Restaurant management : the three pillars of success and differentiation

Restaurant management is a difficult task and a mix of a variety of elements. However, success is always built on the three pillars bellow that you need to take into consideration when staring or when improving your business. 

Pillar 1 – The Culinary Offer

It is not at all enough to serve a great meal for overpassing the challenges of the catering sector, a sector where customers are better and better informed. It is not only about selecting the freshest ingredients or knowing the recipes. For succeeding, you must take into consideration the following aspects:

• The Quality – the main characteristic of your menu must be the quality of the offer. Still, it is not only about best products and mastering the recipes. For offering an extraordinary experience, you need to combine the perfection of the flavour with the fragrance and the plating. Follow this rule and the customers will want to try your foods.
• The Rentability –the quality of your courses shouldn’t mean at all that they should not be profitable, but the opposite. You need to determine the products and the ingredients that are most consumed and most profitable. Optimal stock management will always generate benefits.
• Innovation –even if you are having been very successful by offering a regional product that got famous for tourists or a course that your local home customers come back for, you need to regularly add new products so that you keep step with market trends and have long-term success.

Pillar 2 – The Service

It is no longer enough to have a kind waiter, who smiles all the time, checks if the customer is happy with the food and thanks at the end.  Nowadays, if you want your business to distinguish itself from the competition, your service must be extraordinary and memorable. How will you do that? Well, by paying a great deal of attention to the following details:

• A great motivation of the team. An unhappy waiter will never be able to properly attend the customer. Your employees are human beings who need to be listened to for them to be able to carefully listen to your customers. For creating the ideal team, you must bring them to the right level of motivation both financially and by simply appreciating their efforts.
• Excellent knowledge of the products. A customer will happily choose a course if the waiter knows how to describe it in detail and with honesty. All your waiters must know by heart the menu and not only, but they must also be able to describe and recommend the courses. Make sure they all benefit from the right training before they start. Organise regularly tasting sessions with the whole team (cooks and waiters) for everybody to familiarise themselves with the culinary offer.
• Personalised attention. Each customer is different and special, and they need to be listened to and treated with special care. Each of your serving staff must observe the customers, analyse them, listen to them so that they can offer a personalised and unique service that is truly customer-oriented. If your customers are properly listened to and served according to their needs, they will definitely come back.

Pillar 3- Ambiance

When we talk about ambiance, we think about all the physical elements, the “mise-en-scene” of the culinary offer. From the moment that the customer enters the restaurant, everything contributes to the emotion and impression: the decorations, the comfort of the seats, the cleanliness of the place, the music, the toilets, the quality of the napkins… Maybe thousands of details that our complex brain remark and associate and that contribute to the overall satisfaction.

In order to create a great ambiance, you need to take into consideration the following:

• The authenticity. Ask yourself why a customer would prefer your restaurant to another one. What makes your establishment unique and special? With the right decorations and music, you can create an inviting and welcoming place. You must always remember that people go out to relax and enjoy.
• Comfort before all. It is useless to create an ultra-modern establishment where customers do not feel comfortable. Do not ever give up comfort for spectacularly looking items. Ideally, you will create a unique experience that is still comfortable.
• Added value. Your restaurant already offers a good quality menu, a memorable service and a harmonious ambiance, then the cherry on the cake could be something extra, for example, live music or dance.

We thank you for reading, we wish you good luck and we invite you to discover our super offers of restaurant supplies that are essential for your success.