Opening a Restaurant in the City of Boston

Angela’s desk was filled with paperwork. In her small office at the back of her restaurant, she was filled with fear. Days prior, she had been forced to close doors because of the shelter-in-place restrictions put in place on March 23rd across Massachusetts. While she understood the shutdown, the uncertainty of not knowing when she could open again was hurting her financially. The novel coronavirus pandemic was uniquely frightening, but this wasn’t the first time she felt uncertainty. 

When first opening her restaurant, Angela felt that the Boston city government didn’t help her with a number of questions she had: What forms should she fill? How long would the process take? What departments did she need to go to?

Both then and now, Angela couldn’t hire people or buy the necessary food products. She needs time to go through resumes and secure her supply. With a little more certainty, she could plan ahead and be ready for opening day and minimize her losses. While nobody knew yet how or when the lockdown would end, the City of Boston can make it easier for her and other restaurant owners to navigate the complicated initial approval and permitting process. 

Over the course of this past semester, our team of five graduate students, in Harvard’s Tech and Innovation in Government field class, spoke to many restaurant owners to understand the challenges they face as they attempt to open a new venue. We brainstormed a number of different solutions and picked a few to test them with restaurant owners. Working alongside employees at the City of Boston’s Inspectional Service Department (ISD), we hope these ideas can be put into practice.

Entrepreneurs like Angela face incredibly tough competition, long hours, and high expectations from Boston residents. Our goal was to help lighten the load they already carry. 

Prototype Testing & Iterating

Because our early interviews revealed that restaurant owners are frustrated with fragmented information across the web and lacked the ability to understand where they were in the process, our first instinct was to build an online portal where owners could upload their documentation once and receive feedback digitally.

However, as we began to think of implementation, we realized that an online portal takes time to build. And it turns out the City of Boston already has a similar portal in place with additional features under development. 

Could there be a solution that provides value that doesn’t require much technology?

After another round of talking with owners, we realized that there were easier ways to reduce the uncertainty throughout the process by: (1) providing a feedback mechanism between them and the City of Boston, and (2) making reliable, easy to find information about the restaurant opening process readily available.

However, we wanted to ensure that these ideas would actually help restaurant owners. Our process was:

• First, we drew out the solutions we envisioned on paper. 

• Second, we refined the drawing into a low-fidelity prototype using a tool called Balsamiq. 

• Then, we ran our first round of testing—we gathered insights into how the owners would use these solutions and what features would make it even better.

• Next, we used the feedback to produce a second usable prototype using a free online survey creator and an online document sharing website.

• Finally, we ran our second round of testing and used that feedback to our near-final product. We went through this process several times to arrive at a point that provided value for restaurant owners, while also being feasible for ISD to maintain and incorporate.

Figure 1: Paper, balsamiq, survey tool feedback survey progression

Our Two Ideas to Support Owners

The goal of these two ideas is for them to be sustainable, meaning they can be improved on and useful in the long-term. The deliverables should be easy to integrate into the City’s existing processes and therefore usable by its different departments.

Restaurant Opening Guide

During our testing sessions and interviews, we unequivocally heard the desire to have a guide that contained each step of the restaurant opening process and the resources available.  Our user guide is a step-by-step online document with links to corresponding documents or websites. It includes a visual representation of those same steps as well as an inspection checklist. The document allows for easy updates by ISD and other departments.

Figure 2: Step by Step Guide

Feedback Survey & How-To Guide 

During our interviews and testing sessions, restaurant owners told us they wanted to give feedback to ISD and the City of Boston about their experience. They described negative experiences—such as troubles with inspectors or conflicting information sources—that they felt would hinder other business owners, and wanted the City to fix the issue. 

Our feedback survey: (1) allows the city to receive constant feedback from restaurant owners in a structured manner (Figure 3), and  (2) provides ISD a guide on how to ensure anonymity and how to use the data to improve internal processes.

Figure 3: Final Feedback Survey

Figure 4 How to-Guide and Data Usage Instructions

Thank you

As our project comes to an end, we reflect on Angela’s experience and the impact that our small time on this problem could have on business owners like herself. We are especially thankful to all the restaurant owners and the ISD team who gave us so much of their time. Our proposed solutions—a restaurant owner guide and a feedback survey— are based on their excellent feedback and suggestions.

