A New Restaurant

John Foley at The Restaurant Blog made some very interesting observations about how restaurants handle being busy, and it got me thinking about my own experiences.  I’ve seen and heard being busy as an excuse for a host of problems from meals coming out slow, to food being cold, to servers messing up the entire order.

When you opened, didn’t you want to be busy?  So, now that it’s happened, why aren’t you ready for it?

Now I understand that there is a difference between being busy, and getting slammed.  What I’m talking about is your typical Friday night busy.  You know what to expect because your dining room is full every Friday night, you have the kitchen staffed, and there are plenty of servers on the floor, and yet partial orders still sit under the warming lights waiting for the rest of the dinners to come up.  Customers are irritable because it’s taking so long for the meals to come out, and the waitress hasn’t even come around with a coffee refill. (By the way, I see this as an almost unforgivable sin.  Even if nothing else is working right, you should at least be able to keep the coffee cups full.)

Take a long hard look at what is going on when you get busy.  Where are the bottlenecks occurring?  Is it a work-flow issue, or is your menu too extensive for the size of the kitchen, would different equipment help?

The point is, if you’re falling behind every time the dining room gets close to full, there is a problem.  If you want to stay busy, you need to find the problem and fix it.  You’ve worked too hard to fill your restaurant.  Now that it is, don’t let it go to waste.