italian Flags please)
• Ideal surface area: 500SF (48mq) – 1000SF.
• Seats: between 15 and 25. If we had to sacrifice space, we would sacrifice the dining area since we aim to prepare more to go.
• Floor to ceiling, in NYC, are between 9 and 11 feet.
• In NYC, shops have small window areas and are very long (like in the proposed layout)
We want our expectations to be exceeded. We want our place to be functional to our processes. But we also want it to be unique. That’s why we are here. It is difficult to innovate in the food industry and we believe that there’s no innovation without tradition.