While we wish that we could have worked on this project for another semester, we’re confident that our ideas can be taken forward by the City to help Boston’s restaurant community. We hope that our work this semester has provided the City of Boston further insight into problems faced by restaurant owners and that, post-pandemic,  they have new tools to help entrepreneurs open restaurants to once again create a thriving food and culture scene here in Boston.

- Ian Cutler, Gavin Jiao, Amy Villasenor, Nicolas Diaz, Emily Chi

Harvard Field Class Adapts Design Workshop to Social Distancing

For what seemed an endless five minutes, we stared at the screen, trying to read the faces of the Boston city employees on the other end of the video call. Had they understood our detailed instructions? Were they on board with our brainstorming? Did they think we were crazy? 

For the past two months, our team of five graduate students has been working with the City of Boston’s Inspectional Services Department (ISD) to improve the experience of restaurant owners opening a new establishment in Boston. The project, part of a Harvard Kennedy School class on innovation in government, has relied heavily on user research; we’ve spent two months meeting face-to-face with restaurant owners and City staff to understand their experiences with the current process. The next milestone for us was to get all our stakeholders in a room together to brainstorm ideas for improving the process, but then our project ran up against an unexpected barrier: the COVID-19 pandemic.

On March 10th, Harvard announced that the campus would be closing due to risks posed by the coronavirus, and our own group’s work sessions moved online. On March 14th, Governor Baker banned food service in Massachusetts restaurants, causing many to close their doors. And in the middle of March, most ISD employees were instructed to start working from home. 

Without the ability to meet in person, we set about adapting our project. We had planned to generate ideas by having restaurant owners and City employees write proposed process improvements on sticky notes and thematically arrange the ideas on a whiteboard, a time-tested brainstorming technique that is interactive, tactile, and fun. 

Now, we needed to figure out how to moderate a session that inspired creativity, but this time over Zoom and with fewer participants.

We started our meeting with the ISD team over video chat, with a slide deck to structure the process and a virtual whiteboard to jot ideas. We were nervous and uncertain of how effective our new remote process would be. As they  explained their new and increased workload,  we wondered if our project was even relevant anymore. Was the City still interested in our insights from talking  with restaurant owners about the mundane process of securing restaurant permits? 

As we shared what restaurant owners had told us about their challenges with the current permitting process—a lack of clarity over requirements and timelines for permitting, the need to jump from city department to city department in different physical locations, and the inability to communicate their frustrations— we were reminded how hard it is to read people’s reactions over video conference. Were our clients bored? Offended? Confused? We explained the remote brainstorming exercise we had designed–“Grab a sheet of paper and come up with as many possible solutions to the restaurant owners’ issues as you can in the next five minutes”–and waited to see what would happen. 

After five minutes, everyone began to share their ideas out loud and two of our team members wrote them down on “sticky notes” on a virtual white board. Then, we quickly grouped the sticky notes into similar clusters. We were pleasantly surprised to discover significant overlap, agreement, and excitement over potential solutions—such as creating a starting guide that covers the whole process, or digitizing the uploading of documents. As we began to discuss each potential solution, the energy in the hangout room went up. We were seeing virtual eye to virtual eye and getting excited about what we could do.

Sticky notes have become the iconic medium of technologist design sessions because they are big enough to write one, and only one, idea, and their weak adhesive backing allows them to be placed on a wall and easily rearranged. Our experience wasn’t quite the immersively tactile experience we had initially hoped for, but the end result was remarkably similar.

The outputs of two “ideation sessions.” On the left, a window covered in sticky notes after an in-person brainstorming session our team conducted before the outbreak of COVID-19. On the right, a virtual board with virtual notes, conducted remotely with City of Boston employees over Google Hangout.

Digital sticky notes on a virtual whiteboard, collaboratively arranged to identify high value, low investment solutions for prioritization.

