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Delivery Fail: The Problem with a Gig Economy
What do you think a delivery company like Deliveroo, Just Eat or uberEATS should be good at? That’s right – delivery. In my personal experience (outside of London), this – sadly – does not hold true with high enough certainty. I can’t speak for UberEATS as I have no direct experience of their service outside of London, but both Delieroo and Just Eat suffer from the same issue – ‘not enough drivers’ to quote their system. Tip of the Iceberg The problem actually runs much deeper than simply one of having enough drivers; it’s about how those resources are deployed. In the early days, the fleet of riders were employees…
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Merchant’s Heart Mixers
One of the upsides of being a restaurateur is that suppliers are always plying you with free samples to try to get you to buy their products. Last week, a rep from Merchant’s Heart popped into Meejana Windsor and dropped off these little bottles so I thought I’d post my initial thoughts on the product. Yet another premium mixer (although Merchant’s Heart calls it a “spirit enhancer”), this time from Japan and made with Bikan Yuso. I thought this was an exotic ingredient until I checked their website where it actually means “A sense of beauty and playful imagination.” Sadly there were no supporting marketing materials left by the rep…
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Restaurant Reservations; Why Timing is Everything
Have you ever been to the doctor or the dentist? You arrive a couple of minutes before your appointment only to be greeted with a smile and told that there has been a bit of a delay and you’ll need to wait for your appointment. Or you could come back another day. And you’re only the second booking.
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Runner, Server, Host. What’s the difference?
There are thousands of books and blog posts written about being a waiter/waitress or server in a restaurant. These range from tips on how to do the job, to how to excel, to mistakes to avoid, to job descriptions, through to training resources of all different types. These are all good, but can often be dry and impartial. So I thought I would outline a more aspirational set of guidelines to help you achieve and deliver more to the guests you are looking after. Your employer will be happier, and you will be too. Even if it’s not your career or you may be doing it to get through college, the guest…
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Another Year, Another Restaurant Scam
In the restaurant business, we learn about hospitality. We learn about finance. We learn about marketing. We learn (a lot) about operations as there are so many variables. But we learn - often the hard way - about fraud.
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Why we left Quandoo
Quandoo was born in Germany and set out to ‘disrupt’ the restaurant reservations space since competitors like Open Table were charging a fortune for the service. That’s what they told us when we signed up shortly after they launched in the UK.
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State of the UK Restaurant Market (2017)
This has been based on the excellent piece on PwC about the restaurant sector at the end of 2017, with additional commentary from me based on developments in 2018 and my view of the market from the inside.
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The Employers’ Problem: Some Hospitality Staff Just Don’t Care
I’ve been running restaurants for a little over 10 years now (at the time of writing) and employees have always been a fickle bunch; here today, gone the next. It’s a sad fact of the industry that employees, especially the more junior ones, hop between jobs. Sometimes they are just doing the work to fill in and earn some cash before their next real gig comes along. Sometimes they are just lazy and go back to claim benefits rather than work for a living to improve their situation over the long term. But over the last year, and especially this year, the new recruits-cum-leavers have been the worst I have ever seen.
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If you want better service in a restaurant, respect these five unwritten rules
Answer by Maxwell Arnold, former sous chef, restaurant manager, waiter, and busboy, on Quora: The relationship between a server and a customer can feel like an adverse one at times. Quite often, this is because the two parties simply misunderstand each other. I benefit from the experience of both working as a server, and being someone who dines out on the regular – so I understand what the dynamic is like from both sides. For customers who get the most out of the dining experience, they understand the many nuances of the restaurant business to include several unwritten rules that they have to go along with whether they like it…
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The Top 35 Restaurant Etiquette Fails
According to the Telegraph, these are the ‘top 35 most irritating restaurant faux-pas’. They go on to say …
MISADVENTURES IN THE RESTAURANT TRADE
