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

While waiting for the ups and downs of construction, you start to toss around ideas for decor. Our theme is southern home cooking. That is pretty wide open to interpretation and allows a lot of latitude. Our existing restaurant features cooking antiques, funky signs and relatively bright colors. We intend to stay relative true to the concept, but you can easily go astray.

We tossed around new ideas like a wall mural of surrounding attractions, before and after pictures of a bridge being built nearby and even 3 dimensional objects that protrude from the wall as part of a painting or mural. While all of these were fun and somewhat related, we lost our focus. A second location of a successful restaurant concept needs to remain true to the theme. There are many reasons to develop some sameness to the brand. They include:

• Why change a model that has worked?
• What does the customer expect when walking in the door? Some of those customers will have visited the original restaurant and others have expectations based on the southern cooking theme. Neon and chrome, common in a New York deli, won’t work here.
• There is also a psychological aspect of keeping the customer engaged with the surroundings. Guests who enjoy and peruse the decor tend to believe the wait for food or service is shorter than a customer who is bored.

While we had fun for a week or two trading ideas, the focus returned and we are goiing back to the cooking antiques, funky old signs and cheerful colors. The new 15 pane French doors look very much like the entrance to an old southern mansion.

Lose focus and have some fun, but go back to your concept to make sure the customer doesn’t wind up with something less than expected.

As i mentioned in a previous post, the most frustrating part of building a restaurant is waiting on permits and regulators to do their job. Even though we are in a terrible economic slump for building, the time frames for the issuance of permits has remained the same (4 to 5 weeks). It is sad, costly and common.

We have kept busy with projects since the completion of demolition and the filing of the restaurant plans.  In some cases, we have done some construction that was not permitted, but we took the chance of not getting caught. We have now laid tile in the front half of the building, leaving only the kitchen and bathrooms when we get started. Double french doors replaced the old glass commercial door. The plumber has even made cement floor cuts, ready to begin underground drainage as soon as the permits are issued.

Tomorrow will be the beginning of the week. On Friday we were told the “trades” reviewers should be done with the revised plans. It didn’t happen. Hopefully Monday will be the day.

We have also;

• Drafted our restaurant opening marketing plan and will finalize (and post) as soon as we can plug in dates.
• Ordered many of our small equipment when found on sale or a bargain.
• Booths are being built and awaiting an installation date.
• The kitchen hood is ready to be placed when the permit is issued.
• Built an outside enclosure around the back door and walk-in refrigerator/freezer.
• Assembled many of the forms we use in the other two restaurants.
• Tested several products for possible inclusion on the menu.
• Picked wall coverings and beginning to buy some cosmetic decorations.

We are ready to build the restaurant!