The new season brings new food to the menu and will likely inject some new energy into your restaurant as tourism season begins in many parts of the country. As Ashish Alfred, chef and owner of the Alfred Restaurant Group, told Modern Restaurant Management recently, it’s a good time to do some spring cleaning to make sure the back of your house is ready – and to give it a refresh if not. That includes taking a careful look at your menu to ensure you’re focusing on quality over quantity with your options, as well as making sure you’re doing so in a way that is profitable, minimizes waste and simplifies food preparation for your staff. Doing more with less extends to other areas of your business too: Enhance your efforts to cross-train staff to build skills across your team, identify opportunities to automate or simply food preparation and compliance tasks, and review supplier contracts to make sure you’re getting the most you can from your agreements. You may also be able to extend the reach of your business in low-labor ways through online ordering and delivery. Then, think about how you might provide creative, experiential, high-value experiences for your guests in the months ahead. Depending on the range of guests you serve, that could mean planning a series of onsite events that showcase your chef or specialty menu items, or finding new ways to get your food onto guests’ tables in their homes and offices. At the height of the pandemic, it seemed like ghost kitchens might be the restaurant industry’s salvation. But once restaurant dining rooms reopened, many of the large brands developing these operations failed as consumers directed their dollars toward businesses whose locations and brands they recognized – not (as many consumers perceived) tech companies that happened to prepare food. But now the remnants of major ghost kitchen brands Nextbite and Kitchen United are being repackaged into something new that may help revive and repurpose ghost kitchens. Fast Company reports that Sam Nazarian, founder and CEO of the hospitality brand SBE, who recently acquired the above ghost kitchen brands, is reassembling them in ways that lean on the individual brands of the restaurants they include and the chefs and other personalities behind them. Further, this reinvention of ghost kitchens is embracing the physical spaces – including grocery stores, food halls and hotels – that consumers trust when they make decisions about the food they eat. Nazarian is then weaving in the strong digital ordering and distribution channels that made ghost kitchens seem so promising in their original incarnation. While it’s early to say if this updated approach to ghost kitchens will pay off, it may set the tone for how restaurants might be able to use them to tap into new income streams going forward – capitalizing on efficiency and scalability but retaining more of the qualities that have always made restaurants desirable to consumers. |
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April 2024
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