Simplify Your Life: Reduce Your Restaurant Menu Items

In these times of economic uncertainty, it is easy to get lost in trying to do many things all at once. A good example is restaurateurs trying to manage their inventories, their staff, their operations, their books, their sales, their marketing… Do you know anybody like that? I thought so. You need to simplify your life and focus on just a few basic core competences to make your restaurant the best it can be to stand out...

Menu Pricing’s Theory Of Relativity

In a previous oldie-but-goodie Back Burner post I talked about menu engineering – how to put together a menu that effectively markets your dishes and makes customers want to spend more and buy high margin menu items.  One thing that post did not touch upon, however, was how to price and organize those prices...

Green Restaurant Tips: Serve Sustainable Seafood

Seafood is a wonderful delicacy that helps form the backbone of thousands of restaurants. Seafood is healthy and great tasting, and customers love treating themselves to seafood when they go out to eat. Unfortunately, overfishing has increased exponentially in the last 25 years, resulting in the collapse of a full third of the world’s fisheries. Many more are in ...

Who Wants Some Iridescent Shark?

That thing doesn't fit in my aquarium! Sustainable seafood has become an increasingly important issue for restaurateurs as the green restaurant movement gains ground.  This is coupled with increasing evidence that the world’s wild caught seafood supply is in serious decline. The result has been a renewed search for...

Restaurant Management Tips: Engineer Your Menu

The menu is often the first thing your customers see when they decide to eat at your restaurant, and sometimes might even be the thing that convinces them to come inside in the first place. But you’d be surprised how many restaurants spend little or no time on menu design, and as a result miss out on easy ways to help servers sell top menu items. Some examples: Deemphasize prices on your menu! Drop dollar signs. Anyone who has...