In article <[email hidden]>, RobtE <[email hidden]>
Quoted message said:I've eaten in restaurants for years, and I've never really thought about
what goes on there apart from whether I'd enjoyed the meal or not.
Lately, though, I've started wondering just how restaurants plan what
they serve. OK, so I guess these are sort of dumb questions, but maybe
someone out there who knows how restaurants do these things can
enlighten me.
First, how do they plan how many people they'll serve in a night? Is
there a rule of thumb that says "X number of seats times Y hours of
dinner service = Z portions"?
I used to work at a small mom and pop seafood restaurant when I was
in college. I loved that job! From what I quickly learned, menu planning
relies a hell of a lot on experience. A good restaurant manager just
learns over time. This is why restaurants get better after they've
been in business for a few months. You have to learn the trends in
your restaurant in its particular location with its particular
clientele. For example, my boss (the restaurant's owner) knew on
each Friday night in our heavily Christian neighborhood during Lent, we
would sell a lot more of everything than we did on during those same
days during other periods of the year. He knew that at lunch the first
Thursday of the month, a department at a large naval supply facility
nearby would place a large order for delivery and the order was almost
always the same each month, so even before the order was called in, my
boss would start preparing the cold items on it such as the salads,
cooked shrimp, and set aside the bottles of soda they would order. On
Mondays and Sundays during football season, we couldn't make cocktail
shrimp and salads fast enough! On Sunday's during football season, esp.
the end of the season, one of the first things we would do when we
opened up shop each morning was start boiling big vats of water for
cooked shrimp because we know we would need a lot of it and we knew we
would almost always sell out of it at the end of the day.
Quoted message said:Second, assuming you can plan on how many portions you'll serve in an
evening, and you know how many different entrees will be on the menu,
how do they know how many of each entree to cook? Say you have 6 entrees
on the menu and you expect 60 people in an evening. Is it as simple as
10 portions of each and tough luck to those who arrive after an entree
is sold out?
Menu planning is probably a major challenge in a restaurant that has
just opened for business, but for those restaurants that have been in
business a while, their managers get to know what kinds of items their
customers want and which days of the week, month, and year they want
certain items. The restaurant were I worked had been in business a few
years before I got there and my boss had gotten very good at planning
the menu. We also rarely diverged from the cooked menu, although we also
sold a lot of whatever fresh seafood we could get, and that varied a
lot. We also rarely had any prepared food left over at the end of the
day. Unfortunately, the owner and his wife had a bitter divorce so they
sold the restaurant in order to liquidate the assets for the divorce
settlement and my boss went to work for a local seafood restaurant chain.
Quoted message said:Like I said, they're probably dumb questions, but after years of eating
in restaurants I've only just started wondering how they do it, and so
far Googling hasn't yielded up an answer.
Not dumb questions at all.