We settled on three areas to prioritize for prototyping, that would provide the most value for restaurant owners while also being realistic to implement:

1. A starter guide for new restaurant owners beginning the permitting process. There was widespread agreement by Harvard students and City officials alike that the most effective way to get restaurant owners the information they need would be to consolidate information currently siloed among different City departments and provide an easy-to-understand overview of the entire permitting process from the user’s perspective.

2. A feedback mechanism so the City can continually adapt to user needs. ISD doesn’t currently have any reliable method of hearing from their clients. To ensure ISD continues to hear this valuable feedback and can continue to adapt to meet the needs of restaurant owners, we decided to prioritize designing a mechanism for users to provide direct feedback to ISD.

3. A post-COVID reopening and communications strategy that incorporates the two previous ideas. The challenge our project seeks to solve—improving the experience of restaurant owners opening a restaurant in Boston—was defined before covid-19.. However, many of the challenges that were identified in the normal permitting process, such as the  limited communication between restaurant owners and City officials, are equally or more relevant  during the current pandemic. We therefore decided to develop a user guide and a feedback mechanism specifically for the eventual process restaurants will need to go through after the crisis has subsided. This will help the City as it seeks to support local businesses at this trying time.

Overall, our initial virtual co-creation session was a success.  We’ve figured out how to digitally collaborate with stakeholders in a way that feels organic and interactive and, while it’s not quite the same as being together in the same room, it gives us an acceptable path forward.. 

The next step will be for us to start prototyping these three ideas and testing them with restaurant owners. Buoyed by the success of this first virtual session, we are already starting to think of creative ways to conduct these user testing sessions remotely. With just a few weeks left in the semester, we will rapidly try to learn what works and what doesn’t with  our proposed solutions. We are looking forward to this final sprint with renewed morale.

- Ian Cutler, Gavin Jiao, Amy Villasenor, Nicolas Diaz, Emily Chi

The Challenges of Opening a New Restaurant in Boston

Veronica, a neighborhood Business Manager in the City of Boston’s Small Business Unit, should be the first point of contact for restaurant owners opening a new venue. Her team’s mandate, after all, is to provide small business owners with the tools and guidance to successfully start, grow, and build a business in Boston. However, t many entrepreneurs do not know about her office and are left to navigate the process of opening a restaurant on their own—which can be especially challenging for new and aspiring restaurant owners. She explains that when trying to open a restaurant, “...you have to touch several departments and agencies, and that’s the problem: everyone’s process and requirements are different.”

Veronica acknowledges that restaurant owners get frustrated because there is no single entity or individual who has all the information they need—which is spread across a number of different departments.

This disconnect between the City and some of the people they serve is something we’ve uncovered as we continue exploration of the problem and interviewing restaurant owners and city officials. As a team of graduate students in Harvard’s class on innovation in government, we are spending a semester working with the Inspectional Services Department (ISD), and the City of Boston at large. Our goal is to improve communications between the City and constituents in order to provide an accessible, efficient, and effective restaurant opening experience for restaurateurs while ensuring compliance with existing regulations. In our first blog we uncovered some early evidence of restaurant owners’ frustrations. Now, we’ve put our boots on the ground and spent time face-to-face with people at various points of the restaurant opening process trying to answer critical questions.

The Journey of Opening a New Restaurant 

What are the major pain points that restaurant owners experience during the permitting process? What are the positives of their experiences? What does the process look like from inside the City of Boston and how do city employees operate? 

Getting the full picture of the inner workings of the City gives us important context as we seek to  understand the restaurateur (that’s a fancy word for someone in charge of opening and running a restaurant). Talking with Veronica intrigued us: Why do restaurant owners feel the need to seek private contractors just to navigate the process?

To answer these questions, we were able to do 13 interviews with restaurant owners and 1 with an expert restaurant investor. We also did 2 visits to restaurants and had owners fill out our email questionnaires. Additionally, we went to ISD’s office and spoke with several staff members. We then took the data gathered from interviews and distilled the high and low points experienced by restaurant owners along the way.

In parallel, we attempted to go through the process of opening a restaurant ourselves. We started by searching online. We were overwhelmed. We couldn’t find the ‘Start a restaurant’ link on the ISD website  (Figure 1). The same was the case for the Google link for the permitting process (Figure 2).

