Open for Business

Tips, resources and fresh ideas for running a successful restaurant

Tips, resources and fresh ideas for running a successful restaurant
Open for Business  September 9, 2019

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Extraordinary at Work: Take Restaurant Hospitality to the Next Level with Our New Guide

Hospitality is your business – creating the most delicious and memorable experiences for guests in your restaurant. It’s about doing work that matters to you and your guests, and building real relationships that make them feel taken care of. 

It’s also a ton of work. Our business is building the tools that help you make it look easy. That’s why OpenTable and Venga joined forces to give you everything you need to offer the ultimate hospitality. 

Through decades working with the best restaurateurs in the industry, we’ve learned a few things. We’ve seen first-hand how a great operator can turn a party of four into four VIPs, and make every guest feel like a regular. We created a new guide to showcase three key ways restaurants can take hospitality to the next level and deliver extraordinary experiences for guests, sharing success stories from our own community. 

In our new ebook, you’ll learn how three outstanding restaurateurs use customer relationship management technology to uplevel their hospitality. Get best practices and actionable tips from:

  • Boka Restaurant Group One of the top chef-driven restaurant groups in the U.S.
  • Garces Group Created by Chef Jose Garces, named 2009 Best Chef in America by the James Beard Foundation
  • Farmers Restaurant Group A group owned by more than 47,000 family farmers

We hope these successes inspire you with new ways to enhance hospitality and make every experience extraordinary. Get the guide here!

 

GuestCenter for Groups: 3 Ways Running Multiple Restaurants Just Got Easier

Running multiple restaurants is hard work. There’s a unique set of challenges that comes along with delivering personalized hospitality across different locations and concepts, each with unique personalities of their own. To do it well requires an organized management team, expert-level staff training and development, and a clearly communicated vision that permeates company culture. That’s why we’ve developed new features for GuestCenter, OpenTable’s flagship hospitality platform, to make it seamless for operators to manage multiple restaurants within a group. 

GuestCenter for Groups provides restaurateurs one centralized platform for an entire business. Operators can control users and access, making sure the right people have the tools they need; get consolidated reservation and guest data across locations; share guest data between locations, to optimize service; and see key performance trends with easy reporting tools. 

These enhancements will save you time, illuminate performance trends and fluctuations, and help you deliver better hospitality to every guest who steps inside one of your restaurants.

We talked to two top groups – Denver-based TAG Restaurant Group and Earls, with locations in the U.S. and Canada – to learn how they approach growth, take on challenges, and strive to perfect operations. Read on for three key ways to optimize group management, plus the GuestCenter tools that will help them along the way.

  1. Control users and access at scale.

Restaurant management can be organized in countless ways. At TAG – the brainchild of Chef Troy A. Guard – there are three Directors of Operations, each overseeing a different segment of the business. (One manages the fine-dining concepts, while the others guide the more casual restaurants, some which have multiple locations.) All sit in an office together, and communication between management is critical to the company’s success. 

“As a company, we’ve grown so fast in the last five years,” says Sam Haupt, Director of Operations for TAG Burger Bar, Bubu, and FnG. “We’re still very young. As directors, we all talk together, and we try to get all the GMs together. We have quarterly meetings with every single manager.”

Earls, a pioneer in casual fine dining, has 70 locations across the United States and Canada, and management is broken out into 10 different regions. On a corporate level, there’s a whole team of Vice Presidents, regional directors, and regional chefs. Even with multiple offices and time zones, however, there’s plenty of communication that needs to happen between teams. 

“All are very involved with each other – there’s a lot of movement that goes on within management between the locations,” says Kristina Melnyk, an IT specialist with the company. 

