Launch a Restaurant ? Choosing The Right Menu | Small Family ...

Choosing the right menu for your restaurant is a key decision for the success of your business. This decision will impact the revenue of your business by differentiating your service from other restaurants and the cost structure of your business through the choice of ingredients, and the labor intensity of the recipes chosen.

The Menu as Differentiation

While having a unique or attractive menu is only one of the potential methods of differentiating your restaurant, it is one of the most common. Unless your restaurant?s location, atmosphere, or some kind of gimmick sets it apart as a destination, the menu and quality of the food is what will draw in customers and, most importantly, keep them coming back for more.

Customers care not just about the quality of the individual items offered but also about the presence of options. This explains why diners with overwhelming menus more than six pages long find success. Higher-end restaurants generally choose smaller menus and focus on the quality of the few recipes they serve over options because they are confident that this is what their customers will value.

The menu becomes a key part of your marketing, as it is reviewed and posted online, talked about by customers, and rated in magazines or Zagats. Don?t underestimate the power of a high-quality menu with a few standout dishes to create buzz about your restaurant.

The Menu as Cost Driver

Choosing the menu early in your planning allows you to understand the cost structure of your business much more easily. The cost of raw supplies and the labor to prepare and serve the food are the greatest variable costs you will be dealing with. In contrast, the costs of rent, utilities, and the equipment are relatively fixed over time. A simple menu can make cost projections much easier and more accurate. By adding the cost of the time spent by staff prepping, cooking, and serving the dish to the cost of the ingredients going into the dish, you have a basic sense of its dollar cost and how to price it to allow for profit. The more items at different costs that you will serve, the more difficult it will become to determine costs in this way.

By thinking ahead about these costs, you will uncover cost saving measures even before you launch the business. When you choose ingredients that can be used in multiple dishes, you can buy in greater quantity, get better rates from suppliers, and save on the costs of ordering. When you find out that some recipes take longer than others to prepare you can uncover methods cut down on that prep time or choose to drop that dish from the menu to stick to a target time for service.

Source: http://www.knobhillmeats.com/?p=201

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