Have a Failing Restaurant? These Might Be Your Problems

Have a Failing Restaurant? These Might Be Your Problems

Everyone has been to a failing restaurant. You can feel it in the air. Service seems strained. Food takes a long time to arrive, and just doesn’t taste right when it gets to your table. A stressed out manager can be heard yelling at a line cook from behind the kitchen doors. Oh, and no one else seems to be enjoying their meal ever. It’s bad enough when you have to sit through a meal in one of these places. But the worst of all possible worlds is when the restaurant is your own.

Restaurants fail at a surprising rate. And they do so for many reasons. The problem is, restaurant overship/management is incredibly time consuming and stressful. Many restaurateurs are working on their eatery for 70-100 hours per week, sometimes even more! Burning the candle at both ends like this, finding peace of mind for calm reflection is a tall order. If you are watching your restaurant sink around you, and you aren’t sure why, here are some of the reasons why it may be taking on water.

1) Old-Fashioned Standards. It’s possible that your restaurant simply hasn’t kept up with the times. Maybe you’re so busy at the restaurant that you just don’t get out that much to see the way other people do things. There are a bunch of earmarks which will date your shop: using an old-school credit card system instead of an iPad point of sale, featuring menus that are long and exhaustive rather than whittled down to a few great items, or other factors. Pay attention to what relevant restaurants are doing well. You don’t have to cook exactly like them, or dress like their chefs do. If new restaurants succeed in the long term, it is because of some fundamental thing they do well. Become a student of quality work, and it will begin to incorporate itself into your system.

2) Poor Service. It doesn’t matter how good the food is, if it doesn’t arrive on time or is delivered by a discourteous server, your patron is going to leave with a bad taste in his mouth. Restaurant customer service is the most important factor for a significant percentage of people, when deciding whether or not to return to a restaurant.

3) The Food is Bad. Sometimes you just have to face it – the food might be bad. It’s easy to become desensitized to bad food, especially if you or someone you care about is the one making it. It’s time to see things for what they are. If you can’t objectively determine if the food is to blame, get someone who knows what they’re talking about and ask for their honest opinion. Or simply look at your Yelp page. If your restaurant has been around for even a few months, you’re likely to have a bunch of brutally honest reviews. If they consistently blame the food, so should you.

There are other reasons why a restaurant might fail, but these are the most common. Be brave and take the steps you need to build a restaurant that will last.