Hello and thank you for stopping by. I am in the process of moving everything over to www.foodingle.com. Please stop by and check it out. Contact FooDingler through that site and please give me some feedback.
I am creating an online hospitality/food enthusiast community, and I would love every one’s input and feedback.
Thank you for your time.
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“We will never be able to change the winds, but it is within our power to adjust the sails.”-Roberto Goizueta
“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.”-Ronald Reagan
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”-William Arthur Ward
“Its not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog.” Mark Twain
“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein
“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.” Lyndon B Johnson
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Sir Winston Churchill
“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” Confucius
I was waiting for a connecting flight in the Atlanta airport at about 8AM and decided to grab some breakfast in a food court like area with three restaurants.
When I was finished paying for my breakfast I started looking for a place to sit (it was pretty busy) and a gentlemen waived at me and motioned me to a table, so I went and sat down at the table. I must say, I was surprised as I have never seen anything like this before in this type of setting. He was very cordial, he smiled and said hello. As I ate my breakfast I noticed several other employees in the same uniform with towels in their hand to clean tables with, just like the other gentlemen that sat me had. The entire time I was there, not one of them moved, or wiped down any tables.
However, the gentleman that directed me to an open table was hustling around, wiping tables, directing other customers to empty tables and he was even pre-bussing tables! This guy clearly understands and gets what hospitality really is. It was great to see that a lot customers recognized this as well as I saw several customers tip him.
I was just totally blown away by seeing this, because I rarely see this level of customer service from employees in full service restaurants anymore. At least not with the enthusiasm that he had.
I wish I had a few just like him.
The host staff is the first and last impression your guests have of the restaurant.
It is very important that your host staff is genuinely outgoing, with a great personality and can make your guests feel warm and welcome. If all this is not genuine, the guests will see right through this and it will be meaningless.This will make the restaurant feel very inviting and that first impression they make on your guests will be lasting.
They must possess great knowledge of the restaurant and including good menu knowledge. Since part of their job is answering the phone, they will be asked various quests that they must be able to answer. Otherwise, they have to get a manager for every guest question and this will take them away from managing the operation.
It is very important when the guests are leaving that the hosts say good bye, ask them how everything was and tell them to have a wonderful evening.
If the Host staff is in tune with the guests, they help acknowledge any potential unhappy guests and get the manager involved so they do not leave with their negative experience as the last thing on their mind.
It is very important to keep your staff motivated. There are various ways of doing this, but sometimes a simple quote posted on the board or talked about at line ups can help. Below is a list of quotes that I like.
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started” Mark Twain
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle
“It is hard to fail, but it worse never to have tried to succeed.” Theodore Roosevelt
“The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.” Theodore Roosevelt
“Simplicity is the key to brilliance.” Bruce Lee
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” Henry Ford
“You will never possess what you are unwilling to pursue.” Mike Murdock
“He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has masters himself is mightier still.” Lao-Tzu
“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.” William James
“To move ahead you need to believe in yourself…have conviction in your beliefs and the confidence to execute those beliefs.” Adlin Sinclair
“People underestimate their capacity for change. There is never a right time to do a difficult thing. A leader’s job is to help people have vision of their potential.” John Porter
“People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.” Andrew Carnegie
“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” Jim Ryun
“Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.” Stephen R. Covey
A good way to build sales within the four walls of the restaurant is to run server contests that focus on selling items that can increase your check average, help get rid of high inventory items before they go bad (this works great in the case of over ordering which also helps combat high food cost), help increase sales in an area that may need a little help such as wine or liquor, and can also help build sales on slower nights.
If you provide great contest prizes this can have a huge impact on employee morale and can help generate competition amongst the servers and once everyone is on board it can be fun and everyone wins.
Here is a list of some on the contest I have done or seen done in the past:
Bingo-fill out a sheet of paper with a bunch of squares listing the menu items or drinks you would like sold. The first one to complete it wins.
High category sales, such as appetizers, wine, dessert etc…
Highest check average.
Wine feature contest for a month based on highest sales. Usually, three winners; first, second and third place.
Here are some the prizes I have offered in the past.
No closing duties or side work.
They get to write their own schedule for the next week.
Trade outs with other restaurants or local businesses.
Beer, wine and liquor purveyors can also give some really good prizes.
Anytime you can get your employees to compete with each other, can create a positive fun atmosphere where they can win some really cool prizes it a great morale builder.
A lot of food quality, consistency, and cost issues are due the fact that cooks often do not know how, or forget to do the proper conversions when cutting a recipe to a smaller batch, or increasing a recipe to a large batch. Believe it or not, they also forget that the is a big difference in ounces by weight and ounces by volume. Here are some basic measurement conversions.
1 T. = 3 t.
1 C. = 16 T.
2 C. = 1 PINT
4 C. = 1 QT.
2 PINTS = 1 QT.
4 QT = 1 GALLON
1 GAL. = 128 FLUID OZ.
8 FLUID OZ. = 1C.
1C. = .24 LITER
1PINT = .47 LITER
1QT. = .97 LITER
1 GAL. = 3.8 LITERS
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”-Aristotle
“The road to success is paved with well handled mistakes.” – Neiman Marcus
“Everybody makes mistakes. It’s what happens next that matters.” – Danny Meyer
“It’s easier to keep a customer than get a new one.”-Allan Keller
“Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.”-Sally Gronow, Welsh Water
“Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it.
It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”-PETER DRUCKER
“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect.
They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.”-DONALD PORTER
“Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game.
Service wins the game.”-TONY ALESSANDRA
“People expect good service but few are willing to give it.”-ROBERT GATELY
“Choose to deliver amazing service to your customers. You’ll stand out because they don’t get it anywhere else.”-Kevin Stirtz
“Customer service is not a department, it’s an attitude!”-UNKNOWN
“Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.”-KATE ZABRISKIE
“In business you get what you want by giving other people what they want.”-Alice MacDougall
“Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.”-Jeffrey Gitomer
“If you don’t take care of the customer someone else will!”-Raffaele Ciarla
“Under promise and over deliver.”-Toby Bloomberg
“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”-Damon Richards
How many times have you heard a server or cook say this guest or customer is impossible? What about a manager? Ever heard them say that? Ever felt like that yourself?
There are times that it seem no matter how hard you try, can not make some customers happy and you end up comping the entire check which sometimes can be rather large. Yes, sometimes it seems like they are just looking for something for free and some people probably do that. What really gets me is that employees and management alike try to find excuses to not comp anything for the guest. A lot of times it’s not even us they are upset with, they are just having a bad day, or are fighting with their spouse and every little thing seems to be wrong and we just seem to get the bad end of the deal. It is our job to make sure they leave happier than when they came it.
What employees never think about and what management seems to forget is that we have spend marketing or advertising dollars somewhere to try and get them in the door. How bad can they hurt us with negative word of mouth comments about us? A lot!
If your customers have access to send comments to your corporate office and most companies allow that access, how much time and money does it cost to take of them once they get to corporate? A lot more than if you could have taken care of it in house.
In fact some of our most loyal customers are one that we made a mistake with and went above and beyond the competition to make it right.
When it comes to taking care of the guest, this is one area that can absolutely set you apart from the competition.
