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What makes a restaurant an instant classic? There’s no exact formula, though the food, the service, and the overall vibe have to be on point. When you’re sitting inside one, you understand.
Practically, a restaurant deemed an instant classic is one whose popularity lingers after its opening splash, enticing diners to return by offering great service and value. (Who doesn’t love a good time?) Operationally, it’s dialed in, confident in its approach, and staffed by capable and supported employees.
According to the Square 2025 Future of Restaurants report, in the last year, over half of diners —63%—have cut spending at restaurants, including delivery. That’s a scary stat, but restaurants still have an opportunity to delight diners, demonstrating that their patronage is worth the price.
MAMA Oakland is a small Italian restaurant in Northern California with a point of view. It serves up to 120 diners every night of the week. Most nights, the reservation books are filled to capacity or close. Maintaining popularity is a challenge. It’s easy enough for seasoned operators to generate buzz and excitement at opening, but it’s much harder to maintain.
“Getting to be the popular restaurant means you have to be doing something right. You stay popular when you deliver with your guest experience,” says Ryan Cole, CEO and partner at Hi Neighbor Hospitality Group, which operates MAMA Oakland.
It’s a strong concept. A three-course meal at MAMA costs $39.95 per person; the standard formula is starter-pasta-dessert. Diners can add optional items — focaccia for $6, a steak for $44 — if they want to extend the meal or they’re just hungrier. That keeps the meal predictably short, usually maxing out around 90 minutes.
“Our price point is recession-proof,” Cole says. “We would rather have a full restaurant at a lower price point than a not-full restaurant at a high price point.” When the economy, or, in the Bay Area, the tech industry, is low, expensive dining is the first thing to go, he adds. Cole speaks confidently about the restaurant; it’s clear he knows it’s doing a lot of things right. They’re intentional decisions, made for the sake of guest enjoyment and the restaurant’s bottom line. Here are three areas of particular focus that, when combined, make a real difference.
Provide real value
The word “value” gets a bad rap in restaurants. It’s not the same as “cheap” or even “discounted,” even though Cole is happy to admit that paying under $40 for dinner at MAMA is basically a steal.
“Value means you’re receiving something for less than you expected to pay,” Cole says.
The Square Future of Restaurants report also found nearly all restaurant leaders —98%— said they’ve added or expanded their discount or value offers in at least one way to respond to current economic challenges. Still, 71% plan to increase prices over the next year due to increasing costs.
Optional extras and a wine list featuring bottles at all sorts of price points add to the experience — and the cost — while still offering value, Cole says. Additionally, marking up the bottle half of what others do, which Cole says they do at the restaurant, means the guest gets more value from purchasing the wine there than at a competing spot down the street. “That doesn’t mean the wine is cheap,” Cole says.
Get specific about who you’re marketing to
Running a neighborhood favorite is a delicate balance of attracting new diners while serving the community. For years, Cole says, the restaurant has invested in behind-the-scenes marketing initiatives, like search engine optimization, to make sure the restaurant is top of mind where people search for it — on the internet.
“The fact that we’re able to be completely full from open to close seven days a week means we are making more impressions, which ultimately gives us a bigger audience to pull from,” Cole says.
MAMA strategically targets people in its neighborhood, of course, but also local East Bay communities like nearby Danville and Walnut Creek. People in San Francisco, west of Oakland, aren’t generally a target. “We’re not expecting you to drive across the bridge and come tomorrow,” Cole says. “This isn’t going to revolutionize your world.”
But it doesn’t have to, and that’s the point: It’s a restaurant with a point of view and a business model to support it.
“Everything about the restaurant is efficiency,” Cole says. At its busiest, MAMA has five front-of-house workers; one manager and four servers. It also turns a profit. “We do very well, and it blows most people’s minds,” Cole says. “When you talk to people in the industry, they don’t understand how the $39 menu is even possible.
Take care of staff
MAMA, like its fellow Hi Neighbor restaurants, doesn’t take tips. It instead levies a mandatory 20% service charge and won’t accept tips on top of it. Some people hate it, Cole says, and it’s a taxable charge, so it adds to the bill. But he’s clear that the restaurant doesn’t hide it.
In fact, the website and menu spell out its philosophy:
“We have carefully and thoughtfully made a progressive decision to add a mandatory 20% service charge to all checks, enabling us to take better care of our entire staff by providing full benefits, vacation, and professional development resources,” it reads, in part.
Restaurant employees get sick time and two weeks of paid vacation. If a San Francisco mandate — like required healthcare — means staff across the Bay get more money or benefits, they offer the same at MAMA. Turnover is low, Cole says, and when someone does leave, it’s usually because they’ve gotten all they can from the experience. MAMA Oakland’s menu changes constantly, but it follows a predictable formula: starter, pasta, optional meat or fish, and fruit or chocolate dessert. Diners may not consider it monotonous, but after a couple of years, a server certainly could.
Still, he says, offering competitive wages and benefits is the right thing to do, not because it’s less expensive for the business (it’s not).
“We are firm believers that volume of business outweighs everything else,” Cole says. “The more people I can get through the doors who can experience our service and our products, ultimately, are going to drive long term sustainability.”
Of course, achieving instant classic status in restaurants is about more than drawing guests in, then out, of the front door. (That faceless metric is called “throughput” and is invoked by Wall Street to measure a business’s performance.) An instant classic instead appeals to diners and staff alike with a consistent and thoughtful experience — on both sides of the table.
