Harry Posner & Natalie Dial: Put Staff Before Guests

**Josh Kopel** (0:00)
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Again, you can sign up for free today just by going to restaurantbusinessschool.com. I'll see you there. Now here we go.

**Harry Posner** (0:54)
The most important people in this business are our employees. We need to take care of them first before we can take care of our customers. And if you treat your staff right, you're going to have a much better outcome and you'll be able to treat your customers right.

**Josh Kopel** (1:13)
Welcome to FULL COMP, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders, and innovators. Served up on the house.
What if the conventional wisdom about putting customers first is the very reason our industry keeps losing good people? Harry Posner and Natalie Dial walked away from careers in medicine to open Tomat, a Michelin-recognized, seasonally driven restaurant in Westchester, Los Angeles. Neither came from the industry. Both came with the analytical frameworks most operators spend years trying to build. In today's conversation, we get into why they deliberately ranked employees above customers before the day they opened, how diversifying revenue across breakfast, lunch, dinner, and events gave them financial staying power when the calendar went quiet, and why the quote unquote wrong location turned out to be one of the smartest market plays in LA dining history. If you think the customer is always right, this episode is going to change your mind.

**Harry Posner** (2:22)
We met doing medical work in Africa, and we struck up a friendship, and then much later on, we were like, all right, this is who we want to be with. And Natalie came over to England to start her PhD, also I was doing some doctor work, and we were kind of figuring out what we wanted to do, where we wanted to live, and what the plan was. And Natalie is very good at having a 5-year, 10-year plan. And we're looking at apartments in London to move closer to where I was working.
We had a day of being like, we hate all of these places, we don't want to move, we don't want to do this. Let's go eat at this restaurant that was near all of these places, and we heard good things and we're eating, and we're just like, okay, what's the 5-year plan? Where do you want to have kids? Where do you want to get married? Where do you want to do this? What are we doing? Et cetera, et cetera. And in the back of my mind, LA had always been an option. And I was born here, my family's here, Nat's family's here. Nat's parents grew up in Westchester, where we are now. And the site of Tomat had been taken by someone else. But I think just before all of this happened, they'd pulled out in the middle of 2019 So this is all in 2019
I just come back from doing a stint at Ballymaloo Cookery School and that was just for...

**Josh Kopel** (4:09)
What was that about?

**Harry Posner** (4:11)
I was just like an itch that needed to be scratched.

**Natalie Dial** (4:15)
I just have to interject and say a common thread throughout this entire story is that Harry is an incredible cook and that's part of our foundational things that we have in common, things we love to do, eat, cook.

**Harry Posner** (4:27)
Yeah. So we just finished the bat stint and there was no thought of ever restaurant, anything like that. But then this whole plan of like, okay, if we're going to move to LA, what's the plan? There is an option to take over this space, or do we just move over and go back into medicine? And where do we want to be in five years time? But do we want to do this super exciting path that is very risky or maybe less exciting and still a very hard path? But whatever, we were like, you know what, this would be an amazing opportunity.