With the myriad combinations of team structures and locations, making sure the right people have access to the right tools and information is essential to the success of the business. The new GuestCenter for Groups tools save operators time by:

  • Providing a centralized view of every user in your restaurants and group
  • Quickly giving users access to multiple restaurants. 
  • Allowing the ability to create, search, and edit users across a group
  • Customizing access types to control who has access to different parts of GuestCenter

[Read more…]

Besting Brunch: How to Overcome Challenges and Engage Diners 

Midday meal loyalists can’t get enough of brunch. Smithsonian Magazine references a 1895 Hunter’s Weekly article by British author Guy Beringer entitled, “Brunch: A Plea” – supposedly inspired by the author’s own hangover – in which he speaks of brunch putting diners “in good temper.” Luxuriating over bottomless mimosas, creamy egg dishes, and fresh pastries can do that to a person. 

Brunchers are passionate diners. Some make elaborate plans weeks in advance and corral friends and family to build special occasions around it. Among the most dedicated are cash-strapped millennials, who will splurge on a brunch meal even when wallets are bare, according to Restaurant Marketing Labs. 

But executing a brunch that appeals both to the masses and to persnickety diners can strip some chefs of their will to cook. Not every restaurant has a solid brunch following, so it can also be expensive to produce and difficult to market.

A peek at Google trends reveals how location impacts brunch revenue. The terms “Mother’s Day brunch near me” versus the ubiquitous “brunch buffet” return entirely different cities. Metro areas lead the pack with Washington, D.C., followed by New York, and Miami-Ft. Lauderdale. Crabcake Benedict-friendly Charleston and the beignet paradise of New Orleans wrap up the top five regions for diners on the hunt for brunch. Contrast that with brunch buffets, most popular in Las Vegas in the lead followed by Honolulu, San Diego and Los Angeles. 

Brunch is a balancing act for chefs and restaurant management. To make it successful and keep it exciting requires dedication, creativity, and patience. Here’s how five North American restaurant leaders make that happen. 

JP Potters, Executive General Manager and Wine Director of Boulevard Kitchen & Oyster Bar (Vancouver)

The seafood-focused Boulevard Kitchen & Oyster Bar, attached to a 500-room hotel in downtown Vancouver, is located in an ultra-high-end tourist area of the city. Building on the success of the restaurant and guests who frequent it, a couple of years ago, Boulevard management began strategizing how to make brunch more theatrical.

“It’s one thing to have good food and wine but lots of people have that,” said JP Potters. “We wanted to do something that would make the experience more exciting for diners and engage them.”

Boulevard’s mimosa trolley was just the ticket. “People really like the mimosa trolley going from table to table – what we learned is that a server can walk to a table and offer someone an alcoholic beverage at brunch and they’ll often decline, but when they see the cart, diners are more likely to accept,” says Potters, who serves French Champagne or very high-quality Prosecco.

“It says a lot about the psychology that people place a higher premium on the visual impact of having a high-quality product they can see with their eyes and not just on a flat menu.”

Potters also gives guests choices among the mimosas he offers. In addition to the traditional mimosa with fresh squeezed orange juice (never frozen from concentrate) Boulevard features a rose lavender mimosa and an elderflower mimosa with housemade elderflower syrup. 

Boulevard dishes have a wow factor: lobster, sable fish crabcakes, and appetizers like the Boulevard “experience” with local oysters, Read Island mussels escabèche, poached prawns, octopus ceviche, and olive oil crisp with mignonette and cocktail sauce. 

“Brunch service requires a lot of positive energy and everyone has to give a lot more, so naturally it is a bit of an odd time of day to be switched on to all smiles and go-go-go,” says Potters. “For most servers, it is the end of their week after five or six days when there are not as many smiles.” 

For the benefit of his staff and his restaurant, Potters hires specifically for lunch and brunch. His dinner team doesn’t work lunches or brunches and he looks for a very specific type of server for that shift. 

“If I’m interviewing late-night people and the most interesting thing to them is obscure wines, I know they will not enjoy working brunch. But there are people who only want to work Sunday and Monday daytime, because for them it is a side hustle and not the only thing they want to do,” says Potters. “Those servers see the brunch shift as fulfilling a need for them, rather than fulfilling the need for us. When you recognize that, it changes the psychology of it: find a person for whom brunch will be of benefit rather than insist on people doing this shift and everyone is happier.”

