You could have the most beautiful restaurant, delicious food, and the friendliest wait staff, but poor kitchen efficiency can mean these things count for less than they should. When your kitchen isn’t operating at its best, customer service can suffer, and so can your restaurant’s reputation. If you’re struggling to manage a restaurant kitchen’s inner workings and your team at the helm, it may be time to consider ways to get it back on track.
Welcome Technology
Even if the idea of using technology like cloud kitchen software to assist your kitchen seems daunting, it can still be a worthwhile consideration. With training and time, you can find yourself more in control of what happens in your restaurant kitchen than ever before.
Such technology can allow you to track orders centrally, view instant reports of your profits and costs, and even manage items in your inventory. Rather than shuffle papers around your desk, you can have all information relating to your restaurant in one simple platform.
Evaluate Your Menu
If your kitchen isn’t running like a well-oiled machine, it’s time to evaluate why. Sometimes, a complicated or extensive menu can be one of the many issues plaguing your establishment. Talk to your workers and find out what they think about it. There may be ways to streamline it for both efficiency and cost-cutting. You can then promote your restaurant’s new menu to bring in customers and determine if it positively impacts your efficiency.
Communicate With Your Team
As a business owner or manager, you likely have a reasonable understanding of costs, profit, and business goals. However, it can be challenging to know where you can make improvements if you don’t gain insight into daily operations. Talk to your team to find out where they are struggling, what ideas they have, and how they believe your restaurant could be successful. You may just learn some new ideas for how to improve your business model.
Create Standard Operating Procedures
You know how you want your business to operate, and you may even train your staff to run it in a certain way. However, as time goes on and new team members join, much of that information can get lost. Every part of a restaurant can benefit from standard operating procedures. These can cover everything from how to handle complaints to how to store food safely. If you didn’t establish an employee manual when you opened your restaurant, now may be a good time to implement one.
Create Defined Kitchen Work Stations
If you’ve ever walked into your busy restaurant kitchen to see everything in disarray and orders failing to go out, there’s clearly something wrong with its efficiency. One way to manage this chaos is by ensuring there are defined work stations for each kitchen task. Get the chefs involved in this process, as they will be the workers to benefit the most from a new kitchen layout. After these new work stations are implemented, you can analyze the results and see if efficiency has improved as a result.
Even the most successful restaurant owner may have questioned their business’s efficiency at some stage. It’s all part of growth and improvement. If you’re not happy with how your restaurant kitchen is operating, consider some of these efficiency improvement options above.
