How to improve a restaurant’s customer service.

Here are four simple steps for great customer service

Improve the customer service

Improve the customer service of a restaurant. Here are four simple steps to improve the customer service of a restaurant. What are we talking about? When we talk about customer service we text a series of operations carried out by a prearranged area, which is attentive to listen and meet the needs of the customer in any situation and context. We are therefore talking about a type of service that must be better organized so that it can guarantee success and satisfaction to its customers.

Customer service is more than just a smile and pleasantries. It is about showing appreciation for those who choose to do business with you, so reviews are becoming increasingly important in today’s market – especially because companies can lose their reputation quickly due to unwanted advertising or offensive content online! Let me take you through some of our favorite companies that understand this concept well…

A catering service is perfect when the customer leaves the restaurant completely satisfied. How many times does it happen in your business? 

The truth is that getting everything to work every day during service is a complicated but not impossible challenge. There may be problems with a supplier, during the morning meeting or a waiter may get sick or damage a product. However, the important thing is that customers can live a good experience regardless of the unexpected.

Customer service

  1. Your Restaurant Staff

The first step for great customer service is your restaurant staff. A well-trained front of the house staff will keep customers happy and get them back for more. Good waiters are among the best talent in circulation. They are friendly, but not annoying.

Your staff ( Staff ) must be honest, reliable and able to work as a team. Organizing and setting up a good team of waiters is very important because in this way you will be able to make the best service to your customers. Being able to count on helpful, polite and kind waiters is very important. In this way you will remember more easily a particular restaurant and you will decide to return more often.

Customer service

  1. Customer complaints

The next step is one of the most important because it will help you deal with customer complaints. Things are destined to go bad once in a while, food is burned, orders are forgotten in the middle of a tip of dinner. No matter the reason for the complaint, the important thing is to try to please the customer. You should recognize that yes, there was a problem, but it is not what you should expect from your restaurant

  1. show their appreciation towards customers

Actions speak louder than words, and this is certainly true for customer appreciation. There are countless ways to show your customers how much you appreciate your business. For example, pay attention to the staff, especially from the owner or manager who will only make you feel pampered and special just to go to customers to ask how the evening is going.

  1. Be Responsible

Responsibly serving liquor is probably the most important way to show customers that you value them. After all, you do not want to see a patron who has had too much to drink and wants to get behind the wheel of a car. So if you are going to serve alcohol in your new restaurant, you must be familiar with all the laws of the liquor state. The laws of liquor vary from state to state, in most cases, if a person is involved in an accident while being drunk, as the owner of the establishment that served them, can be held responsible.

By following these tips you can achieve satisfactory results and improve the quality of service of your restaurant. These are small steps that can promise success to any business in the field of catering. Courtesy, quality of raw material and professionalism will allow your business to be successful.

A good restaurant in order to function at its best must work in every section and must be able to propose itself as best it can presenting itself as absolutely able to handle any type of request. Only then will success be assured. Organizing is the basis of any type of business management process and without the right internal management it will be difficult to achieve results.

Read also:HOW TO OBTAIN THE MICHELIN STARS 

5 digital marketing strategies

Digital marketing strategies-Food marketing. Creating an effective online marketing campaign is hardly and  simple task – especially for restaurateurs who use most of their time and energy to control what happens in the kitchen.

In recent years, a number of online marketing platforms have intervened to make it easier for independent restaurateurs to develop websites, manage social media, and cultivate better relationships with their online customers. Here are five tips from industry experts about what you could do to improve and expand your online presence.

digital marketing strategies

Digital marketing strategies

The turnover around Digital Food Marketing amounted in 2018, according to a survey by Necomm Food, to over 1 billion euros. But how can you communicate your product to potential customers?

Storytelling: the ability to know how to tell is fundamental to create a precise identity and leave a mark in the mind of users.

Engagement: Building a stable and lasting relationship with your customers can lead to incredible results.

Brand Identity: as already mentioned, the concept of identity for a brand has become an essential element to differentiate from all the others.

Multichannel: presence on multiple communication channels logically increases the chances of being seen by potential customers.

Social Media: fertile ground for Food Marketing is undoubtedly that of social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, in addition to the latest TikTok.

Digital marketing strategies

Digital marketing strategies

1) Create mobile websites. Restaurant owners who spend a lot of money on sites with moving buttons and Flash content, perform a bad service if these sites do not work on mobile devices. Sixty-nine percent of mobile phone users access the web every day from their smartphones, which is why you should focus on creating a simple website that quickly runs on as wide a variety of mobile devices as possible. This site should be easy to update, and should possibly integrate with the web platforms for restaurants without hindrance.

