Starting, Owning and Marketing A Restaurant Blog|Starting and Owning a Restaurant - Construction, Planning, Marketing, Opening and Managing a New Restaurant

For those of you following the adventure to open a new restaurant, there are many roadblocks, frustrations and wasted time. However, one of the fun things is developing food items, ideas and testing for menu items. While this new restaurant will be a second location of an existing concept, there will be differences. Our demographic is slightly different and we want to have signature items at each location.

To develop your menu, it starts with ideas and, of course, your theme. The new restaurant is a slightly upscale breakfast and lunch operation (as a side note, we call lunch “Blunch”, since we serve breakfast entrees all day).

The steps are:

1. Start wilth ideas that you accumulate. Some may be stored in your head for years. Others you will come across as you move forward. Write them down. We have chosen to share the thoughts with a page dedicated to menu ideas. Click here to see some of the beginning thoughts.
2. Each menu item has to be tested and re-tested to create a recipe that will work in the volume of a restaurant kitchen. Just because you can produce a dish at home doesn’t mean it can be efficiently produced in a large volume.
3. Make sure suppliers can furnish the ingredients and your inventory and equipment can support the item.
4. Ask for opinions from someone who will share the honest thoughts with you. Family and friends don’t always give the best test results.
5. Don’t wait until two weeks before your opening to begin the process. You will have even more pressures just prior to opening. In this case we have at least 6 to 8 weeks.

Remember, your job is to meet or exceed the guest’s expectations. Don’t let your ego build recipes that only you may like. You can visit this link on a regular basis to view the ideas as we add to the list.