Potters’ tips for resurrecting a bland brunch:

  • Empower staff and spread out the menu development process, if you have a competent team. Sharing this is important for people, so don’t hog the development process. 
  • Get ahead of your planning and give yourself the space to practice. Don’t try to develop a dish for today – that’s a losing formula. Instead, plan far enough ahead of it that you have the time to develop the dish. 
  • Be critical. Put your dishes in front of people you value. Don’t be so married to the first version of a new dish that you’ll become offended. Go through that sharing process and be okay with positive criticism. 

“Our normal dish development process allows for all of our chefs, sous chefs, and senior line cooks to participate and develop dishes on their own,” says Potters. “We give them a brief of what we are looking for a specific month or season to set up goalposts.”

Dishes go through a rigorous process passing across the Boulevard management team, including executive chefs Roger Ma and Alex Chen and Potters. After, they share refining elements to make it stronger, like adding a textural component. [Read more…]

Expand Your Brand: Experts Dish on Opening a Second Location

Your flagship restaurant is packed every night. Patrons post glowing reviews. Diners book reservations well in advance to score a Friday night table. Social media pages are brimming with gorgeous photos of food and ambience, drawing a lively crowd to dinner service. 

It feels like the perfect time to open another location, and you know just the place. Now, all you have to do is duplicate your existing restaurant, right? 

If only it were that easy. 

Hospitality expansion is anything but a cookie-cutter process, and there is no magic wand. The road to expanding a restaurant brand is fraught with stumbling blocks, nightmarish tales of building code violations, restoration woes, and equipment and staffing challenges. 

There is good news. Follow a few cues from the experts, and your expansion can be something to celebrate. We asked an architect, builder, chief operating officer, and trailblazing chef for their insight into expansion success. Here’s what they had to say. 

Ask the Architect: Jeffrey Beers

Restaurants by Jeffrey Beers International share an instantly recognizable “it” factor. At heart, Beers is a true artist who grew up in a traveling family that exposed him to global flavors. He spent almost ten years with master architect I.M. Pei and a lifetime in the kitchens of the world’s best chefs. From Seoul to Dubai to Manhattan and everywhere in between, Beers’ passion for detail is legendary. 

A few of Beers’ high-profile clients include the Four Seasons Hotel and Resort, Masaharu Morimoto, Gordon Ramsay (including Hell’s Kitchen in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas), Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Disney Hotels & Resorts, Dinex Group, Ritz-Carlton, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club. Beers is also a restaurant owner in his own right, and when it comes to expanding restaurant brands, he has seen it all.

“It raises the bar the moment you get into multiple locations, but if someone is wired for that and ready for the challenges, it is a great thing,” said Beers. 

The architecture is a huge part of the equation, but restaurateurs and chefs might be surprised to learn that Beers believes the process should begin with considering the guest experience. 

“In the culinary world, especially from chefs who have reputations that made a mark, they never forget that this is a consumer-based business,” said Beers.

It’s important to assess if an established brand in one location will fit into a different neighborhood and meet the consistent needs of diners. Beers says successful brands must include two critical business components and without one or the other, the risk of failure is high. 

“I’ve seen many chefs go through this, and I strongly believe in apprenticing for someone who has developed a strong reputation, work ethic, and understands the business, and that means both food and service,” said Beers. 

The other component that cannot be overstated is not to go it alone. “It’s remarkable what can come out of collaboration, especially in opening a second location and beyond because the restaurant brand is important, but each restaurant is a different space,” said Beers.

Measuring the popularity of the first location is not an accurate indicator for expansion where location is concerned. Beers says that’s because customer demographics at any new location will inherently be different than the first one. Again, it’s all about knowing your diner beyond what you put on the menu.