2) Stimulate the interaction. Hundreds of online visitors can click on your restaurant’s website every day, but what turns visitors online into real customers is the stimulus to interact with the restaurant owner. The best incentives are definitely limited time offers and discounts – usually posted on the restaurant website, on the Facebook page, or Twitter – a way to encourage people to get up and walk through your restaurant doors.

Digital marketing strategies

Digital marketing strategies

3) Publish the online menus. The thing that consumers seek more than any other, when they look for information online on a restaurant is an updated menu – even more than the phone number, address, or photo of the establishment. The menus do not need to be published only on the restaurant’s website, in any case: a good online marketing strategy for your restaurant could be to send your menus on online advertising platforms for restaurants or in website listings local newspapers to further extend their disclosure.

4) Solicit anonymous feedback from your customers. Often, restaurant owners do not fully understand the quality of service that the staff provides. Has the customer experience been satisfying or frustrating? The food was top notch or so? The catering platforms that provide restaurants with anonymous ways to gather honest customer feedback – both text and online – can help you understand what they are doing well and where your restaurant has room for improvement.

Digital marketing strategies

5) Take advantage of social media. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter should be an important part of your online marketing campaign. Restaurant owners seeking to take full advantage of Facebook should post photos of their dishes and ask customers what kinds of specialties they would like to see. On Twitter, restaurants can tweet links to photos posted on Facebook and occasionally send culinary suggestions as a way to demonstrate their expertise and keep their followers updated.

As you may have noticed, all these online marketing strategies can be integrated with each other, so as to exploit all the possibilities offered by the Internet.

Read also: Food marketing: how to understand the needs of customers with the target.

How to create a restaurant menu: 9 things to know.

Restaurant menu. It is said that the appetite comes by eating, and yet how many times have we sat in a restaurant and leafed through the menu we got a mouth watering? Scrolling through the different names of the dishes we evoke flavors, scents and suggestions that make us lean for a recipe or another.


This happens as long as the menu is well thought out, edited and written. Very little remains of the paperboard drawn by hand with the list of the courses of the late nineteenth century. Today nothing is left to chance: from the format, to the graphics everything is designed to improve the performance of the restaurant.

If you have a well-organized menu, in 3 minutes you will be able to orient the customer to choose the dish that is easier for you to make or the one with the greatest margins, with the aim of maximizing profits. Otherwise, the preference could fall on a great classic, but cheaper.

1.The restaurant menu must be original

Restaurant menu

The restaurant menu offers an ideal balance of unique and old dishes, for example the basic burger. It can be offered in a classic or with American cheese. You can even offer a unique version, one that fits with the themed restaurant, like topping a burger with guacamole cheese and pepper jack for a Mexican themed restaurant.

2.The restaurant menu must be versatile

This simply means that no item in the menu should be alone. If you offer a fresh lobster roll, be sure to include lobster in other dishes.

3.The restaurant menu should have the correct cost of food

Restaurant menu

In order to keep profits and prices accessible to customers, each item on the restaurant menu should be evaluated to determine its food in terms of costs with the actual amount it costs you to make the dish. The expensive ingredients (as already mentioned the lobster) is equivalent to an expensive menu. This does not mean that the food you order should be the cheapest quality available – it is the most important aspect of creating menu items – but it is necessary to balance the high and low cost of food at a reasonable profit margin.

4.Menu items must be easy to prepare

The menu items should be easy to prepare and these are two useful tips:

1 – easy to prepare on the spot (sautéed, grill, etc …)

2 – easy to prepare in advance and heat (lasagne, pasta, ribs).

5.The restaurant menu should have an easy to read format

Reading characters and too much text make it difficult for users to read. Keep your menu with simple design and avoid using too much culinary jargon.

6.The restaurant menu should be in a manageable size

Restaurant menu

Restaurant menu

The sky is not the limit when it comes to your restaurant menu. Avoid the temptation to offer a wide selection of articles, otherwise you will inevitably throw food at the end of the evening. Consider also what your kitchen restaurant is able to produce. There are enough stations to offer grilled dishes, sauteed dishes, salads, soups, baked goods, etc …

7.You should know when to update your restaurant menu

Restaurant menu

In order to keep the cost of food under control and keep up with other costs, you need to update your menu at least once a year. This does not mean that you have to rewrite the entire menu or add all the new dishes. It is simply a good time to make sure that prices are where they should be, and to evaluate the menu items with those that are not being sold.

