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.
Brett, you should be teaching my class. I actually just had two students and recommended much the same, but I love, love your work on speed. You must be an engineer! I like the way your brain works.
I agree with all your points Liz. It’s not a perfect system, but it is a simple one. When We did Colorado Boy I thought of doing it again, but I decided, hell, sometimes a customer just wants to sit down and be waited on. It’s all good either way!
We operate the same way as you propose. There are a few minor drawbacks including (1) finding numbers can sometimes be challenging (especially if there’s a patio like ours and wind knocks over numbers) (2) if a customer doesn’t finish their meal, we sometimes miss the opportunity to find out why and if we can make it right and (3) numbers get reused so our kitchen staff have to “unassign” the table number for it to get reused for a new customer. But we worked around this. We also tip our kitchen staff (I have NO idea why that’s not more common practice!
Overall great concept and our little kitchen has been running great! Seeing about 20% average revenue and 25% profit from this model
This is the model we use except we went one step further. We are a brewpub and bought our own food truck instead of building a full kitchen to have the open patio/food truck atmosphere. We still had to have a prep kitchen but it is much smaller and we skipped the enormous cost of fire suppression and hood.
We take drink orders and food orders at the bar, we pour your drink (a couple kegged cocktails and wine on tap for speed) get your phone number and tell you to pick up your food at the food truck when it’s ready. Expo in the food truck double clicks on the order on the screen and send them a text telling them their food is ready. We can handle 250-300 people this way with two bartenders, one barback, and two food truck workers because of our simplified drinks and food preparation in the truck. It’s a great system.
We also added a second roll away bar that quick disconnects to fittings on the beer trunk line for the busier days and it has its own POS system and bartender.
Brett, you should be teaching my class. I actually just had two students and recommended much the same, but I love, love your work on speed. You must be an engineer! I like the way your brain works.
I agree with all your points Liz. It’s not a perfect system, but it is a simple one. When We did Colorado Boy I thought of doing it again, but I decided, hell, sometimes a customer just wants to sit down and be waited on. It’s all good either way!
We operate the same way as you propose. There are a few minor drawbacks including (1) finding numbers can sometimes be challenging (especially if there’s a patio like ours and wind knocks over numbers) (2) if a customer doesn’t finish their meal, we sometimes miss the opportunity to find out why and if we can make it right and (3) numbers get reused so our kitchen staff have to “unassign” the table number for it to get reused for a new customer. But we worked around this. We also tip our kitchen staff (I have NO idea why that’s not more common practice!
Overall great concept and our little kitchen has been running great! Seeing about 20% average revenue and 25% profit from this model
This is the model we use except we went one step further. We are a brewpub and bought our own food truck instead of building a full kitchen to have the open patio/food truck atmosphere. We still had to have a prep kitchen but it is much smaller and we skipped the enormous cost of fire suppression and hood.
We take drink orders and food orders at the bar, we pour your drink (a couple kegged cocktails and wine on tap for speed) get your phone number and tell you to pick up your food at the food truck when it’s ready. Expo in the food truck double clicks on the order on the screen and send them a text telling them their food is ready. We can handle 250-300 people this way with two bartenders, one barback, and two food truck workers because of our simplified drinks and food preparation in the truck. It’s a great system.
We also added a second roll away bar that quick disconnects to fittings on the beer trunk line for the busier days and it has its own POS system and bartender.
This is exactly the model we adopted and it works great!