Restaurant Equipment: 4 Factors For Calculating Total Cost Of Ownership

There’s always a significant amount of cost involved whenever you buy a new piece of restaurant equipment.  Those costs only continue as that equipment ages in your restaurant – from energy use to repairs, the consequences of new equipment will be around for a long time after you’ve written the check to purchase. Of course, restaurant equipment makes you money as well.  Without that ...

How To Battle The Evil Reservation No-Show

Reservation no-shows are a frustrating experience for any restaurant.  On an especially busy night like New Year’s Eve or Valentine’s Day, they can really cost your restaurant some serious money.  Not only do you have to depend on walk-in traffic to fill those seats, but there’s a good chance you turned down other customers looking for a reservation leading up to that high-traffic day. So how do you fight the evil no-show? Traditionally,...

Beg, Borrow, Or Blow Your Food Cost

In a restaurant, especially a newly started or taken over one, it is highly recommended you get to know the other area food facilities and develop good relationships with them.. While this may seem quaint, sort of like moving into a new neighborhood and making nice with the neighbors, there is a very good reason for doing this. Yes, technically, other area restaurants are competition, but they can also be allies and assets. Similar...

This Isn’t Your Mother’s Happy Hour

The happy hour has long been the domain of college bars, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and after-work watering holes.  These establishments always understood a cardinal rule in driving business: a busy place is a place people want to be, and the easiest way to fill up a bar or dining room early is with a happy hour special. Of course, many restaurants focused on good food, excellent service, and solid advertising to drive business,...

Why Spreadsheets Are Your Restaurant’s Best Friend

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 to MS Excel I was a MAChead and used a program called Clarisworks which had a similar spreadsheet program. I couldn’t have done without and been as organized...

Restaurant Glassware: Use Style And Function To Sell More Drinks

Every restaurant takes good food presentation seriously – after all, no one wants to eat something that doesn’t look absolutely delicious.  You carefully place garnishes, make sure the entrée has the proper color, and serve everything on a stylish plate with matching silverware. So why aren’t you paying the same amount of attention to your bar presentation?  Top mixologists from around the country agree the glassware...

How To Give Your Customers Value

In yesterday’s post I talked about the new reality facing restaurants, namely, the consumer expectation of great value.  This doesn’t appear to be changing despite an uptick in consumer spending.  A number of voices in the food service industry have been advising restaurants to provide value to their customers...

Better Sales Don’t Change Your Restaurant’s New Reality

Restaurants take heart: change seems to be coming.  After two years of declining growth and slowing spending, it appears that consumers are finally going to spend more this holiday season, not less. A flock of reports have been circulating in the retail and food service worlds pointing to positive growth on the horizon for both industries.  As the Thanksgiving holiday approached last week, many restaurateurs held their breath,...

POS Systems: Love Them, Learn Them, And Please Don’t Ignore Them

I didn’t learn to program my first Point of Sale system until I actually become a head Chef at a restaurant and the POS system impacted my food cost. I taught myself how to use it, as there was no operating manual and none of the waitstaff or the owners knew how to program it either. After two weeks of not being able to program in specials and receiving hand written dupes with orders written on them, flank steaks coming through...

80/20 vs. 4: Restaurant Marketing By The Numbers

The Pareto Principle has long been hailed as the Holy Grail of marketing, the one rule by which all marketing efforts succeed or fail.  The principle itself is pretty simple: 20% of your customers drive 80% of your sales.  There’s always a core group of loyal customers who not only spend money in your restaurant, they bring their friends,...