8.You should know what to avoid on the restaurant menu

There is a long list of things to avoid in a restaurant menu, such as reading difficult characters or overly descriptive languages. The menu is like an ambassador for the restaurant, and you want to set the right foot.

9.One must know when to offer special restaurant menus

Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day often deserve a special menu at a fixed price. A fixed price menu limits the number of items available at a time, making it easier for the kitchen to result in a large number of meals in a short space of time. Even if it’s not a party, a set menu also acts as a big promotion during slow times. Special-price menus of two-for-one or a fixed-price wine tasting menu are great restaurant promotions to convince people, even in difficult economic times.

Read also: How to adapt the menu to the law on allergens

Wine tasting dinner: 4 tips

Wine tasting dinner. Wine is an alcoholic beverage that never goes out of fashion. A wine tasting dinner is a popular and promotional event to try at your restaurant. The Wine Tasting Restaurant offers the opportunity to encourage businesses, especially during traditionally slow seasons. A wine tasting in the restaurant is similar to a home wine tasting, as guests will be sharing and conversing on many different wines.

Wine tasting dinner

Wine tasting dinner

However, a wine tasting in the restaurant goes further, inviting a sommelier (expert wine) to teach guests about the wines of the evening.

When you want to organize a wine tasting, the right atmosphere and theme can be fundamental to put guests at ease. A cozy environment with soft lighting would give them some stimuli while enjoying their experience as experienced sommeliers who know exactly which wines match well together
I personally helped many people prepare for these events by recommending some types or the most popular ones of France – Beaujolais n’kin French red wine; Chardonnay when it comes time to try something different but still familiar reds Bordeaux region.

Wine tasting dinner

Wine tasting dinner

You can propose wines produced in a specific region or vintage, or offer participants the possibility of an itinerary tailored to their interests. You could also do things like matching each person’s tastes with different types of wine – dessert wines (but be careful because they are usually sweeter and therefore more difficult than other varieties).
This article discusses some ideas you may want to use to host your next tasting session!

We recommend that you opt for a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 6 wines.

Wine tasting dinner

Whether you are organising wine tasting at home or in a restaurant or in a wine cellar, you will need, in addition to wine of course, some essential utensils to offer a perfect experience:

Glass with stem, to avoid that the heat of the hands can change the properties of the wine.
Decanter, to allow the wine to oxygenate once opened and then to release its flavor.
Bread and water, to clean the palate between sips.
Corkscrew.
A basket of ice to cool the white wine.
White napkins to see the color profiles of the wine.
Scorecards

Wine tasting dinner

Select a wine list

Wine tasting dinner

There are countless types of wine, from classic French or Californian wines to locally produced wines to more exotic, (rare wines). Work with your sales person or a sommelier to help you choose a robust wine menu. A sommelier is a person with experience in wine. Your wine can either put you in touch with a sommelier or do the work yourself. Many wine distributors will help you at every stage of planning a wine tasting, since you buy wine from them directly.

Choose the Complimentary Foods

Once you have decided on a selection of wines that complement each other, select the menu items that will also complete each wine.

Think beyond the old rules such as white wine with chicken and fish and red wine with beef and pork. In this case too, in collaboration with your sommelier, just plan a tasting menu that will help you plan the perfect combination of food and wine.

Invite Guests

Once you have the details of the tasting (date, time, wine list, dinner, price) it’s time to get the word out. Take your social media accounts to promote your wine tasting in your restaurant. Emphasize that space is limited, to encourage early bookings. You can sell tickets or take reservations, or both. It is important to have a certain number of guarantees, so you know how much wine to order and how much food to prepare. Order around 10% more food and wine than you need for last minute bookings.

Educate your staff

If this is your first taste of wine restaurant, it is important to educate your staff on the protocol of the evening. Review the routine step by step, with both servers and kitchen staff. Give everyone a copy of the wine list and menu, so that they know in what order they will have to serve wines and dishes. Ask the staff to read the wines that are served, so that they can answer simple questions for guests, including wine, the types of grapes that have been used, etc …

Escort of Wine Glasses

Lack of wine glasses? Make sure you have enough glasses of wine for the evening. Each person will have a glass, for each wine served. So if you are serving you need to have six glasses for each guest. If you have 50 guests, you will need 300 glasses of wine.

Read also: Chocolate, that’s why it should never be missing. Let’s celebrate the chocolate festival with the tasty Mud cake recipe

5 trends of successful catering.

