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Running a bar well is no different to doing anything well. Simply stated it boils down to: What you put in is what you get back and usually in good measure too.
My advice is to give as much of yourself as you can to your customers. Be prepared to give help if someone has lost their bag or locked him or herself out. It’s very helpful if you can keep all the useful phone numbers handy, so that when a client of yours has a problem you can call a locksmith for them or anybody else they might need.
By being helpful you are demonstrating that you are a nice person and you will attract regular customers to your bar in that way, because people will like you.
Be a good listener: If you listen to people’s stories and problems, they will really appreciate it and will repay you by coming to spend money in your bar regularly.
However, it’s not a good idea to sit down at a customer’s table, as you will get stuck there and will have to neglect your other customers, so just listen to a sentence or two and then say “Excuse me! I must do this or that.” By doing this you create the illusion that you are listening even if you are only picking up half the story.
The point here is that your customer will feel happy that they’ve been given a chance to share their story with you and they will go home happy.
If you are observant, you will notice around closing time that kitchen staff from restaurants all over UK and Spain, are busy throwing away perfectly good food , which they failed to sell by the end of the day.
This is foolish behaviour and it means that the kitchen is not properly organized.
Nobody would come out of a supermarket and throw away what they’d just bought. So why throw away food from a bar restaurant at the end of the day? One might just as well throw money into the bin.
When we first started running our high quality fast food restaurant some 20 years ago, I have to admit that we too would end up at closing time with food stuffs that we would throw in the bin, but by the time we had been running our own place for six months we had mastered the problem and from then on virtually nothing got thrown away.
OK! So how do you get around having to throw away food, which let’s face it is the same as throwing away your profits?
To learn how to plan the quantities of perishable foodstuffs, that you are going to prepare for each session, of course takes months, so what I’ll do today, is give you a list of pointers to help you get started with planning an efficient kitchen, which doesn’t have to throw good food in the bin:
- Eat your own food! In our bar and restaurant and in other restaurants where we know the owners personally, the owners and the staff sit down to a meal at the end of a shift and eat a meal based on the perishable food that has failed to sell. Often this will be white fish or seafood, but usually we sell out of everything, so the problem doesn’t occur.
- Always prepare a little less than you think you are going to need. When you’re new to catering you will tend to produce too much food, but with a little experience you’ll soon learn how much of each item/dish you need to prepare to keep your kitchen running efficiently.
- Fast Food! One of the reasons we sell fast food, is that there is usually little or nothing to throw away at the end of a session. A la Carte restaurants face a much bigger problem, which explains why they have to charge a lot more for what they do.
- Batch Production: some things like fresh sliced mushrooms or chopped onions, we produce in batches, so during a busy session, we might prepare those items 2 or three times in order to keep up with demand. (We keep the washed mushrooms and peeled onions in a fridge and chop them up when we are running low.)
- Display Cabinets: Try to avoid having to display food if you can, as food that has been on display will have to be binned if it hasn’t been sold. Anything mayonnaise based will only last one day, even in a display cabinet.
I hope that you find these tips useful and that they boost your profit too!
