Happy Holidays

Its the holiday season and the shopping rush is on. Whats this mean for the restaurant industry? It means most every restaurant is getting hit with holiday partys and loads of customers coming in from long days of shopping. A money making season.
It means employee call offs so they can attend holiday partys. It means gift card sales and pie sales. It means working on xmas eve when most people have off. So if you go out to eat this holiday season just remember were getting the rush just like the retail stores.

Customers (food stupid) no offense

The hidden secrets of most chain restaurants is pre made food. Why you may ask? Its easy, uniform and quicker to prepare. Its the belief that most employees don't have enough experience to make the product in house and it would take to much training to teach them. It is also the belief that the customer can't tell the difference and its true. Most people wouldn't know the difference between products made in house and pre fabricated unless your a foodservice professional.
Take for instance simple fried food items like poppers, mozzerella sticks, mac and cheese balls. These items have been served in tons of restaurants but could you tell the difference if they told you it was homemade?
An even bigger question is does it matter? Well it does to me because if your going to serve me pre fabricated food I should just stay home take it out of the box and make it myself. To most people it probably dosn't because they can't tell the difference anyway or they don't have the time to cook for themselves so they don't care.
I'll leave you with this thought. If your going to pay the prices in a high end restaurant to have a nice meal shouldn't it be homemade?

Management and staff turnover

If your a regular customer of a particular restaurant then you've probably seen a lot of new faces on a regular basis because the staff changes all the time. You may ask why does this happen? The only answer I have is that restaurant work his hard. This is probably the main reason most people encounter bad dining experiences. People simply don't want to work these days.
Most restaurants are always hiring because people quit just as fast as they are hired. This creates a constant on going training of employees. Employees are rushed through training when restaurants are short staffed and this causes a negative effect on the customers. Then when you finally get them trained they quit and the whole process starts all over agian. In my experiences you have to go through ten or so new hires to get one that will work hard and stay for at least a year or more.
Another issue is management turnover. There is always another restaurant out there looking to hire managers and make them a better offer. This causes management teams to constantly change in restaurants. This creates a negative/positive effect on the staff and customers because with new management comes change which can be good or bad. The problem with this is that management teams can change as fast as the rest of the staff.
In my own experience the company I work for I have been with a little over a year and I have worked in four different locations because of turnover. The restaurant industry has the highest turnover rate out of all other industrys. This is just anothe reason why a resturant that gives great service one week may give really bad service the next.

Long wait to be seated and Long wait for food

Have you ever been to a restaurant and waited thirty minutes or more to be seated and then once you were seated it took another thirty minutes to get your food? Of course you have almost everyone who has ever dined out has. As a restaurant manager you always hear "We only ordered ............ how long dose it take to make" or "We ordered ...... it doesn't take that long to make it." What most people fail to realize when a restaurant is packed is that their order isn't the only order being made in the kitchen. It also depends on what is ordered to determine how fast it comes out. If you order a steak well done that is 1.5 inches thick your looking at a minimum of 15 to 18 minutes before it is done cooking then by the time the server delivers it your total wait time could be 20 minutes. It also depends on how many orders are in front of your order. For instance if there are 10 orders in front of your order it depends how efficient the cooks are on starting the checks as they come in. If they get behind on starting checks or have to run to get to much product this slows the whole process down. A good cook will start all the items on checks that take the longest to cook then the cook will focus on the first few checks to sell them in a timely fashion. Then once the check is sold it is up to the server to deliver the food as fast as possible. The biggest problem arises when you are short kitchen staff and the orders are coming in faster than you can start them and sell them. This is what causes the 30 to 45 minute wait for food in most instances. Another cause which is a big one is incompetent kitchen staff. One more cause of this which happens alot is running out of cooking space which is when your fryers are full, the grills are full, and you have no more cooking area to start incoming orders. So you can see there are alot more factors involved as to why your order is taking so long. This is probably why most people who work in the restaurant industry are more understanding when they go out to eat and their order is taking a long time.