How to Take & Work Orders Efficiently. In Your Restaurant, Bar Spain.
One of the secrets of running a successful Bar, Restaurant on the Costa del Sol is:
Train your staff to operate to a system.
Especially when it comes to taking down customers orders!
There is nothing worse for slowing down the flow rate from the customers table through the kitchen and finally back to the table, than a set of staff who have no common system for working/processing orders.
I worked for Ford Motor C0. when I was young. I was one of 14,000 staff. when I first arrived I couldn’t understand how the output of 14,000 office staff could be co-ordinated. Here’s how it’s achieved in a nut shell:
They have a massive office solely dedicated to writing systems/procedures. These people who ensure that 14,000 staff can operate together in a highly efficient way are called “Systems Analysts”.
To run a bar/restaurant successfully which employs staff, you must become your own Systems Analysts.
Here’s how we take and process orders to a strict system:
Any item on our menu is described in detail, so all staff must be taught the same system of short hand and must use it at all times when taking down orders
The short hand must be simple. The simpler the better!
e.g. Our short hand looks like this:
Cheeseburger with onions, chips and a side salad and a gin & tonic for table 4, would be written as follows:
4.
1* ch/b+ons+chips
1*sal green.
Everybody who works in my pizzeria uses this system.
The advantages are:
- Can be written quickly
- Can be read quickly. This is very important for the chef as he may have as many as 30 orders hanging on pins in front of him, at any one time. He can read them quickly and hold them in his memory easier.
- Don’t have to decipher several different ways that staff choose of writing down the same thing.
- No mistakes in what arrives at the customer’s table.
- Speeeds up the work flow
Creating Sales Costa del Sol
When running your bar restaurant in Spain you and your staff can take one of the following approaches to selling your product:
-
Passive approach
-
Proactive approach
The passive approach is used my most bar restaurants and is quite simply explained as follows:
Yourself or your staff approach a table, give the customer a menu and then come back and ask them what they would like to order. As they order you write it down and that’s basically your sale for that table.
The proactive approach is morev aggressive and does generally result in winning bigger orders from each table.
This is how it works:
- Approach the table and introduce and establish yourself with a greeting and a little banter. (Your customers immediately feel just a little more special, because you have made the effort to give them a little attention, which they will interpret as feeling accepted.)
- Hand a copy of the menu to each client.
- When you return to the table to take the order, always suggest extras like garlic bread, a side salad a starter if they haven’t ordered one. (A lot of people are watching their figure or their pocket and just need a little push from you to make them order an additional item.)
- Wine. If they order a cheap wine always try to get them to up grade a little. (I always say “If you don’t mind me suggesting it, the Tierra Blanca is a much nicer wine and it only cost 4 euros more”. About 50% of clients will follow your recommendation.)
- If they finish the stater quite quickly, as you collect the plates just try saying the following. “The pate is really good today. Would you like to try some” I sell a lot of pate and servings of garlic bread with Mozzarella topping this way.
- Clear empty beer and shorts glasses away frequently and ask if the customer would like another.
- At the end of a meal always ask if your clients would like a brandy etc.
If you and your staff are trained to think of taking orders in a bar restaurant on the Costa del Sol as selling your product, your turn over will be quite a lot more than if you are simply passive.