Figure 1: The top result from Google search for “How to open a restaurant in Boston” led us to the City of Boston website, but towards a missing page.

Figure 2: The overall results from Google search for “restaurant permitting process Boston” had old links and resources.

After seven weeks of working on this project and talking with various stakeholders, we still do not feel like we have a clear idea of what the process looks like and would not be able to confidently walk a new owner through it. 

Our current understanding of the steps involved (user’s journey in design speak) when opening a restaurant is comprised of at least the following:

1. Identify and secure location of choice;

2. Identify required licensing and permitting by searching online;

3. Fill out needed forms (e.g. food service permit, liquor license, common victualler license);

4. Go to the Inspectional Services Department and City Hall to submit printed and filled out forms in person;

5. Pay for permits in person at the Inspectional Services Department for health and building inspections;

6. Call ISD between 8-9 am while inspectors are in office (before they go out into the field to do inspections) in order to request an inspection; and

7. Wait for inspectors to come by the restaurant while the restaurant remains closed.

This is certainly not a definitive list and both the order and number of steps is something that we are still researching. Moreover, different projects may skip some steps or require additional ones. 

What We Found

We distilled our research into 6 insights: 

The manual, disjointed, paper-based process is difficult for owners to navigate

“If you go in there blind, you’re gonna be lost.” “You need to get a paper receipt in person for everything.” -frustrated owner

“When we asked ISD how many permits it takes they told us they don’t know” -our student team

There is no single source of truth: there is conflicting information across departments and online resources

“The most frustrating part...is being passed on to different departments for a simple question and not being able to get a straight answer.” “You get bounced from one desk to another.”  -frustrated owner

Information asymmetry leads to difficulty communicating between owners and inspectors

“The inspectors don’t have knowledge about modern kitchens so they miss things they should be focused on but they also focus on things that don’t matter anymore with updated tech.” -restaurants expert

Owners use assistance of lawyers and consultants to navigate the process but not everyone can afford it

"I can't imagine being a single person doing all of this because you may find out too late that you can’t open because there is something you had to do that you didn’t realize.” -restaurant general manager

"If I could save the money and do it myself, I absolutely would. [Lawyers] charge about $700 per hour." -first time restaurant owner

Unpredictable delays impose a financial cost on owners

"You need to hire staff, train staff...The guessing game of understanding how much time, how many inspections, how many re-inspections – that process is incredibly difficult to navigate.” -first time restaurant owner

Inspectors are constantly switching between the role of educator, regulator, and success partner

“It’s not their job to be your friend, it’s their job to make sure you did things properly.” -restaurant general manager

“We want the owners to succeed.” - ISD Inspector

Next Steps

Ultimately, the public doesn’t care about distinctions between City departments; they just want to get stuff done. For owners, the lack of a centralized place to get answers can become especially frustrating in situations when contradictory code requirements between different departments exist—for example, between fire department permitting and building permitting. 

Our next steps are to work with ISD and the City of Boston to collect more data around existing gaps in our understanding. Additionally, we will go through several ideation phases to brainstorm solutions that will provide Boston restaurateurs with a better opening experience. Our approach will be to get as many ideas as possible on the table before choosing the best one. 

Note: Names used throughout our blogs will be changed to protect privacy.

- Ian Cutler, Gavin Jiao, Amy Villasenor, Nicolas Diaz, Emily Chi

Improving the Experience of Opening a Restaurant in Boston

Future restaurant owners will have to fill a handful of permits, and inspections, before their grand opening.
(Photography courtesy of bostonbuildingresrouces.com)

Yoshi, a new Boston resident, stood in awe in the middle of his empty, soon-to-be vibrant restaurant. He couldn’t believe that his dream of opening an authentic ramen restaurant was on its way to becoming a reality, but a few worries remained: he had spent months raising capital but realized he was going to spend time and money on lawyers to fill out the permits needed for the opening. His mentors warned him of stressful months ahead.

Small business owners are an important part of Boston’s economy, yet opening a new restaurant is perceived by many to be a hassle. Entrepreneurs have to accomplish a lot of varied tasks to open a restaurant, from finding a property to hiring workers to complying with health and safety regulations. The City of Boston’s Inspectional Services Department (ISD) serves as their counterpart inside the city, helping prospective owners understand their requirements to open a restaurant, and inspecting new restaurants before they open.  ISD also regularly inspects existing restaurants. 

