Tag Archives | restaurant operations

Listen To What Customers Aren’t Saying

Tweet Some of you put customer comment cards on your tables and ask that guests fill them out and let you know how you’re doing.  I could put money on the fact that you receive more complaints on those cards than praise.  Unless someone was given absolutely outstanding service or the food was just phenomenally [...]

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A Glossary of Restaurant Lingo, Slang & Terms

Tweet Here’s one of the most complete guides to restaurant lingo, terms and slang – including some that our readers left in the comment section below. Click these links to jump to a letter to look up a term: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P [...]

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Clean Restroom

Dirty Restaurant Restrooms Say Dirty Kitchen To Many Customers

Tweet A recent poll conducted by Harris Interactive reveals that 88% of people who encounter a dirty restroom at a restaurant think this reflects poorly on the sanitation of the rest of the establishment, including the kitchen and food preparation areas.  Of those, a full 29% said they would never come back to a restaurant [...]

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The 4 R’s of Driving Server Sales

Tweet The tired old maxim “your servers are your salespeople” is as true today as it ever was, but just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean you have armed the front of your house with every weapon they need to drive your restaurant’s profits. Really, there’s no understandable reason why servers shouldn’t be some of the [...]

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Why Spreadsheets Are Your Restaurant’s Best Friend

Tweet I would have to rate a computer as a must have for a Chef, second only to a good set of quality knives. While utilizing a POS (Point of Sale) System and knowing how to use it can be enormously useful to a chef, I think spreadsheets are the cat’s meow. Before I migrated [...]

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4 Tips To Keep “Inventory Shrink” From Making Profits Smaller

Tweet Every month your restaurant spends thousands of dollars buying food.  More than likely, it’s the second largest expense on your balance sheet after labor.  And every month, that inventory of food products might be “shrinking,” meaning a percentage of it is disappearing due to either unintentional waste or very intentional theft. When you’ve got [...]

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Portion Control: Are You Losing Money To Food Waste?

Tweet Imagine for a second that you run Coca-Cola instead of your restaurant.  You sell millions of cans of soda every day, and you’re making a decent profit.  Now imagine that as the founder and owner of Coke, you never bothered to standardize the size of each can, so some cans are 12 ounces, others [...]

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Adventures In Restaurant Maintenance: Replacing Equipment

Tweet “Which _____________ do you recommend?” This is a question I have been asked countless times by owners/managers that operate the restaurants I have worked in. The real question they are asking is: “What equipment will run the longest and have the fewest breakdowns and cost the least to fix?” The answer to such a [...]

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9 Restaurant Management Tips

Tweet As you know, restaurant management is more than a full time job.  It means long hours and lots of hard work.  Here at The Back Burner we understand that restaurant managers and owners are always on the go and that every day is a challenge to meet revenue goals, keep both customers and employees [...]

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Restaurant Management: Why Nick’s Isn’t Just Another Pizza Joint

Tweet Inc. Magazine did an article recently about pizza and pub owner Nick Sarillo, a restaurateur with blue collar roots based in the Chicago area.  Sarillo has built his business based upon a corporate culture that emphasizes customer service and employee development. Sarillo’s Nick’s Pizza & Pub is another example of how the labor environment [...]

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