Succesful catering. It is always difficult to decide what to include in the menus designed for catering, especially because of the varied tastes of their customers! For this reason, it can certainly be useful to know the various culinary trends in catering.

With the introduction of yellow zones, opening at lunchtime and early closure in 2022 it is expected that 36% will resume eating out in breaks. This may be due to the fact that flexible work is becoming more entrenched in the daily routine, where people can choose when to return from work instead of being required only once a week or month as before.


TheFork noted how this new system could lead employees to take possession of a habit won by the end of 2021, namely to use wisely these times during the rest days to indulge rather than store them until later after long hours.

Succesful catering

The kitchen in the dark is a new segment of the catering industry that will definitely establish itself in 2021. This space contains only the necessary to cook and prepare food, no frills such as renting a useless room or staff costs – you eat instead at the customer’s home! The product can be more flexible with these reduced expenses; when times get tough during recessions there is not much left but this one idea: quickly move the headquarters maintaining its quality standards (and maybe even increase prices).

Successful catering
Successful catering

Successful catering

Food with local ingredients
One of the most used culinary trends in catering in the current menus is to offer food made with local products. This includes meat, poultry, fish, fruit and vegetables. The use of food made with local ingredients or in any case belonging to the territory in which it operates, is an important part of the great trends that look at environmental sustainability and healthy eating. The typical local dishes are very suitable for most events with catering, because often you are creating a personalized menu for the specific event.

Successful catering
Healthy menus
Another culinary trend in catering is to offer menus that go beyond meat; inserting something like potatoes and some steamed vegetables will help you offer healthy foods like whole grains, a variety of vegetables and fresh fish that are definitely a good way to show off your great culinary skills. Does this mean that you should eliminate fried fish or mozzarella sticks from your menus? Not at all; rather you should consider adding low-calorie, low-calorie foods, such as lean cuts of beef, pork, poultry or fish, as well as making smaller portions (and at lower prices).


Gluten-free foods

Successful catering
Many people suffer from the annoying gluten intolerance, while others eliminate it from their diet, in an attempt to eat healthier. No matter why, gluten-free cooking is one of the biggest culinary trends in catering that is expanding more. There are many delicious gluten-free dishes that offer good food costs, and also serves as an opportunity to experiment with many alternative ingredients like amaranth, cassava flour and teff.


Ethnic cuisine and street food

Succesful catering
Oriental cuisine, and in particular the one  of the Middle East, has had a dizzying growth in the menus of 2014. This trend also entails a greater tendency to use alternative ingredients. Just think of ingredients like the pomegranate syrup for breakfast, as an alternative to maple syrup. Then I suggest you to  look for exotic spices and mixtures of these, such as Togarashi, zataar and shichimi, and to offer  together with salt and pepper.

One of the culinary trends in catering offers dishes inspired by the ethnic fusion of street food. From the Mexican churros, to the Spanish tapas, the Chinese dim sum up to the Middle Eastern skewers, the more international the menu, the better. These types of dishes worked well with pickup trucks or for accompanying cocktails.

Successful catering
Homemade cooking
In the homemade style the food is served on plates and the people  serve themselves (just like at home). You can see this kind of lunch at many traditional Chinese and Korean restaurants. If you are offering catering services on  your restaurant, home cooking is great for small and medium-sized groups. It is much easier to feed 50 people at the same time if you let them serve 10 salads.

Read also: The rules for commercial catering

Hotel Ristorante Olimpia in Abbadia San Salvatore

Abbadia San Salvatore. Today on our blog we interview the owners of Albergo Ristorante Olimpia, Abbadia San Salvatore, in the province of Siena.

Abbadia San Salvatore
Abbadia San Salvatore

Let’s start immediately with a very simple question: at the Albergo Olimpia Restaurant, do you have any typical dish of the house?

Among the first courses, we have a tasty porcini mushroom soup, while for the latter we prepare a great roast with wild fennel, or if you prefer some excellent eggplant all’Olimpia. As for desserts instead, we have a delicious curly-haired ready to be enjoyed.

We remain on the subject of dishes, and we would like to ask you what are the dishes most requested by your customers?

Surely the most popular soups are homemade pasta. Mainly because they are easy to do, but also very comforting when you need a hot meal on a cold day or after an evening out with friends!
Mole sauce is one of my favorite things about this country – it tastes absolutely divine served on noodles that have been cooked all the way but still retain their bite; while cannellini beans give depth and crunchiness thanks mainly to their use here together with some fleshy mushrooms such as cèpes (porcini mushrooms) or porcini mushrooms.

