A New Restaurant

When I was writing about value the other day, two news stories caught my eye.   The first story was about Burger King lowering the price of their double cheeseburger to $1 to battle McDonalds having a double cheeseburger on their Dollar Menu.  People would have a hard time justifying the value of paying the old price at BK when they could go across the street and get a similar sandwich a Mc D’s for a buck.

The other story was about Pizza Hut promoting a limited-time offer Double Deep Pizza just in time for the holiday parties.  The new pizza claims to have 50-percent more cheese and double the toppings than the Lover’s and Supreme pizzas that are currently offered.

While BK tried to create value by lowering their price, Pizza Hut is trying to create value by increasing the size.

What is your restaurant doing to be perceived as delivering value?

I’ll let you in on a little business secret; the one thing your customers are looking for that will bring them back to a restaurant again and again, is value.  If you can deliver value, you will be successful in this business.

The hard question is, what is value?

Value may or may not mean low prices.  Value may or may not mean large portions.  It might be both, or it might be neither.  Like beauty, value is in the eye of the beholder.  It means different things to different people, and could mean different things to the same person depending on the circumstances.

I have two teenage sons.  When our family goes to a restaurant value is typically defined as large portions at a reasonable price.  When my wife and I are on a date value is more about atmosphere.  We don’t go to any one restaurant for both.  When we are looking for price and portion value we go to one restaurant, and our dates are at a different restaurant. 

My last job at a restaurant was in a place that just opened up.  The food was decent, the dining room was clean and comfortable, but the comments I heard usually fairly good, but they typically ended with, “I paid too much for what I got.”  They didn’t perceive it to be a good value.  It wasn’t about the price per se, it was about what they got (or didn’t get) for the price.  I have been out with my wife and spent nearly $100 for dinner for two, and felt like it was worth the money.  On the other hand, we had lunch together today, spent around $15, and felt like it wasn’t worth the money.  It’s about the value.

I wrote in an earlier post that people do not want to be disappointed when they go to a restaurant. This goes hand in hand with that concept.  Occasional value will not keep you in business.  You have to deliver value day in and day out.

Figure out how you are delivering value, then do it consistently.

Are you ready for the Christmas shopping season?

I’m not talking about you personally; I’m talking about your restaurant. The Christmas season is a time when restaurants can really thrive. People are out, in the mood to spend, and they will include a stop at a restaurant as part of their shopping experience. It is a great opportunity to make a first impression on a lot of new customers.

I’ve written before about how much less expensive it is to keep your existing customers as it is to attract new customers. This is your chance to make that advertising pay off. If you were able to get a location for your restaurant that is near a major shopping hub, you could potentially attract a flood of new customers. Your job is to be ready to serve them when they arrive.

This always brings up the question, “How much food should I order so I am prepared for the rush?” Unfortunately, that is something you have to figure out for yourself. You need to weigh the cost of ordering too much food against the cost of running out of food during the busiest season of the year. While you don’t want to have food in your cooler going to waste, you don’t want to disappoint people who could become your customer base for the years to come.

Don’t forget to take the time to make sure your staff is prepared for the rush. Even though the Christmas season is meant to be a time of joy and peace on Earth, the shopping season can be a time of stress and lack of patience. Your staff has to be ready to deal with a dining room full of people that are tired of crowds and impatient about just about everything. If your crew is not prepared, tempers could quickly flare, and ruin any hard work that you and your kitchen have done. It is a balance; great food and great service. One without the other is not enough.

Tis the season. Make sure your restaurant is ready.

One of the things your customers will weigh when deciding where to eat is whether it is more important to them to have a great meal, or if it is more important to avoid being disappointed.  The reality is, most of your customers will choose the second option,  They’re willing to forego a great meal in favor of avoiding a disappointing experience.  That is one of the reasons for the success of many of the national restaurant chains.

A tetm I have heard numerous times when discussing the national restaurant chains is “consistent mediocrity.”  While the meals may not be great, they are consistent in what they serve.  You may not get a fantastic meal, but you will not be disappointed very often. 

When you go to one of the national chains you know what to expect when you walk through the doors; a decent meal in clean, comfortable surroundings.  The food is good, and the service is usually adequate.  You know that your dining experience probably will not be a disaster.  These chains can deliver because they can afford to hire qualified chefs that develop the menu in the corporate test kitchens, then test the new meals in limited target markets before placing it permanently on the national menu.  They also have the time and resources to develop very good training programs for their staff.

