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“Too Many Orders in My Bar Restaurant Spain”

Too Many Orders in My Bar Restaurant Spain

What To do when Food Orders Start to Block-Up the Kitchen?

You can easily find yourself in this situation, especially during July and August.
It is very bad for your restaurant to accept too many orders at any one time. Too many orders flowing into the kitchen can only mean two things:

• Customers will have long waits for their food and you will loose valuable return trade. (Customers with small children hate to eat in places where the service is slow.)

• When a kitchen gets too busy mistakes get made, the food quality drops-off and incorrect orders arrive at the customer’s table. Result, the loss of valuable return trade.

How do you deal with this situation, once it has occurred?

If the situation has already occurred, it is too late to stop poor service becoming the result i.e. customers waiting too long and getting fed-up and even angry.

All you can do in this situation is a bit of last minute damage control:

• Instruct staff to tell all customers that there will be a wait involved in preparing their orders and in the case of customers who haven’t ordered also stress the unavoidable long wait.
  

• Instruct staff to stop taking orders for main courses for as long as it takes for the kitchen to unblock.
• Staff must slow everything down. Take more time on drinks orders, chat to customers.
• Only where customers refuse to wait to have their order taken, do everything you can to get them to have easy to prepare or pre-prepared starters.

The Proper Solution to Back-up of Orders in the Kitchen:

Correct Training

All staff should know to control the kitchens work flow

When you know that it’s really busy:

• Clean the table as guests arrive and strike up a bit of chat. Tell them you’ll be right back to take their drinks order (slowing things down.)
• Serve their drinks 5-10 min later and apologise (slowing things down.)
• Give them the menus 5 min after you have served drinks (slowing things down.)
• 5  min later take order for starters.
• As they finish their starters take the main orders and Tell Them There Will Be a Delay and apologise.

If you follow these simple procedures everything will flow smoothly, your customers will feel that they are important to you. They will realize that the wait is unavoidable and maybe they wont even notice that you have strung everything out. A lot of customers enjoy this more leisurely continental approach and the end result is that they’ll probably become Return Customers.

Children : The Gateway to Increased Bar Restaurant Profits

Cater for Childrenand the Whole Family Will Increased Your Bar Restaurant Profits

Are You Going To Cater for Children?

When you plan your bar or restaurant business, you’ll need to decide whether to aim any of your products or any aspect of your services at children.At one end of the extreme you may want to create a sophisticated atmosphere, which is designed entirely for the adult sector and where children are not encouraged. At the other end of the continuum you may have a beachside bar or restaurant where children make up 50% of your trade.

Our particular bar favours the middle way where children are encouraged as customers, as long as they are supervised, or are at least well behaved, and don’t disturb the adult customers.

Offer Items That Appeal To Children

We get quite a lot of trade by offering items on the menu that will attract children. Basically the way it often works in our commercial centre (which is next to a hotel), is that families wander around the centre looking at all the various menus. Our menu contains foods that really appeal to children alongside those that are specifically for the adult palette. When children see that we have pizzas, sausages, egg and chips then they will sway the parents to take a table at our restaurant.

Most parents want peace and quiet, so they usually will eat where their children are going to be happiest.

We fully understand businesses that choose not to cater for children, but our own marketing policy is to aim for the widest sector possible, so for that reason we include children in our targeting.

Aim Your Marketing at Children

My advice then is to have a few items on your menu that children will really be attracted by i.e. hamburgers, pizza or perhaps sausage egg and chips. Also always try to have a basin of boiled sweets or some very cheap puzzles and games available too. We give out little gifts or treats, either directly to children or we give them to parents to take home to their children. This is all valuable marketing, which will help to increase your turnover and to build your business.

The way to get parents to spend in your bar/restaurant, is to win over the children first.

NB: Always check first with the parents that it’s OK to give sweets to their children.