When owners are creating a new restaurant from scratch, they have the opportunity to build a great menu from the ground up. Creating the best menu means that your restaurant will build a customer base while fitting into the community. To create the perfect menu, you will need to balance costs, flavors, and appeal to your customer base. Sam Mustafa of Charleston, South Carolina is a restaurateur with a great deal of experience in starting new restaurants and making them profitable. He shares his tips with readers and points toward ways they can make their new menus profitable.
Creating a Menu
You will want your menu to feature innovative dishes as well as the favorites that everyone likes to order. Think carefully about what your customers might expect from your menu when they encounter your restaurant. While it is great to be creative, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. For example, a pasta restaurant should have a good chicken Parmesan dish.
Balance Price and Cost
Consider which ingredients have a high-profit margin. These are items that you can buy low and sell high. They are also quick and easy for your chefs to prepare. When you move many of these dishes through your kitchen during the course of the day, you will see an increase in your profits. Make sure these dishes are high quality and as interesting as they can be while remaining on the affordable side.
Leverage Your Menu
The printed menu itself can help to guide your customers to the right choices. A replaceable sheet in the front of the menu listing the daily specials can help you move excess inventory out of your kitchen. Inside the menu, find ways to highlight the dishes you most want your patrons to order. Highlighting these items with a box or with a special font may help to grab their attention.
Tweak Prices to Make Dishes Attractive
Having one expensive dish on your menu may make everything else seem more affordable. It is possible that this technique will not work on your customers, but it is worth a try. For example, listing a filet mignon at $30 may make a sirloin costing $20 feel more affordable for your customers.
Use Photos
Attractive photos of your best dishes will draw in customers. Make sure that you take professional-quality photos. Customers will be turned off by amateur efforts. Think about having a professional photographer shoot your dishes for the best possible results.
Build Your Customer Base
As your restaurant has just opened, you will want to take a walk around your establishment and take note of the different kinds of customers that you are attracting. For example, if your restaurant seems to be attracting mostly older people and couples without children, focus on these particular customers. They will probably appreciate a quiet, peaceful dining experience without a lot of bells and whistles.
If you do attract families, make sure that your kids’ menu is up to date and provide entertainment for them. Whatever you do, make sure you know your target market.
Focus on Service
No matter which kind of restaurant you choose, you will need to make sure that your staff is well-trained to provide the best possible customer service. Customers may not always remember the food they were served, but they will always remember a rude staff. They may spread the word that your staff is not up to their standards, and you may lose customers before they even walk through the door.
Focusing on service will help bring all of these different areas together. When you create a new restaurant, you will be able to make a profit while pleasing your customers. Anyone who is not focused on making the customers happy will not succeed in the restaurant world. Sam Mustafa recommends that you take a careful look at each one of these points while you are planning your new restaurant venture.
