Assignment 2: Operating a Successful Restaurant

Creating Your Own Restaurant

Introduction

The starting of a business can be very exciting but if not well planned it will fail at a very short period of time of operation. However, I decided to start up a restaurant up business and to make sure that the business doesn’t fail; I must come up with a winning restaurant business plan. There are number factors that will come into play for the restaurant to thrive and survive, and two of them are a good theme and business plan well documented, but first and for most will be to turn an idea into the business and be well informed of the license and regulatory information. It will be hard at the first two or three months because the restaurant is new in town, and it will take some time for it to get noticed.

Create a concept / theme for your restaurant. Identify the key aspects of your concept / theme, the ownership type, and the restaurant type. Provide a rationale for your decisions. 

Deciding on a cuisine is the most difficult part this is because the restaurant is recognized for the food they serve. “Palm Restaurant” will be the name of the restaurant. There will be palm trees put in big flower pots at the entrance of the restaurant and in each corner of the restaurant. The tables will have a light green surface and the chairs also to reflect the color of the palm tree leaves. Waiters and waitresses will wear black trousers white shirts and light green half coats with their name tags.

The walls of the restaurant will be paint light green as the chairs and the ceiling section white as the shirts of the staff members. The floor area will be a mixture of the two main colors of the restaurant, that is, tiles of green and white put in a particular pattern will be used. The pattern will follow this order green, white, and green, white all over the place.

For the lighting, green and white light will be used but also put in a particular manner. For the ceiling since it is white color used, bulbs emitting green color will be used and on the walls since they are painted green bulbs emitting white light will be used. There will be always soft music playing from the speakers that will be mounted into the ceiling.

Outline the business plan for your restaurant. Include a description of your company, basic market analysis, management structure, and financial risk assessment. Provide support for each aspect of your business plan. 

The restaurant business plan will provide a road map to the success of my business and not only will it provide the right direction also pitfalls and opportunity of my prospective enterprise will have to be considered, before opening the doors to the public. The business plan will be referred to as a script the business ought to follow. The restaurant operational strategy will be of a casual dining restaurant offering full table service with very affordable prices compared to the fine dining for VIPs. The target market here are people of any class, that is, lower, middle and upper class since the restaurant food price will be affordable and not too high. The techniques that will be used here will include the following:

Customer Database – this will in knowing your customer better like the type of food the customers normally takes at particular times of the day, also, the restaurant can send banners to them, and they can also send them to other people (friends or workmates).

Social Network – create pages in social networks (Facebook and twitter) and bring people to like the page and know that the restaurant is up and running plus also the day’s special meal and the price.

Website Adverting – designing and hosting a website showing all the type of food served at the restaurant with their pictures and prices respectively. Websites are easy to manipulate and make changes at any time as compared to billboards.

Business relationships – building business relationship with big hotel owners and getting ideas from them on how they run their business and how they made it big from scratch to where they are now.

The operation planning of the business plan will simply convey on the general description of the restaurant’s day-to-day activities. The operation section is the most critical part for the success of the restaurant because it helps in the management and operations of the restaurant. The things that have to be considered in the operations include staff, customer service, suppliers, and the management controls (Ordering procedures, Point of sale systems, time and attendance tracking, payroll processing systems and scheduling).

Identify the location of your restaurant, and examine the major advantages and disadvantages of this location for your restaurant concept / theme. Include pertinent demographic information from the United States Census Bureau Website to justify your chosen location. 

The location of the restaurant will be in the Central Business District (major town). The reason for choosing such an area is because of the following merits:

· Early risers who come to work very early without breakfast they can take their breakfast there.

· During lunch hours people can leave their work place and come for lunch at the restaurant.

· For those people work overtime or night shift, they may decide to take their dinner there.

· The restaurant in the future may decide to have delivery boy or girl to deliver food to people in their offices those who don’t want to leave the office or have too much work.

The main demerit for the business is that when people have closed for holidays and am open the business will be very low on that day. According to the estimated annual sales of U.S. Accommodation and Food Services Firms by Kind of Business: 1992 through to 2012, NAICS code 722211 for Limited-Service restaurants, the sale have been going up. So this makes it a perfect place for business of this kind

Outline the restaurant’s menu. Specify both food and beverage options, and include a sample layout of your menu in the report. Provide a rationale for your food selections. 

