Simplify Your Brewpub Service System

We ate at a cool little Mexican restaurant in Telluride the other day. It’s hard to find something affordable in that town. I was impressed at how simple their set up was, and I of course recognized it, because it was the same as our first pizzeria/brewpub from the early 90’s.

You basically walk up to the bar, place your order, get a number and your food and drinks are brought to you. Our original idea was the customer just picked up their drinks at the bar, but New Mexico laws (where we were located) didn’t allow that. However in this Mexican restaurant they did. So I paid, grabbed my number and our drinks and sat down at the table. In about ten minutes, a cook brought out our food. When we finished, that was it, we just left. I had already left a tip when I paid. Their entire staff had one person at the register who also got the drinks, and two cooks.

While I was there I was reminded how it would be so easy for a little brewpub to do this. It would go something like this.

1. Customer starts a ticket with their name, orders food and beers, gives a credit card which is captured in the breweries system, then grabs their beers and a number and takes it to an open table. Behind the bar there would be one person taking the order and pouring the beer when it was slow. During busy times there would be a register person, and a bartender.

2. Once the order is taken it goes to a printer in the kitchen and the cooks prepare it. The ticket has the number on it to match the number the customer took to the table. If it is slow - like in the afternoon - the cook can take it out to the table. If it is busy you have a runner.

3. If a customer wants more beer they go back up to the register and ask, giving their name. It gets added to the credit card.

4. When they are ready to leave, they close out at the register. If a customer forgets and walks out, there is a sign on the menu and at the register that explains an automatic tip is added if a customer leaves without closing out.

5. Tips are shared with the kitchen. You can legally do this if the servers -runners, bartender and register person - are paid the states full minimum wage, rather than server minimum wage. Everyone that way makes really good money and works better as a team

I like this system because it requires less staffing and it’s less formal. With a full service establishment there are many more opportunities for something to go wrong.

The reason we came up with it was because we also had a fancy full service restaurant across the street from our little pizzeria/brewery. I counted the points of contact our restaurant had with a customer. Walking in the door and being greeted by a host, then a busboy, then a waiter, perhaps a bartender and so on. I counted over 30 things. With the pizzeria we got it down to about 14. Each time a customer deals with either an employee or even how the parking lot is laid out, that can be a contact point and something can go right or wrong. The less contact points the better. When people went into our fancy restaurant, their expectations were really high, so to be successful of course, you need to exceed expectation; hard to do. In the pizzeria/brewery expectation were low, especially with our service system, so it was very easy to deliver beyond what the customer expected.

And, by the way, because of the simplicity of the pizzeria system, it did almost half the sales of the big restaurant but had a higher net profit.

We finished our meal at the Mexican restaurant and I made a mental note to revisit this idea again with our next Immersion Course students. Just as how we teach to build breweries, simpler is ALWAYS better.