For Alejandro Saravia, opening Morena in Sydney has been a bit of a homecoming. “When I arrived in Australia, I landed in Sydney, and I lived there for eight years,” says Saravia, who was born in Peru. “The first Morena opened around 2011 in Surry Hills, so when we got the opportunity of branching into Sydney [again], we thought it was a good idea to retake that concept, to take that name again.”
Returning all these years later, the new incarnation of Morena builds on a style and philosophy that Saravia has honed to a sharp edge down in Melbourne with Farmer’s Daughters and Victoria – one that champions the produce and producers of the local region. With Morena (which has also opened a second outpost in Melbourne), he combines his signature local focus with a pan-Latin menu that builds on Australia’s growing curiosity around the flavours and ingredients of South and Central America.
“One thing that we really want is to make sure that we represent the diversity of the cuisine in Latin America,” says Saravia. “Ceviche is a great example of this. We have ceviche from Mexico to Chile, and each ceviche has a completely different experience when you eat it – the texture, the level of acidity, the level of spiciness, the way it’s cooked, the technique. It’s a journey just on our ceviche section.”
With a menu that skips across the continent’s cuisines with light-footed ease, he understands the importance of taking diners deeper than just words on a page. Service is key to bringing the stories of producers, ingredients and Latin American dishes to life.
“With service, we have a very strong philosophy on training within our front and back of house,” Saravia says. “Service is not just delivering a dish or a plate to a table or a glass of wine – it’s creating an experience. It’s that extra time that we spend with our customers, that extra explanation about the people behind the ingredients. It’s that storytelling approach to the service that makes our restaurants different.”
He says the strong focus on front-of-house and memorable service is made easier by having the right processes in place on the back end. With systems like Square, the team at Morena is powered by tech that informs everything from restaurant finances and KPIs to vital customer information.
“A lot of people think that the restaurant business is just about serving and cooking food, but it’s also about analysing data,” he says. “As a business, that provides creativity, that provides an experience. We don’t have a lot of time and resources to have a big financial team sitting in an office for eight hours a day, five days a week analysing numbers. We need those numbers to be accessible and clear for our management staff, so they are also able to share milestones, KPIs, challenges and goals in terms of revenue creation in the restaurant.”
And the result of all that data and information? A heightened experience for guests and first-class service, ensuring a lasting impression is left.
“If you go to a restaurant or any dining experience, if you don’t remember what you ate the day after, if you didn’t take away something that you can share with your friends or family, if you can’t recommend a flavour or be excited about something, we’re not doing our job.”
This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Square.