The restaurant’s menu will have all the type food to be served to our customers except for the main menu of the day which will be put up on the chalk board at the front entrance of the restaurant. The layout of the menu will be put into sections or categories depending on the type of food to be served and the time. The menu will be put inside a water proof transparent cover so that it can’t be damaged by spilt drinks or wet hands of the customers.

In the first section of the menu will be the breakfast area for the early risers, and it will also have sub-sections in it. In the sub-sections an area for drink (coffee, tea, and fruit juice) will be put and other area solid foods (eggs, toast, sausage). Beside each food item will be the price of the food so that the customer knows what he or she can buy comfortably.

Immediately after the breakfast section will be the snacks area, this type of food will be mostly taken between breakfast and lunch and also between lunch and dinner. Here also there is going to subsections solids one side (cakes, cookies, popcorns) and the other is beverages (energy drinks, milk shakes, yoghurt).

The snack sections will be followed by the lunch section which will be divided into three parts. One part will be for the vegetarians only, the other area for those who can eat meat there will be different types of meat (pork, beef, mutton, bacon) and the last area will be for the dessert area. For the dessert there section it will be put in the middle of the lunch and dinner meals. Desserts will include vegetable salads, fruit salads, ice cream and drinks (milk or water).

The last section will be the dinner area, and it will comprise of three areas, vegetable area, and meat area and drinks sections (types of wines red or white wine). For the people who can eat meat they may decide to mix it with some vegetable also if they want. Also, if a customer wants something special for a special night he or she will have to make a booking one day early for better preparation and good time management. The wine will only be served to customer of the legal age and not minors

Determine both the layout and equipment for your restaurant’s kitchen. Demonstrate the strategic manner in which the kitchen layout and chosen equipment adequately support your menu choices. 

For the kitchen layout, there will be a very large section for putting prepared foods that are ready to be served to customers. This section will be located near the door so that when a waiter or waitress is told that the food they have ordered is ready, they just come and pick it near the door, and they will not have to enter all the way into the kitchen. The food preparation area, that is, example cutting, chopping, mixing of flour will be along the sides of the kitchen and in the middle of the two preparation surfaces will be a fireplace with eight gas burners. One side of the preparation area will be for vegetable foods only and the other preparation area will be for meat alone. This is because some customers may want to see how their food is prepared and for those who are vegetarians they would not want to see vegetable and meat on one sections.

The eight burners that will be put in place, four will have an oven below them, and they will be two ovens for each side. The gas burners will have gas piped to them from outside the building. The main gas tank will be put outside at the back side of the building this is because gas is highly flammable and having it near fire it is very dangerous. All the burners will have one chimney cap on top of them, and it will be connected to a pipe that will run all the way to the outside back of the building. Along the chimney pipe there will be an electric fan that will help in sucking out the hot moist air from the kitchen hence providing a cool environment for working.

The kitchen will have three fire extinguishers located near the doors, five smoke detecting devices and two fire switch alarms. For the smoke detectors, there will one on each corner and one in the middle right on top of the chimney cap, the fire alarm switch will be put each one on the food preparations sections of the kitchen. At the other end of the kitchen section after the passing, the preparation sections and the burner will be the washing section and a place for putting the utensils and cutleries. There will be two dishwashers put in place and a sink for washing large items that can’t fit in the dishwashers.

In this same area of washing the utensils there will be two doors that will be on opposite sides, one door will lead to the cold room and the other to the food storage area. Besides the food storage door will be another door that will lead to the exterior of the building, the backside of the building. On top of the cold room, door will be a meter gauge for measuring the temperature of the cold room hence help in controlling the temperature.

Conclusion

The success of the restaurant will be purely based on hard work, strategically planning from day one of the start-up process, determination of attracting the customers and some bit of good luck. The joy will bring to me, and my employees’ everyday will be one of the measures of starting the restaurant business. There will some activities that will make the growth and prosperity of the restaurant exciting or challenging, and as the owner of the business the income will be dependent upon the direction I take in this restaurant business. The customers’ needs is where all the focus and hard work of the business will go.

References

Ghorpade, J., Chen, M. M., & Caggiano, J. (1995). Creating quality-driven performance appraisal systems. Academy of Management Executive, 9(1), 32-39.

Zimmerer, T., Scarborough, N. M., & Wilson, D. (2002). Essentials of entrepreneurship and small business management (Vol. 2). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Glantz, S. A. (1999). Smoke-free restaurant ordinances do not affect restaurant business. Period. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 5(1), 1.

DeThomas, A., & Derammelaere, S. A. (2008). Writing a convincing business plan. Barron's Educational Series.