Restaurant Simplicity Part 2: The Case for Clean Plating

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After your guests have ordered their meals, their second impression of your restaurant will come from how their meal is served. We’ve talked a lot about customer service on this blog, but this isn’t about customer service, it’s about plating. Here’s why plating matters much more in your restaurant than you’ve previously suspected.

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Drink Menu Pricing

Restaurant Simplicity, Part 1: How to Strengthen Your Menu

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It is a fact that running a restaurant or bar has become too complex. In fact, it’s not just restaurants and bars, it’s everything. Work hours are longer for everyone, the cost of leisure activities are more expensive for everyone, the pile of obstacles that we face when trying to accomplish tasks just grows higher every single day—and every day of our lives, we have to prepare ourselves for a battle or a sacrifice. It’s time for all that stress to stop. This three-part series explores how you can make your restaurant or bar a calm oasis for your guests to escape the hectic difficulties of life. The first thing you should simplify is your menu—here’s how to do that. Read more

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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Selling Wine Every Day Uncorkd

Start Selling Wine Every Day

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On the surface, selling wine seems easy. Your guests come into your restaurant ready to spend money and have a great night, but somehow, when their server gets to the table, your guests choose not to order wine, opting instead for something flashy, like a cocktail; sturdy, like a beer; or choosing the conservative route and going with a non-alcoholic drink. As a restaurant owner or manager, this situation can get stressful because you didn’t allocate funds to stock a lovely looking wine cellar, you planned on selling every last drop of the wine you ordered. But you can’t do that unless every one of your tables sees wine as a necessary complement to their meal—not as an added expense meant for special occasions. Here’s how to convince your guests that at your restaurant, wine is an everyday thing. Read more

5 Autumn Drinks to Add to Your Menu

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As of September 23, the season finally changed. Here in Chicago, we started seeing glimmerings of cooler weather almost a month ago, when temperatures started dropping into the 40s at night. Hopefully your weather is better than ours here in Chicago (really, I hope it is—the weather here is just dreadful) but at this point, I’m sure your restaurant has stopped serving gazpacho and your pina colada sales have dropped off. It’s time, so here are five delicious autumn drinks you should add to your menu. Read more

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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iPad Wine Menus, More Affordable Than You Think

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iPad wine menus are popping up across the country.  But it isn’t only celebrity chefs using the technology.  Although you can find iPad beverage menus at Gordon Ramsay’s or André Rochat’s restaurants, restaurants of all sizes across the country are using electronic wine menus, from independent operators to regional and corporate operators nationwide.

One of the hesitations we usually hear from prospective customers is around cost.  Having all of these iPads must be so expensive.  After all, using paper is cheap, pennies.  Let’s break down the costs a little further… Read more

Be Who You Want to Be: A Celebration of Restaurant Diversity

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It is rare that a restaurant or bar experiences the confidence to just be itself. On this blog, we talk about how you can improve your sales methods, introduce more alcohol to your menu, or  find and hire a good band. However, we have never coached you in how to be who you are—proudly, happily, unabashedly. Today’s post is in celebration of your restaurant, exactly as it is. 

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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