Before You Open Ask Yourself Do We Need Menu Covers?

Each and every week we would print up new menus. It was as if we could never quite decide what sort of a restaurant we were, or at least that we could never land a price on our Turkey Club. Things would have been so much smoother if we had just found ourselves a comfortable position in the market and stuck to a menu. Same pricing, same food. Consistency is all most people really want from their lunch in midtown. What's really troublesome is if we had gotten some consistency we might have managed to get a little classier. We could have gotten some fancy menu covers and leather coasters for tables. Instead we hemorrhaged money printing and re-printing and then once again re-printing stacks of menus that would just end up thrown in the metal trash can.

When you're opening a restaurant it is key to find some sort of angle and work it. You need to define yourself, especially in a busy metropolitan area with dozens of options at your constant disposal. There needs to be a reason people come to you. This failed restaurant I am discussing which will remain unnamed, had a wealth of problems the biggest of which being that it seemed like we were flapping in the wind, changing course with every light breeze. What's great about being consistent is then you can implement the sort of cosmetic changes we always discussed like the aforementioned menu covers and leather coasters. But also hostesses and uniforms for servers. We wanted to set up a wait staff with a guest check presenter instead of just throwing a scrap of paper into a puddle of sauce after a meal. We considered having a vinyl placemat at every seat in the restaurant. None of these things ever happened because, to alter a popular idiom, we simply never got our "junk" together.

So I guess the point of all of this is that you need to have a plan in place before a restaurant opens. Don't talk about implementing menu covers, hostesses, leather coasters and a vinyl placemat at every seat in the house after you open, just open that way. People come into a restaurant and want to feel that everyone knows exactly what they are doing. No one wants to eat a sandwich with a big metaphorical question mark hanging over it. They want to know what they get is what they want and that no one had any trepidation when making it.