Benjamín Lana, director of Madrid Fusión Alimentos de España, presented a double presentation that would focus on the diner and customer, but with Ferran Adrià (elBulliFoundation) ‘with more energy than in the last twenty years’, no one knows what might happen. Paulo Airaudo (Amelia** in San Sebastián) did stick to the topic, although with his usual irreverent spirit, he also questioned the slogan of this year's conference, “The customer takes control”.

In a talk with no time limits and with his usual wide-ranging discourse, Adrià spoke about projects, marketing, making the establishment uncomfortable by questioning it, and the importance of investing in communication. He sought out the roots of traditional Spanish cuisine, claimed to have created the most successful course ever at Harvard for free, and sowed doubt about ‘what we are doing at the elBulliFoundation. You can't even imagine’.

Which customer will we prefer?

All these ideas came together when he began to focus on the customer, asking himself which one is in charge. He spoke about the importance of tourism, gastronomy and food in Spain's GDP, but also about the enormous wage differences that exist between Spain and, for example, the United States. ‘Which customer will we prefer?’ he asked his colleagues present.

Based on studies, figures and slides, he concluded: the country's gastronomic restaurants need 54 million tourists a year and sufficient resources must be put in place to achieve this: ‘How much do you have to earn to go to a gastronomic restaurant, a place with quality products and execution? How much do people spend? Only 1.2% spend more than 70€, but 7.6% spend less than 15€; 56.3% spend between 15€ and 30€. Who can go to a restaurant once a week? And to a creative haute cuisine restaurant? If there are 3,000 gourmet restaurants in Spain (163,000 bars and 81,000 restaurants) with 80 covers a day, we need 54 million customers every year to make the numbers work’.

He has pieced all this together with research work and publications and with his desire to promote Spanish cuisine around the world, something he is working on with governments and institutions. ‘It's now or never’, he said, before emphasising that mayonnaise is the best-known and most widely used Spanish product in the world, something that none of those attending the talk had guessed correctly.

A question of supply and demand

Paulo Airaudo has contributed, according to Lana, ‘the vision of someone young and energetic, who opens restaurants around the world, which gives him a very interesting perspective on the diner’. If this whole question of customer power were reduced to the debate about the tasting menu, this Argentine chef points out that this menu ‘is a business model, although many chefs do not see it that way. There are restaurants that are not profitable or viable without that menu’. He prefers to talk about picking up on trends, such as the decline in alcohol consumption in Asia, or the desire to spend less time around the table. ‘The customer does not take control; it is a question of supply and demand, because if your beach bar is not profitable, you close it’, he said. ‘It is a question of business intelligence to adapt to what you are seeing, but if someone wants to impose something on you, you will respond that this is what we serve in your establishment’, he added.

‘What kind of customer do I want at my table?’ he asked. ‘At Ibai* (an iconic restaurant in San Sebastian that he has been running for more than 40 years), the locals come to the bar, but they don't come out to spend money every day; we live off the tourists who come to eat at our restaurant. No one creates a business for tourists, but it does thrive on the public that comes to the city’, he explained, as another example of adaptation.

Airaudo also spoke about the prices of his menus to explain that ‘the best raw materials have a limited shelf life and a price. No one charges €400 for a menu to become a millionaire, because the margins are not wide’. He also referred to the increasingly frequent requests from customers to adapt menus for allergies or intolerances, something that is not accepted at Amelia; the risks involved in entrepreneurship; and the need for standardisation when one has restaurants all over the world.

In Donostia or Hong Kong, his philosophy is the same: ‘You have to understand where you're going, and that's very important: I don't go to your house, open the fridge and complain that you don't have the beer I like; it should be the same in restaurants’.