The one thing that is typically lacking in the national restaurant chain dining experience is a meal that makes you say, Yes, this is what eating is supposed to be like!” 

One big advantage your restaurant has over the national chains is the ability to successfully incorporate local flair into your meals.  With the national chains the food is the same whether you are in New York City or Dallas, Texas.  There is very little room for regional differences.

Where national restaurants aim their menu choices to hit a broad national target, you can be more adventurous and try new and exciting recipes.  You can take advantage of local ingredients and flavors, and come up with wonderful meals that may have a more limited appeal, but will knock the socks of your customers that fall into that particular niche. 

If you want your restaurant to be successful, you need to build a reputation that you will deliver both.  Everything you offer on your menu should be consistent.  Your customers dining experience should not change based on the time of day, or who is working in the kitchen.

You should also take advantage of the ability to run specials.  Be creative,  Give oyour customers an experience that will have them telling their family and friends for weeks to come.

I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for coming to A New Restaurant over the last several months.  It has been a pleasure writing for you, and to hear from you from time to time.  I am looking forward to the coming months and years, and getting to know some of you even more.

I have some ideas for some posts that I’m sure you will find interesting, and hopefully will help you to be more successful in your restaurant ventures.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Jim

Last week I had the opportunity to go to the Fabulous Food Show in Cleveland to see Food Network personalities Alton Brown (Good Eats, Iron Chef – America), and Duff Goldberg (Ace of Cakes).  It was well worth the trip.  My wife and I had a great time.  I’m not a big fan of standing in long lines for tiny samples of food, so I didn’t really enjoy that part, but it was very entertaining, and there was some very good food there.

 Seeing the food displays got me thinking about the difference between the way food is advertised at restaurants and the way it looks when it gets to the table.  For me, it is very disappointing when I order a meal that looks so wonderful on the menu, but when it is plated and brought to the table, it’s a mess.  I know that most times the pictures on the menu are studio productions, and usually not even real food.  Still, too often the food you are served is too far from what is promised.  It not only looks different in the way it was prepared, but many times the portion sizes are completely different.

Long term success in the restaurant business, or any small business, comes by consistently exceeding the customers expectations.  You spend a great deal of money in marketing and advertising to get the customers in the door.  Why would you want to waste that money by disappointing them once they get to your restaurant?

It comes down to two things: training and inspecting.

One thing that successful restaurants do is develop a training program.  This doesn’t mean stick them on the line and hope they pick something up from the people they are working with.  It means having a program that walks them through the different parts of the job, and lets them know how to do the job the right way.

I can hear the arguments already: “We need help on the line immediately.  We don’t have time for a formal training program.”  Well let me ask you this, do you have the time to deal with angry or disappointed customers?  Do you have the time to fix mistakes coming out of your kitchen on a busy Saturday night?

You can’t rely on your existing line to properly train a new person, because that usually results in a progressively weaker line.  Over time if workers are left to their own devices, they begin to develop bad habits.  They learn shortcuts in how they prepare and plate the food.  They stop using the proper serving utensils and measuring tools, and they start guessing at portion sizes because they think they know what a proper portion looks like.  When the new person joins the line, they are never taught the way it is supposed to be done.  They are taught the shortcuts, and then they develop even more shortcuts of their own.  Now they get to teach a newer person, and the problems get progressively worse.  Over time, no one will even remember what a proper portion size is supposed to be.

Set up specs on how each dish in your restaurant is supposed to be prepared and plated, and then teach your cooks how to do that.

You also have to inspect what comes out of your kitchen.  Most employees will rise to the level of expectations.  If you don’t expect much, your kitchen will not deliver much.  If you expect sloppy plates with improper portion sizes, that’s what you’re going to get.  Raise your expectations.

And don’t fall back on the “We don’t have time” excuse again.  Do you think 5-star restaurants have more time in the kitchen on a Saturday night?  No, they don’t.  What they do have is a management team that expects the food to be prepared and plated properly, and they do not accept anything else.

You staff does not want to make more work for themselves.  They do not want to have to make a meal again that they have already prepared.  Their preference would be to get it right the first time.  After a few incidences of meals coming back because they weren’t properly prepared and plated, the line will start being a little more careful about what they send out.

