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

When you open a new restaurant with a relatively soft opening, you hope sales grow through word of mouth. This is the strongest form of marketing you can do. If your product and value is acceptable to the customer, plus you meet service expectations, increasing sales will be the reward.

As I indicated in the previous post, the weekend would tell the story if our message was spreading throghout the community. On Saturday we reached a new plateau with $2000 in sales, despite the season’s coldest weather and no seating outside. Happy we are, but the work isn’t done.

As sales increase, both good and problematic things occur. The good outweighs the bad in our case. Here is a list of things we will continue to work on:

• At several points during the day, we were on a wait. We have to subtlely find ways to turn tables a little quicker. Things like pre-bussing, slower coffee refills after guest has finished eating and quicker table setup will help.
• Notably the new servers are having a few problems ringing correct descriptions of the food they want. Better menu knowledge and consistent input into the kitchen will help ticket times.
• Any restaurant strives for consistency. Servers need more direction on the items they prepare at their station. Salads, topping waffles and plate garnish was inconsistent.

The good part of the day was the kitchen’s ability to meet reasonable ticket times, even at the peak of business. While we have potentially another 25 seats outside during pleasant weather, it appears we have the capacity in the kitchen. Another busy day will confirm that.

Another positive was relatively few problems with any returned food, customer complaints or server errors. That means training and diligence in policing each ticket is paying dividends.

As business increases, so does the need for inventory. We have been trying to keep our Inventory Form up to date as product came in the door. The link above shows an Excel spreadsheet that is color coded based on various items we want to note. One color may be for a particular supplier. Price highlighting means a date when last price confirmation was made. Your form can be modified according to your needs.

Your ability to maintain inventory levels is important because:

• Your restaurant cannot  be out of menu items on a regular basis to avoid customer disappointment.
• Over ordering can lead to waste and spoilage.
• Ordering the proper quantities negotiated with suppliers will keep costs in check. Make sure your supplier has a copy of your inventory sheet for their records when placing an order. It will simplify the process and reduce order mistakes.

Overall, the first eight days of operations have been very gratifying and helps to alleviate some of the reservations we have had about opening a restaurant in this economy. We still have a lot of work to do, but we feel we are on the right track.

It is difficult to believe I haven’t written a post in over a week. The week is like a whirlwind that never stopped. To detail all that has occurred will take several posts to explain the details and activities that lead up to the opening day photo on the right.

Besides the holiday immediately after receiving our restaurant license, many of the suppliers were not delivering on their scheduled days. To complicate matters even further, both sister restaurants had about tens days of exceptionally high sales.

Fortunately we were prepared to hire and train employees, test menu items and get the doors open.

A day by day log and activity detail will be posted soon. Right now our exclusive goals are to work out the “kinks” that always creep up on you on opening day.

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.