Abbadia San Salvatore

A question that directly concerns the Albergo Ristorante Olimpia as a company: how long have you been open?

We have been in this business for 75 years.

And if any of our users wanted to reach you to taste your specialties, where should they go?

Our Albergo Ristorante Olimpia is located in the central area of ​​Abbadia San Salvatore in the province of Siena.

We also wondered if you also have a take-away service.

We have no such service at the moment.

Now let’s move on to a more technical question, concerning possible IT tools used by the Albergo Ristorante Olimpia: do you have a system to know the stock of your warehouse?

Yes, we have it because we are aware that always knowing stocks is a fundamental thing for every activity in our sector.

As for customers, do you have habituèe?

Indeed yes: it is always a pleasure to see that a customer becomes attached to our local.

Returning to talk about computer science, how do you take the orders in the hall? Do you use tablets or smartphones?

We at the Alberg0 Ristorante Olimpia are linked to tradition, so we prefer the old way with the waiter.

As for customer services, do you make home deliveries?

No, we prefer direct contact with our customers.

We thank the Albergo Ristorante Olimpia for your kind availability and patience in answering our questions, and we invite you to continue to follow our interviews with the various restaurant activities.

Abbadia San Salvatore

Abbadia San Salvatore

That’s a very good question. Let me tell you what I think! When we interact with customers in person, they may feel more connected to us and the experience is much better for them because of this quality of human connection that merchants have when they deal directly without an online intermediary like Yelp or Google ReviewFrPaper which takes away their ability to be authentic, also providing valuable feedback.

The answer to this question lies deep in the heart of every restaurant employee. They know that personal touch with every customer is what really sets them apart from their competitors, and it can be difficult for managers or owners not to have time at work to do all those little things that help build relationships between servers and their customers!
The love of spoken food could also play in favor when someone works behind a bar – how else should you stay entertained while people order?

We thank the Hotel Restaurant Olimpia for the kind availability and patience in answering our questions, and we invite you to continue to follow our interviews to the various dining activities.

Read also: We know the world of Food & Cook Design. Interview with Nicoletta Mearelli

Capri New Style of Gallipoli

Today we have the pleasure to have as a welcome guest of our blog, Massimiliano Stamerra, owner of the Capri Restaurant New Style of Gallipoli, in the province of Lecce since 2005.

capri new style

The activity of the Capri New Style was born from  the passion of its owner, a passion that led him to give  the bright lights of a city full of opportunities like Las Vegas, to invest everything in a basement of a small semi-dark alley and secondary course of Corso Roma, with the idea of ​​offering  a service that is different from usual; in fact, as Massimiliano loves to affirm, he is “like  always inimitable”, thanks to the intuire mix of hospitality, friendliness and friendship.

Capri New Style

All this has led our Massimiliano and the “Capri New Style” to quickly establish itself in the surrounding area and beyond, taking advantage of the reputation of the “Bella Città” by definition and its special relationship with customers who come to visit it ,despite the difficulties in reaching Gallipoli.

Always in step with the needs of the catering market, the owner of the “Capri New Style” is constantly looking for new ingredients that also offer a good alternative for all those customers who have intolerances or special tastes, for which he offers doughs for gluten-free pizza, milk or yeast, with Kamut, Spelled or Hemp flour, multi-grain or whole.

Of course, all this can not ignore the quality of the ingredients, such as extra virgin olive oil or 100% Italian wheat flour, carefully selected and acquired through the safest and most reliable suppliers.

In addition to the classic take-away service, which offers a very good pizza “by metro” and that is its real strength, the “Capri New Style” Pizzeria Restaurant has a large room that can accommodate up to 500 people. you can safely abandon yourself to the pleasure of a welcoming and lively environment and a large garden where you can breathe the typical festive atmosphere of the summer evenings gallipoline.

Furthermore, the “Capri New Style” is equipped with all the latest, most advanced and modern tools for the computerized management of in-room and warehouse orders; its staff, which can reach the 22 elements between waiters and boys, during the peak highs of affluence in the warm evenings typical of the Salento summers,has chosen among talented young people and offers a service as “always inimitable”, thanks to special handhelds for orders, which allow to speed up the ordering and communication operations with the pizza preparation station and the kitchen.

The advice of the editor of the Blog of Ristomanager.it is to try as soon as possible the quality and the welcoming atmosphere of “Capri New Style” and meet the owner Massimiliano Stamerra.

Read also: We know the world of Food & Cook Design. Interview with Nicoletta Mearelli