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

We are officially a statistic. A licensed restaurant in Florida. After 5 grueling months of construction, delays, inspections and all the emotions that went with the daily hurdles, we received our Certificate of Occupancy from Pinellas county on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 and our state restaurant inspection and licensing on Wednesday, December 31, 2008.

Now the real work starts! Our tasks in the next few days before the doors open include:

• Hiring and training staff.
• Finalizing menu.
• Ordering smallwares, food and dry goods.
• Testing recipes.
• Implementing our marketing plan (some of which started weeks ago).
• Developing procedures, recipe manual, POS materials and forms.

There is nothing more difficult than marketing your operation and putting butts in seats. New restaurants are a dime a dozen with an average of over 55,000 started each year in the United States. Unfortunately, an equal number close each year. While the many details listed above are necessary to open the new restaurant, the priority is to make certain we start communicating our message to potential guests.

Choosing suppliers, pricing menu items and organizing storage and focusing on each step to create maximum efficiency for staff will reduce waiting time for customers and increase table turns on a busy day.

Each plate of food must go through the line in an orderly progressive manner without retracing steps as menu items are produced. The end of the process is the server window where food is ready for delivery.

As you get within a few weeks of opening a restaurant, you must choose your primary food supplier carefully. Price and service are the key elements. One is important as the other. For instance, a supplier that has the lowest prices may not get deliveries consistently on time. Having the product when you need it is a customer service issue that is more important than price.

One of the other critical comparisons when it comes to price is to use the top 20%, by dollar volume, of your purchases. You may be buying ten cases per week of potato chips. That may seem like a lot. However, those two flats of fresh strawberries per day cost a lot more. The minimum invoice for deliveries is another factor that can go into your decision.

Most of the major suppliers like Sysco, US Foodservice, PFG, GFS and many more have services such as:

• Menu development help.
• Product samples.
• Chef assisted recipes.
• Various reports on your ordering habits.
• Regular food shows to highlight new items and product variation options.

If you run a restaurant that has an extremely high volume of a particular item, you may be able to negotiate a contract price through the processor or manufacturer’s representative. Another possibility is to buy a large quantity of an item and have the wholesaler store it until you are ready for weekly delivery.

Your relationship with the food supplier is critical to your growth and operations. They can keep you up to date with trends, new ideas and an insight to what is working for other suppliers.

As good as the large major food wholesalers are, my experience has been that their produce is generally sub-par. In most markets there are companies that specialize in fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs that extend beyond what the large companies supply. When you are looking for that purple fingerling potato or that true Japanese wasabi, you will have to find a specialist. The small companies rotate their inventory faster and have quick access to unique items. Many are buying from local producers native to your area of operation. Make sure produce suppliers deliver in refrigerated trucks, have basic products that allow you to order things like mayonnaise, eggs and dairy items along with fresh produce.

Other suppliers may include fresh seafood companies, paper companies, specialty meats, bakeries and others. Remember two things - you can use them as a source of information and stay a step ahead of your competition by keeping reliable lines of communication open. However, you are still the customer. Your needs flow directly to customer service issues. Service is essential to the relationship.

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.