You can send great meals out of your kitchen.  You just have to make sure your line knows how to deliver what you expect them to deliver.  Your customers will appreciate the effort.

One area that kills the success of many newer restaurants is controlling food cost. Although it is one of the biggest expense categories in the budget, a lot of owners don’t know how to get it under control. This is especially true of new owners that do not have a background in restaurant work.

While keeping customers happy and keeping your restaurant full of customers is critical, it’s only part of the picture. If your kitchen is making you lose money, more customers may not be the solution. It reminds me of the old joke, “I lose money on every order, but I’m hoping to make up for it in volume.”

There are really only two ways to increase your profits: increase income, or reduce your costs. Raising prices probably isn’t the answer for this problem. In fact, many times raising your prices will cause you to lose customers, and your income will decrease. That leave reducing expenses as your only other option.

The good news is, there are things you can do to get your food cost under control, and that will make an immediate impact on your bottom line.

1.) If you offer employee meals, make sure you have some way to track what was eaten. Require your staff to run their meal check through the register. As a general rule, no food should leave your kitchen without a check to account for it.

2.) Create a waste log. Every time a piece of food is thrown away it should be logged. If you cut your own meat, it should be weighed before and after it is trimmed so you know how much yield you are getting. If your kitchen staff knows that someone is tracking the amount of food that is being wasted, they will be more careful.

3.) Do not allow your staff to eat the mistakes. It’s not unusual for a cook to make a mistake just so they get the free food. You will see this especially if there is a limited employees menu. There will be a lot of mistakes made on items that the cooks wouldn’t normally be allowed to eat. Set up a bin where mistakes are thrown. When a mistake is made, it should be written into the waste log, and then thrown into the bin

4.) Control your portion sizes. Even if your cooks are over-portioning just a little bit, it can have major impact on your food budget. It amount may not seem like much when your looking at a single meal, but even a fraction of an ounce when multiplied by a full days service can become fairly significant. Proper utensils on the serving line are a must. If you have portioned ½ cup of rice, get a #8 scoop. Do not allow your cooks to estimate the proper portion size. Consistency is critical. One way to control portion sizes is to pre-portion food items. Invest in a quality digital scale, and then teach your cooks to use it.

5.) Teach your staff the proper way to handle, prepare, and portion the food. So much food is lost because cooks are left on their own to figure out the correct way to do things. They learn to do it wrong, then train someone else to do it wrong, and the problem starts to snowball. Pretty soon no one is controlling your costs, and the failure of your restaurant is almost guaranteed.

With good procedures and training, it really isn’t hard to reign in runaway food cost. It isn’t always easy to try to break bad habits and establish new ones, so at first you will need to be diligent in watching your staff in this area, but over time, as beeter habits and procedures are established, it gets easier. The great part is, controlling your food cost will have an immediate positive impact on your profits, Which will greatly increase the chances for your restaurants success.

As a restaurant owner, you have to remember that when it comes to staff performance, you reap what you sow. You are the leader of your organization, and it is up to you to set the tone and the expectations for how your staff performs.

This puts a lot of pressure on you. Your staffs behavior and their performance is your responsibility. If meals aren’t coming out of the kitchen correctly, or your servers aren’t delivering excellent customer service, guess who’s to blame. And don’t try playing the “You can’t find good help these days!” card. There are plenty of restaurants that are doing it right, and they’re drawing from the same talent pool that you’re drawing from. In truth, the problem usually isn’t the people that are available.

I know that there are some people that are truly bad employees, but they should be the exception and not the rule. If the rest of your staff is performing as they should, the bad apples are easy to sort out and replace. The problem is, how do you seed out poor performers when they’re all poor performers?

The key is to not let things reach that point.

One well-worn cliché became well-worn because it works: “INSPECT what you EXPECT.” What that means is, if you have expectation about the way your staff is performing (if you don’t have expectations, you should), you need to watch them to make sure they are doing things the way you want them done. If they are not performing to your standards, you need to do whatever it takes to make them accountable.

Two truths you need to keep in mind:

1.) Most of your employees want to do a good job.

2.) Some of your employees are still kids trapped in a grownups body.

What that means for you is, 1.) most of your employees will do what you want them to do if you make it clear what you want them to do, and 2.) if you don’t hold them accountable, they will do what they want to do.

Once you get a crew that is living up to your expectations, handling the bad apples is a lot easier.