How to start a restaurant

Monday,August 18 ,2008

Looking at my server log, I found a lot of requests of how to start a restaurant and just because I had one once I want to share my experience and expertise about restaurants.

A restaurant is a wonderful business because we all need to feed ourselves to gain energy so you will always have customers and get new ones day by day.

Before you start a new restaurant, I would like to share my experience in restaurants. A few years ago I decided to start a brand new restaurant, and I did it, it was a wonderful business, but at the very beginning it was difficult to put the business on the road; let me tell you what happened.

At the very beginning I was anxious to start earning money by selling food; in this case, it was sea food: fish, shrimp, and octopus. My dear mother is an expert cooking sea food recipe, so she helped me, the food was delicious, and it’s still delicious. Setting up all the restaurant structure was pretty easy; the hard part was to convince customers that our restaurant is the best in the city.

The first two months were the worst I almost quit, we barely sold something and the business was nearly to bankrupt. Despite our terrible startup, I decided to use a strategy to attract costumers: Advertising of cheap sea food, it worked fine to me and at the meantime, I raised the prices a little, now my mother owns the restaurant, and she manages it. Why did this strategy work? My hometown has a lot of sea food restaurants, and they are expensive so offering cheap sea food was the best idea I got, and it worked.

What are the steps to start a restaurant business?

Think of a restaurant like it is: a business, it needs capital in order to start and a business plan. You may find all information here.
How to start a business
Be creative with your restaurant structure, use creative designs, things that might print a good impression in your costumers. I recommend you to find a niche example: Mexican Food.
Get good chairs, tables, dishes, etc. all of quality, I also recommend you to get them according to your restaurant niche example: If you've got a Chinese restaurant buy china dishes.
A restaurant as a business might be a considerable source of earnings but consider first about the service, customers of restaurants love good service. Remember a good service is a recommendation for your business so your customers will bring new customers to your restaurant.
Do you know what kind of food are you going to sell? Find out what is the most popular food in your area according to your niche and sell new food that is new to your area, be creative.
Hire a good chef, forget about cheap staff.
Hire qualified staff: Waiters, waitress etc.
Build a strategy to attract customers (This might be different for all restaurants)
Lower prices and good quality are the best combination for success in this business: set affordable prices for your costumers.
Be friendly with your customers.

Category Business Tips

Comments (4)

nice article :)

One thing that always drives me to a restaurant, is that even if it's not a cheap restaurant, offer a few cheap items also. Sometimes people are just in the mood for something quick and cheap. =)

Akuma

Nice Tips

Strongly agree with #4, I always recommend my favorite restaurants to my friends.

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