Brainstorming with experts can be very beneficial. When you bring your passion into a world of experienced people who share your passion, great ideas are born. Sometimes, the best investment you make is in brain cells.
Determining Feasibility
Will it work? A restaurant concept design team can determine how to make the new idea or concept work and to project potential obstacles and expenses. A good team can also determine how customers will respond to your product. Because of the vast experience the concept design experts bring, they can also determine customer and employee perception as well as perceived value.
Determining Restaurant Flow
People move all over restaurants. They exit and enter through the doors, travel to and from the bathrooms, wander in and out of the bar, and walk back and forth from the kitchen. A restaurant concept design team can make your restaurant run more smoothly by anticipating traffic flow issues you may not have imagined.
Making Everything Work Together
Everything that a customer feels, sees, hears, and smells in a restaurant is an impression. From the moment customers pull into the parking lot to the very last view of your facility out the rear view mirror, they inhale atmosphere, good or bad. Colors, sizes, sounds, shapes, textures, forms, smells, uniforms, and noise level all combine to make an impact that should be remembered in a good way.
A restaurant concept design team ensures that all pieces of the puzzle fit together. The concept, site, staff, uniforms, and equipment all function as parts of a working whole. This kind of structure is known as a congruent organization.
I often see restaurant owners determining the menu and restaurant concept mere weeks before opening for business. By then, it’s too late. Nearly everything you purchase or design must be in place early on. Don’t assume that you can adapt or adjust a restaurant kitchen to nearly any menu or concept. It’s not that easy and can be quite expensive. A design team can help you avoid such costly last-minute changes.
Recipes Revealed: The core menu concept is the main product line of your menu, and you define it: Italian, Mexican, American, Japanese, or even hamburgers, chicken, or pizza. Traditionally, the owner has a preliminary feel for what kind of food he/she wants to serve: “My goal is to open an Italian restaurant” or “I have this great chili recipe that I want to open a restaurant with.” The rest of the menu (beverages, appetizers, desserts) is usually secondary and is added to the core menu concept.
The Restaurant Concept Decision
What kind of restaurant do you want to own? Don’t just sell food. Instead, sell something you are passionate about because your passion could make all the difference.
Kee Chan opened his Heat restaurant in Chicago because he wanted to give the customer a whole different level of sushi. Unlike most Japanese restaurants, Heat displays live fish in saltwater tanks for the customers to select. Heat is trying to deliver an authentic Japanese dining experience. You can see and feel the passion as the restaurant workers secure your personally selected fish, prepare it behind the sushi bar (sliced thin), and serve it.
Of course, you don’t have to have such a noble reason to open a restaurant as to provide an authentic ethnic meal or experience. Frank Carney once stated that he simply loved eating pizza, so he founded Pizza Hut. Tom Moghnahan wanted pizza delivered to his home and saw an untapped marketable concept and service. His desire and observations led him to found Domino’s Pizza. Passion can come through in a variety of ways. So what is your passion? And what isn’t?
A vegetarian probably should not own a steak house. If you don’t like seafood, stay away from a crab shack. This observation is simple, but true: If the owner doesn’t love the restaurant, why would the employees? And if the employees don’t love the restaurant, the customers are not likely to fall head over heels for it either.
Recipes Revealed: A day-part is the time of day when a specific type of meal is served. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are all separate day-parts. A day-part add-on is when a restaurant, such as Hardee’s, which is clearly a lunch and dinner sandwich chain, decides to add a breakfast menu to try to garner some early-morning traffic. Many restaurants have begun adding day-parts to try to generate additional sales when they normally wouldn’t even be open.
The Core Menu Concept
So what will your restaurant be? At the heart of your answer to this question is the core menu concept, which will more clearly define what your decor, ambience, style of dining service, and overall concept should look like.
Don’t try to be everything to everybody. Instead, try to be something great to specific people. Too often in the restaurant business, the quest for more sales leads to the creation of large, unmanageable menus that cause operational glitches and profitability strain. Not everyone will eat at your restaurant anyway, so why not concentrate on those who will? Finding these customers is first about finding yourself and your passion.
The more things you try, the more difficult it is to be great at one of them. What, for instance, would make a pizza place think they should serve breakfast or a taco joint serve gourmet coffee? Surveys show that consumers pigeonhole most restaurants in one or two core concepts, and unless you have a marketing budget that rivals McDonald’s, that perception is quite difficult to change. Even McDonald’s has thrown away big dollars in different parts of the country trying to add day-parts and be something they are not to the consumer.
Your Menu Needs Professional Help
As a restaurant owner, you must appreciate the menu as the important document it is: It is your Magna Carta, your Declaration of Independence. From the menu flows the story of a great restaurant.
A restaurant’s menu has an influence on everything about the restaurant. Thus, the planning of a menu should be taken seriously and should always be a team effort between an owner and a chef. Yes, planning a menu involves a chef. Even if you are selling hamburgers and french fries, you should employ a chef to develop the menu. A well-educated chef knows the availability and cost of food ingredients, is an expert when it comes to kitchen staff and equipment capabilities, and understands the total picture when it comes to food handling and preparation. The owner/operator will most likely bring a fair share of food knowledge as well, but usually not the level of knowledge that a certified chef would have. The owner brings a different perspective and, with a good chef, can develop a vision in a great document called the menu.
