How to Make Restaurant Ambiance “One Size Fits All”

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Ambiance is the defining feature of your restaurant, but it can also box your restaurant into a certain category in your customers’ minds. Are you a casual “beer with friends” restaurant? Are you an “anniversary celebration” restaurant? Not only do these restaurant ambiance classifications limit your customer base, they also cut down on your sales. There’s no reason you should purposefully hurt your restaurant revenues, so today’s post discusses how you can create a “one size fits all” ambiance to bring in every type of customer for every kind of occasion.

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Customer Service Failures that Kill Your Business

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Is your customer service less than extraordinary? You want to fix that, now. I know that I harp on a bit about good customer service techniques, but the truth is that you have too much competition in the food and beverage industry to fail in even one aspect of your business. Here are two customer service failures, as well as advice about how you can avoid them in your own business. 

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Uncorkd Restaurant Management Resources

Entice New Customers by Writing a Cookbook

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The back-to-school season has started and with harried parents, busy kids, cooler weather, and less tourist traffic, your summer rush is pretty much over. If you want to ensure an even bigger and better summer rush next year, you need to tempt new customers to walk through your doors. Of course, there are many ways to entice the public to try out your food, but one of the best ways to get people talking about your restaurant is to establish yourself as an expert. The best way to do that? Write a cookbook. This post tells you the important steps you need to follow to ensure that your cookbook is a hit.

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What Restaurants Can Learn from Olive Garden to Improve Alcoholic Beverage Sales

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The last few days has seen quite a bit of news about Olive Garden and their parent company, Darden.  Starboard Value, a hedge fund that is one of the largest shareholders of the public company, has recently put forward a slate of 12 new board prospects to replace the entire board of Darden.  Now, Starboard has released a 300 slide deck blasting the inefficiencies they see with Olive Garden and other concepts like Longhorn Steakhouse, while outlining turnaround steps they would take to get the brands on the right track.  According to Starboard, Olive Garden is missing out on $56 million in annual earnings by not taking basic steps with their beverage program.

If you are in the hospitality industry, I highly recommend taking a look at Starboard’s analysis and proposal for yourself.  But after spending hours reading through their materials, I’m going to highlight several things called out in the report that all restaurants should be focused on to improve the guest experience and bottom line.  While there are a lot of problems identified and solutions proposed in the report, I’m going to focus on alcoholic beverages based on our experience at Uncorkd and provide information on how to improve your beverage sales. Read more

How to upsell wine in a restaurant with staff incentives

Increase Restaurant Wine Sales through Staff Incentives

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Upselling, cross-selling, and other high-level sales techniques, when balanced on a strong wine knowledge foundation, form the backbone of your restaurant wine sales. This is good news, as it means that the power to increase sales rests only on your willingness to educate your staff. In addition, when you do motivate and educate your wait staff, they are likely to go to great lengths to assure your wine list’s sales success. Uncorkd has published many articles in the past that help you to teach your staff about wine, sake, scotch, beer, absinthe, and other alcohols; today’s post focuses on two strategies—a simple one and a complex one—that you can use to motivate your servers. Read more

7 Tips for Hiring a Great Host or Hostess

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If someone had warned you that running a restaurant would be a job in which you have to be a chef, a manager, an inventory specialist, an accountant, a janitor, a customer service rep, a marketer, and an HR director, would you still have done it? Of course you would, because every day you get to do exactly what you want to do. Well, almost exactly. Today, we’re going over something that you don’t like doing so much: hiring. In the past, we’ve talked about hiring the right bartender, but since I know you want to get back to your food as soon as possible, I have compiled a fast list of seven things you should do to make sure you hire the right hostess. Read more

4 Steps to Make More Money with Your On-Premise Catering

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Once upon a time, a long time ago, you thought your restaurant could make some extra money by starting up an on-premises catering side-business. The idea started up when you went to a country club or a hotel. You thought, “I could do this. I wouldn’t even have to pay for the extra overhead.” But then, when you tried it, you started losing money. And you kept losing money. Now you’re about ready to give up because you’re convinced that country clubs and hotels know some secret that you don’t. You know what? If those places had a secret in the first place, they certainly won’t anymore. This post talks about simple steps you can take to make your on-premises catering services challenge the country clubs and rake in the cash.

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10 Signs of Restaurant Customer Service Disaster

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Running a restaurant is hard work. You have to plan meals, stock inventory, maintain supplies and licensure, manage staffing issues, and, oh yeah, cook amazing food. With all this craziness going on every single day, it’s not surprising that your restaurant might be forgetting to do something, even something incredibly important. If you look around your restaurant and notice any of the following things happening, you’ll need to switch your focus. Fast. Here are ten signs that your customer service is a total disaster.

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Why You Need to Keep Your Restaurant Website Up to Date--and How to Do It Uncorkd

Why You Need to Keep Your Restaurant Website Up to Date—and How to Do It

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You did your job. You heard everyone talking about why you need a restaurant website, so you went out and got one. You even got yourself an awesome gimmick so that you’d stand out on Google. Either you struggled over learning how to create the site yourself, or you hired someone else to create it for you. The good news is that now you can breathe easy. After all, you have an online presence already. You’ve checked that task off your list. Now you can return to what you really love: food.

Sorry to break it to you, but in today’s world, restaurants can’t just create a site and then rest on their laurels. They need to keep that restaurant website up to date. Here’s why. Read more

The 5 Best Sidewalk Ads for Your Restaurant

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Earlier this week, I went out to eat twice in one day. A funny thing: the two places I ate at were located right next to each other. Sure, I had gone to each restaurant many times before, but before Tuesday, I had never noticed that the two were, literally, right next door. Another funny thing: Both times when I walked to where they were, I walked right past the restaurant front door and then had to backtrack down the sidewalk. If you’re wondering if one of these places was your restaurant, you should really consider better sidewalk advertising. Here are 5 ideas for sidewalk advertising to increase your sales. Read more