“Study your customers and cater the design accordingly — does the space need to be a little lighter or darker? Does it need to be more open? Should there be seating other than table seating? Should the bar be larger or smaller this time around? Pay strong attention to answering those types of questions and take cues from the architect,” said Beers. “Plan from how you enter to where your seating is and take into account the flow of the space all the way to the server and point-of-sale stations.”

Location has become as much about culture as brick and mortar. Chefs often wonder: is it smarter to try and duplicate a second location or to start anew with a fresh concept? 

“Stylistically and design-wise, it has been helpful to me to understand the culture of the guests in that part of the world as well as what isn’t in that city — what works in Columbus may not work in Dallas,” said Beers. “You can invent something new, something innovative, but one has to be cognizant of what a customer in a given location wants in order to provide that experience.” [Read more…]

4 Easy Tips for Restaurants to Be Found Where Diners Are Searching

The digital world asks a lot from restaurants. Posting fresh, compelling content to different channels every day and always trying to stay top of mind can get overwhelming. As digital marketing and social media platforms evolve, nailing down and executing an online strategy feels more daunting than ever. But you don’t need to push new content to be found – and be current – where diners are searching for your restaurant.

Last month, we introduced a new Open for Business series all about online marketing, tapping our own internal team for tips on best practices on each platform. And while yes, digital marketing requires planning, constant attention, and analysis, there are also plenty of easy things restaurants can do right now to optimize their presence. Below, we share four simple ways to build your brand presence. Start by updating these channels, then think of everything that comes next as bonus points.  

1. Optimize your Google Business listing. 

Every month, there are five billion searches for restaurants on Google. A free business profile lets you connect with all of those potential guests through Google Search and Maps. Like with Yelp, you can post photos and offers to your profile to inspire diners to come in for a meal. 

To claim your restaurant’s Google Business listing, log into the Google account you want associated with the business. From there, you can search for your restaurant’s name – if you see your restaurant in the results, select it and follow the steps for verification. 

Google may verify your business by calling you on your business phone number or sending you an email. But the most common method is to send a postcard to your restaurant’s physical address. This can take up to five days and look like a spam mailer, so keep an eye out for it. 

If you search for your restaurant and don’t see it in results, select “Create a business with this name.” Since your restaurant has a brick-and-mortar location, select “Yes” when asked if you want to add a location to your listing. Enter your restaurant’s address, hit “Next,” and on the next prompt, select “Yes, I also serve them outside my location” if you offer delivery. You’ll also be prompted to enter your service area, which is an optional step. (If you don’t offer delivery, select “no.”) 

Next add a business category, like “Italian restaurant.” You can always change it later. Finally, you can add your restaurant’s phone number and website, which is vital because it gives diners a way to reach you easily with questions or to book a reservation. Select “Finish” to begin the verification process.  

2. Set up an Instagram (business) account.

If you use Instagram with a personal account, you know the drill: post your best photos, like and be liked, comment and reply, and don’t forget the hashtags. Your restaurant’s Instagram account will be similar to your personal one, but business accounts give access to tools that can help you optimize your feed, like analytics and paid advertising. 

Operators can see their audience’s demographics (age range, location, and more), as well as which posts had the most impressions or engagement. That kind of insight gives you the power to optimize your social media strategy based on your best-performing assets. Businesses can also add buttons such as “Contact” and “Reserve” to their profiles so users can reach out or book a table. Finally, you can put money behind your posts to reach more people, if you choose to do so. 

If you already have a regular Instagram account for your restaurant, you can convert it to a business account easily in “Settings” without losing any content. If you’re starting from scratch, create an account using a Facebook account, email or phone number. (It’s a good idea to use a general restaurant or company email to ensure you’ll always have access, even if the person who created it leaves.) During the setup process, you’ll see the words “Try Instagram Business Tools” – click there to make yours a business account. Select a category and sub-category (think “restaurant” and “dim sum restaurant”, and add your physical address – this is key, because a location makes you searchable on Instagram. Once you’re up and running, start posting! [Read more…]

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