General

A restaurant has a lot of elements that lead to success: location, management, concept - and that's just the start. Restaurants, especially smaller locations, need to look at what franchises have to offer.

But how do you stand out as a smaller restaurant that isn't backed by a major corporation? Service. Your food. Your staff. You have the advantage of being able to provide a level of service that keeps customers coming back.

Restaurant owners must leverage relationships with a food distributor to ensure that they have the ingredients they need to serve their customers. Supplier selection is key, and you may work with a variety of local food distributors to increase your availability to ingredients.

What makes a good restaurant? Sure, the food is the main draw, but customers also want to feel welcome and important. You can serve the best food in town, but if your restaurant isn't customer-friendly, you'll have a hard time winning customer loyalty.

Fortunately, you don't have to hire ambience personnel to make your restaurant customer-centric. Follow these tips on how to make customers feel valued.

Here we are, up to our collective elbows in foul weather, flannel and family. However, the holidays are an exciting time to prepare and present your very best to beloved patrons, Christmas fair visitors or family. If you are a restaurant owner, a home chef, or just hosting your first fancy get-together, we've got the recipes and glassware to make them (and we mean you!) shine. 

A commercial range is the lifeline of a kitchen, and it's this range that will handle the majority of your restaurant's cooking. But whether you're starting a restaurant from scratch or replacing a range, there is a lot to consider.

Purchasing a restaurant helps alleviate a lot of the initial issues when starting a restaurant, and you may consider buying a bar / restaurant that you frequent often. When you go into a local establishment and find that it's always filled with patrons laughing and drinking, it may seem like a good choice for a purchase.

But there are a lot of questions to ask when buying a business.

Restaurant food waste can quickly lead to inflated food costs. If a chef has made a special stew on Tuesday and there is a lot of leftovers, discarding this food, while it's still good, will lead to restaurant waste.

You're throwing money away if you're not trying to get profit from it.

Restaurant owners are many things, but most are not architects. The owner will have an idea in mind for their restaurant layout and design, but while the design may look nice, it may be an architectural disaster.

Simple mistakes in a restaurant's floor planning can lead to less efficiency and more overhead for the owner.

Everyone loves to dine out. Even more, everyone loves take out. Or, ‘take-away' in other cultural terminology. But, when you consider how many people on our planet order take out, and how many disposable plates are being used, do you ever think about where those plates end up? Landfills? The ocean?

VerTerra did.

Rude customers are often the clients from hell, and handling them requires a different approach based on each situation. Today, we're going to learn how to deal with these patrons, and why some guests have a reason for being the way that they are.

When it comes to kitchen organization and safety, labels are crucial. The right kitchen labeling system can make your kitchen more efficient while reducing the risk of foodborne illness. But restaurant food labels are more than just an organization hack - they're a requirement by the FDA.

Learning how to properly label your food will provide your restaurant with long-term benefits and save you money along the way.

A meat slicer is designed to reduce food prep time. The perfect slicer for your commercial kitchen depends on your needs. When buying a commercial meat slicer, you’ll find that there are a lot of variables:

• Size
• Price
• Safety features

Today, we’re going to cover some of the basic tips every restaurant owner can follow when choosing slicing equipment.

Looking to sell more wine bottles at your restaurant? It's true that guests usually prefer wine sold by the glass, but with the right strategies and a knowledgeable staff, you can boost your wine-by-the-bottle sales.

Customer feedback plays a crucial role in the success of a restaurant. Everything from the ambiance to the quality of service, music, food quality and temperature in the dining room can affect a visitor’s desire to come back to your establishment. The goal is to make each customer’s experience as positive as possible, and feedback can help you reach that goal. Reviews, another form of feedback, will also help improve your reputation and get more visitors through the door.

There's one piece of equipment that every restaurant needs: a professional blender. Whether you’re making smoothies, cocktails or whipping cream, the best blenders will make quick work of chopping and pureeing.

But how do you find the best commercial blender for your restaurant? There are several things you need to consider before making your purchase.

Restaurants have a lot of overhead, and one of the areas where costs are often overlooked is labor. You have to pay your staff, and if your scheduling is off, you may have staff sitting around being paid while not working much.

When you learn how to manage a restaurant, you should be taught how to reduce labor costs.

Restaurant renovations can be profitable, increasing sales between 7% and 20% when done right. A restaurant remodel can cost between $100,000 and $1 million, on average, but this is a major overhaul.

When restaurant remodel costs are this high, you have to worry about keeping the establishment closed for a long period of time. The larger the renovation, the more money that's lost due to the restaurant being closed.

Whether you run a casual restaurant, fine dining establishment or a food truck, there's one thing that your establishment will need: dinnerware. It may not seem like something important, but the right dinnerware will add to the customer's dining experience and give them something to talk about.

Restaurant dinnerware should be chosen carefully. In addition to aesthetics, you want to make sure that your dishware meets customer expectations while staying in your budget. 

Health inspectors are not knocking on your door in hopes of closing down your restaurant. Restaurant inspections are conducted to make sure that your restaurant is following state and local regulations. It's a matter of public safety.

For the new restaurant, health inspections can be stressful and frustrating because you do not know all of the food codes. But after you have a general idea of the health codes and what is recommended, you can work on boosting your restaurant inspection scores.

The catering industry is worth $52.3 billion, and 64% of that goes to a restaurant catering. People are now spending more money on restaurants than groceries, so that figure will only increase in the coming years.

If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to add catering to your restaurant’s list of services.

There’s a reason why restaurants go to great lengths to cater to their regulars: they’re the backbone of the business. Sure, it’s important to attract new customers, but it’s even more important to keep those customers coming back.

As a restaurant owner, it’s your goal to convert as many first-time guests to loyal regulars as possible. Great food and service is a good start. But loyalty programs can give that extra incentive for customers to come back through your doors.

Some restaurant owners don’t know how to control the cost of food properly. They put prices on entrees and appetizers, don’t track profit margins correctly and have no clue about the whole food cost control thing.

But wholesale prices are rising. Tariffs are also hitting some foods, especially avocados, very hard. If you don’t have controlled spoilage measures in place, it’s time to start implementing some.

McDonaldPaper Restaurant Supplies hosts a free lecture from a professional chef.

This class is perfect for restaurants, bakeries, catering companies, and private chefs who want to build better both on- and off-site catering and events operations.