To find a good chef, contact the culinary institutes around you. Many provide career placement for recent graduates and alumni. There are also chef recruiting firms. Your core menu concept will dictate everything else in your restaurant—from layout to wine list. Find a good person to work with to create your menu and to manage your kitchen. If you are not running a dining establishment, finding a experienced kitchen manager may also help you put your kitchen in place but a chef will help you develop your recipes.
Tip Jar: When pricing your menu items, you must estimate costs and sales volumes. To stay in the restaurant game for very long, you need to be able to balance making a profit with customer satisfaction and frequency. Pricing your menu appropriately will have a significant impact on whether this balance happens.
Recipes Revealed: Perceived value is a fair price, determined by the customer. It is based on a mixture of what a customer receives in the way of products, services, environment, and so on and what the customer pays for that overall feeling. If the customer is happy with the overall experience, then the perceived value is good.
How Much for a Cheeseburger?
A key element of the menu is the price listed for each menu item. Everything costs something. First it costs you, and then it costs your customer. So how do you determine how much to charge for whatever you decide to sell?
You can determine the price range of your menu in many different ways, and all of them can be reasonably justified depending on your concept, menu, and location. But the most important factor to consider is the perceived value for any meal.
Two of the bigger errors that I see restaurants make are underpricing their menu when the customer will gladly pay more and overpricing their menu when the poor products and services they deliver don’t justify the prices. Both are major mistakes.
The prices that you charge will influence the type of clientele your restaurant attracts, the sales volume and profitability of the restaurant, and the frequency with which your customers return. People of lower incomes tend to frequent restaurants with lower pricing while people with higher incomes tend to patronize restaurants with higher prices. Customers tend to be more forgiving of poor service in restaurants that have lower menu prices and less forgiving if the menu prices are high.
You must try to determine these two extremes of pricing any product:
The highest price the market will bear and still continue to retain the customer.
The lowest possible price you can charge and still realize a fair profit.
The price you charge the customer on every menu item will need to fall somewhere between these two extremes.
What Type of Service Will You Offer?
How will people get their food at your restaurant? Consider the choices:
Dine in
Delivery
Carryout
Tip Jar: After your restaurant is open, you should test prices frequently (I suggest every third month) to assure that they are competitive and appropriate for your style of service and concept. To get started, check with the National Restaurant Association for comparable pricing in your segment and conduct a survey of your potential competitors close by to compare like products, as well as check averages. (The National Restaurant Association can be contacted at www.restaurant.org or by calling 202-331-5900.)
Dine In
Dine-in restaurants provide one of three major styles of service: quick service, casual dining, and full service. Quick service is distinguished by the following characteristics:
Customers order at a counter by looking at menu board signage.
The emphasis is on speed of service and convenience.
The cost of a meal is at the lower end of a check average, below $7.
The decor is simple and practical.
Customers want their food fast.
Casual dining is characterized by the following:
Customers order at a table by looking at a menu.
The emphasis is on providing a fun yet relaxing environment. The food is of a good quality,
yet unlike full service establishments, not every detail is attended to.
The cost of meal is in the middle portion of the check average: $6 to $15.
The decor may provide a theme or some fun features.
Customers want close to the full dining experience without feeling that they have to dress
up or act in any given social manner.
Full service is characterized by the following:
The customer orders at a table by looking at a menu.
The emphasis is on excellent service, high-quality food, and the overall dining experience.
The cost of a meal is at the higher end of the check average, normally above $15.
The decor is tasteful and more upscale in nature.
The customer wants the full dining experience.
These three styles are the main umbrellas, but many more specific styles have become known in the restaurant industry, including quick casual, modified service, cafeteria dining, home meal replacement, and banquet dining.
Delivery and Carryout
Some of the more important things to consider regarding a delivery service are the size of your delivery area—in other words, how far from your restaurant are you willing to deliver to, what type of food you will be delivering, and how well, quality wise, it will hold up. Poor quality food delivered 25 miles from your restaurant does no one any good.
Carry-out concepts, on the other hand, are more about convenience and price. The customer wants a quick and easy meal at a reasonable price.
Who Are You? Picking a Restaurant Name
The name of your restaurant means a lot, more than you probably think. This simple choice will be one of the most important business decisions you make, so take some time and make the name fit with your vision. You want your name to convey a message to your target market. You want your name to have sweeping implications from culture to style of menu to theme and decor.
Pick a name and then test it on family, friends, and others you know. Don’t settle for the first name you think of. Instead, search out the perfect name. A good name will absolutely help you sell food. Check the phone book to be sure the name you pick is not taken or to look for inspiration from the other restaurant names. Also, ask your restaurant design team or marketing experts to help with suggestions.
The Least You Need To Know The big early decisions, such as buying a franchise or an existing restaurant or starting
from scratch, will affect you for the life of your restaurant.
Do lots of research to determine a workable concept and pinpoint a target market.
Hiring a concept design team helps ensure that everything comes together just right.
Your menu is the heart of your restaurant.
Pricing is part of everything your restaurant does, and it must fit in with the rest of the
finely tuned machine that is your restaurant.
Your restaurant’s name is a major decision, so treat it as such.
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