Every Boston resident and visitor depends on ISD’s oversight when they eat in each of the 3,046 currently licensed restaurants in Boston. Normally, this service is invisible: we expect what we eat to be safe.

How can the City of Boston be a useful partner to restaurant owners while ensuring compliance with food safety regulations and improve residents' safety? How can ISD, in particular, better communicate requirements and expectations with restaurant owners to make their experience working with the City more predictable and minimize frustrations where possible? Those are the questions that we—a group of Harvard students working with the City of Boston—will attempt to answer this semester.

Understanding the new restaurant owner’s experience

In our early research, we uncovered negative comments of ISD’s customer process in different online forums such as Google’s review section. The reviews usually display frustration with the overwhelming number of touchpoints and the lack of empathy in its customer service. Many of the complaints sound reasonable enough: more consistency in the scheduling and more clarity in the instructions. From this perspective, the relationship between the city and restaurant owners needs mending.

A restaurant owner dissatisfied with the scheduling system and the complexity in navigating the process.

Our Team

Our team consists of five students from across Harvard’s graduate schools. We represent the schools of business, public policy, design, and engineering. Collectively, we bring experiences in government, private technology companies, data privacy, product management, software development, and user-experience design. As part of the Tech and Innovation field lab taught by Nick Sinai at Harvard Kennedy School, our team is spending a semester working with the City of Boston to research the experience of opening a new restaurant. Based on what we find, we will propose and test user-centered improvements to the experience, as well as develop strategic recommendations for the City of Boston.

Amy Villaseñor is a second-year student at Harvard Business School. Prior to business school, she spent four years working as a software engineer at Qualcomm Technologies. Outside of her everyday work, Amy is passionate about providing access to quality education in low-income communities. She is excited about working with a government partner in order to make a difference in the life of Boston’s business owners.

Emily Chi is a second year Master’s in Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School. Previously, Emily worked in a Bay Area tech company on consumer privacy and data ethics policies.  Last summer, she worked with local government offices in Toulouse to study the social impact of digital services and new tech products on rural communities. She is most interested in understanding how new technologies can be utilized to increase access, equity, and racial justice.

Gavin Jiao is a first-year student in Master’s in Design Engineering at Harvard University. He worked as program manager at frog design Shanghai studio, where he facilitated teams with backgrounds in design, business, and technology to deliver innovation projects. Gavin is excited about improving the inspectional service experience in Boston by bridging his experiences in human-centered design and program management.

Ian Cutler is a second year Master’s in Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School. A Massachusetts native, Ian spent seven years in San Francisco working at Google, where he managed an innovation team focused on improving the performance of internal company services like HR and Security. Last summer, he worked on Governor Baker’s Strategic Innovation Team, where he led projects to automate manual processes and measure the impact of state benefit programs. Ian is excited to apply his process improvement experience to make municipal services easier for Boston residents to access.

Nicolas Diaz is a Master’s in Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to coming to the United States, he worked for the city government in his native Santiago, where he served as coordinator for institutional innovation and modernization. He is currently writing his thesis on building capacity in the public sector for transformative innovation. Nicolas is looking forward to seeing what happens when you combine a user-centered design to improve one of the core functions of municipal government.

Next Steps

Over the next couple of weeks our team will be interviewing restaurant owners from diverse backgrounds—including women, minorities, and first-time owners. We will ask them about their experiences and encourage them to share frustrating or positive interactions.

To get a first-hand perspective, we will shadow city officials inspecting a planned new restaurant. Our hope is that this research gives the City of Boston insight into how to maintain rigorous health standards while also empowering restaurant entrepreneurs.

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If you have experience with opening a restaurant in Boston and are willing to share your experience, please email us at dpiteamisd@gmail.com.

Note: Names of the restaurant owners in this post have been changed or hidden to protect their privacy.

- Ian Cutler, Gavin Jiao, Amy Villasenor, Nicolas Diaz, Emily Chi