Ideas for a busier restaurant

You cannot cook your way out of the 7pm hour

Your restaurant's peak hour is set by one constraint, not by how hard anyone works. Here is how to find yours on a single Friday — and the three moves you have left at 19:40.

What did you run out of last Friday, and what did you throw away?

Everyone remembers what ran out on Friday. Nobody remembers what went in the bin — and the invisible mistake is the expensive one.

How to order from a restaurant you have never tried

Most of us order the one dish we already recognise, then judge the whole kitchen on it. Here is a ninety-second way to read any unfamiliar menu and find the six things that actually matter.

Count how many ordered a second time. That is where the growth is

The customers who will pay for your next twelve months have almost all eaten your food already. Four numbers from your order history show where they are being lost — and it is almost always at the second order.

Your rating is written by the loudest few. You get to change who they are

Reviews are not a sample of your customers. They are a sample of the two moods with enough energy to type. How to ask the quiet middle for restaurant reviews, and what to say when a bad one lands.

Your dining room turns three times on a Friday. It could turn four

Ask most owners where the money leaks and they will talk about delivery apps, food cost, staff hours. Very few will talk about the room they already own, on the night it is already full.

The refund is not the expensive part

Almost every "the order was wrong" message is one of four failures — and each one happens somewhere different in your operation. How to sort them, what to write back, and the one number worth counting at the end of the month.

Nobody reads your menu. They scan the first four things and pick one

Open your menu on your phone. Count what fits before you scroll — four items, maybe six. That is your menu. Six free changes, in order of what they return.

Five tablets on the counter. Here is what the pile is actually costing your service

Nobody buys a tablet pile on purpose. It accumulates, and every extra screen adds a job someone has to do while the kitchen is full. Here is what that pile actually costs.

Your best local customer is three streets away and has never heard of you