As a restaurant owner, you realize that diners don’t just want great food, they want it served in an exquisite setting. They don’t come in merely to satisfy their hunger, they come to satisfy their sense of aesthetics, too. While they crave delicious food, they relish a wonderful ambiance as well. In addition to delicious food and a wonderful ambiance, excellent service provides the finishing touch to a great meal.
So, if you want to run a great restaurant, you need to have all three elements in place: delicious food, a wonderful ambiance, and excellent service. The closer you can get to enhancing these three elements, the more likely your business will flourish beyond your wildest imagination.
Let’s take a look at all three factors:
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Delicious Foods
In order to create delicious foods, you need more than just superb chefs. You also need to give them a kitchen that allows them to do their work well.
A highly-functional working environment makes a huge difference to productivity and performance.
To illustrate this idea, imagine, for example, how productive you feel managing your restaurant from a back office with poor lighting and second-hand office equipment that often fails. Despite your solid work ethic and your passion for managing your business, your dismal surrounding gets to you. Contrast that with working in a well-lit office that has the perfect furnishings and efficient office equipment. When you work in a pleasant, functional environment you naturally do better work.
Your chefs regard their kitchen as their working environment. A spacious, well-lit kitchen with modern equipment will inspire them to create culinary delights. What chefs enjoy is a highly-functional kitchen. For them, this is the perfect working environment. What’s more, it’s easy to supply your chefs with what they want in their kitchen. You don’t need to spend days sourcing the right equipment. Instead, simply check out the Mission Restaurant Supplies website and review thousands of high-quality kitchen tools, gadgets, equipment, and appliances.
By shopping online, you are taking full advantage of using modern technology to boost your restaurant business.
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Wonderful Ambiance
It’s not easy to come up with wonderful ambiance. One way to come up with the right design elements is to think about layout, concept, design, and window displays.
A good layout allows people to comfortably walk through the restaurant without bumping into other diners or servers. You need enough space for diners to walk into the restaurant, get to their tables and leave with ease. You also need enough space for staff to go back and forth between the kitchen and the dining area quickly. Once you know how much room you have available after positioning tables and chairs, you can make practical decisions about how to to improve circulation. If you have to work with limited space, then you may have to position the counter in a way that does not crowd your available space.
A good concept should relate to the neighborhood. Your concept should separate you from other surrounding restaurants. It has to be a balance between what people find interesting and what people find comforting. If you have an ethnic foods concept, your interior design should reflect aspects of that foreign culture.
A good design depends on your concept. Choose decorative features that enhance the atmosphere you are trying to create. For example, at Disneyworld in Florida, when you walk into the San Angel Inn Restaurante, you feel you are dining in a 17th century hacienda located at the base of a Mayan ruin. While you may not have a Disney budget, you can benefit from the same idea of getting your concept and design to work in perfect harmony with each other.
Finally, a good window display will improve business. An impressive window design will attract the interest of people walking by who may not have originally intended to dine at your restaurant. It should be large enough to give potential diners a chance to see inside and it should not block out too much light.
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Excellent service.
After you’ve gone to the trouble of creating a delicious menu and designing a beautiful restaurant, the last thing you want is to ruin diners experience by offering slow or indifferent service.
The secret to providing excellent service is timing. In an article entitled, How to Improve Your Restaurant’s Service: Timing Is Everything, Managing Editor of Serious Eats Maggie Hoffman says, “As a restaurant owner, one of the primary facets of training your staff should be trying to make sure they coordinate the timing so your customers can enjoy each dish without feeling rushed or ignored. A fun night out can mean that restaurant guests return—and become regulars, while a poorly-coordinated evening can result in a customer never coming back.”
Easy, But Not Simple
Sadly, most restaurants fall far short of implementing these three elements of success. Often, owners have simply not thought about these things. Yet even those who do understand the value of delicious food, a wonderful ambiance, and excellent service fall short of implementation. The main reason is that these ideas are easy to understand, but not simple to apply. This is actually a huge advantage for you. If you do what most restaurant owners fail to do, you will blow away the competition.
