How does a modern restaurant work?

Ones are lured into a restaurant by Michelin stars, others — great service and delicious cuisine. But let’s face it, no matter how cool the restaurant is, we are stunned if it is not on google maps, it does not have a site adapted for mobile, and to see the menu, you need to download it in pdf. Maybe for some of the restaurateurs this is a trifle. However, the further, the more convenient in terms of digital service, customers will want to see restaurants.

What does it take to be modern?

The Zoomer generation won’t even take seriously a cafe where you have to call to book a table, where you can’t split the bill with friends while paying by card, or where it’s hard to leave a tip with the card.

However, the main law of successful automation in terms of profitability is:

Always think ahead about the feasibility and payback of a new digital solution.

And yet, we talked so much and for so long about robots, darkstores, food delivery methods and options for ordering from a restaurant that we were a little out of touch with reality.

Therefore, we decided to figure out what the restaurant business needs to automate today, and which IT fantasies are best left for the future. We talked about this with the co-founder and director of the restaurant-brewery “Friends” (April 2014 — September 2020) — Yuri Priemko.

“Friends.” Beginning

Friends begins their story when the first floor is launched on May 9, 2014 for the Hockey World Championship. By September, the restaurant was already fully operational. Today, the complex includes the “Friends” restaurant, a brewery, a karaoke club, a Beergarden summer terrace and a new project in 2022 — Venner, which is located on the “Friends” beach.

To service such a number of venues, a team of at least 300 people is required, and taking into account new establishments and in the summer season, even more. So in the main restaurant there are about 950 seats, in karaoke — 200 and 250 in Beergarden.

The service staff is organized into departments: kitchen, service, personnel department, marketing, technical support, supply, security service, brewery. The task of the director is to coordinate the top managers who head these departments. I interact only with them, receive reports and give appropriate feedback. But I try not to get into control. Employees must always clearly understand whose instructions to follow.

At the time of the opening of such a large and narrow-profile restaurant in Belarus, there was no such thing, there was just one similar establishment — “Rakovsky Brovar”. But we have technological differences. It might look like that a 100-seat restaurant differs from a 900-seat restaurant in the number of cooks and waiters. In fact, this is a different technological chain. For example, we have two kitchens: one is a factory, and the second is a finishing (responsible for preparing and serving dishes before serving). Therefore, the technological processes that are in an ordinary restaurant are completely inapplicable.

There are other conceptual moments — we went to Munich to meet with other restaurateurs. They showed the underside of the restaurant (kitchen, storage facilities), explained the logistics, shared service standards. In terms of setting up the brewery, we attracted specialists from the Czech Republic. They conducted training and worked in our restaurant for the first year. Now they come only to audit production or with new recipes and beers.

In terms of service, we also adopted a concept that is absolutely clear to any European resident, but it was more difficult for people from the CIS to accept it. Since we are a beer garden, there are no tablecloths on the tables and service is done in a light and informal manner. Guests did not immediately get used to this, because in the post-Soviet space a trip to a restaurant was always perceived as a holiday, where everything should be of the highest standard.

The tasks of the director also include the evaluation of processes. If some of them are repeated regularly and take a lot of time, they should be automated.

In our case, the scale of the restaurant also played a significant role in this. As it turned out, most of the software is designed for small restaurants, and it could not cope with our volumes (for example, with the number of terminals).

How does “Friends” become the first restaurant that made REAL online table reservation

The first thing we automated was the ordering process. Just think about how in such a huge restaurant to manage all the reservations and appointments? Flipping through notebooks in search of the desired surname, while at the entrance you already have a whole line of dissatisfied guests. How to keep track of who came and who didn’t. Is the table free or reserved for other customers?

In general, after several collapses in the restaurant, we decided that we needed a program that would simplify the process of booking tables. After a while, the ability to place an order from the menu was added to it. And even later, the kitchen and the supply department were integrated there so that they could quickly receive information about upcoming banquets and events and prepare the right amount of food.

The software more than “paid off” during corporate events (New Year, February 23, March 8, etc.)

How does automation help to always be on the alert

In the future, the processes of interaction between departments were automated as well. All this running around with leaflets or letters on e-mail has always been fraught with errors.

Let’s also take a look at inventory.

Warehouse department employees manage purchases — respectively influence the formation of prices in the menu. The kitchen constantly places orders to the warehouse. But what to do, for example, if the warehouse employees have already left, and unexpectedly many guests have appeared in the restaurant? In general, all these interactions are controlled by a specially written program, which is “finished” every now and then in accordance with the newly incoming requirements. So, for example, we added scripts that ran at night to find errors in filling. After checking, notifications are sent to the warehouse manager and director to control their correction.

An equally important decision was to automate the work of the HR department. Do you know how much information they need to store? About employees who worked, the reason for their departure, current employees, their medical data, ratings, seniority, schedules, report cards. Constantly update that data, remind employees, for example, that their healthcare list needs to be updated. And remember also that there are 300 of them, not 30.

What else do you need in a modern restaurant?

– The security service. To keep track of who came/left on the territory, issue passes for cars, rent out kegs and barrels of beer using a QR code.

– The brewery. To track when and according to what recipe the brewing was, the current stage, the remains of the ingredients.

– The marketing department. To conduct workflow with musical groups. Usually they got so many applications, contracts and acts that the department turned into an office and forgot about creativity. But with the introduction of automation, this issue was solved.

– To update the menu. To notify all required entities. For example:
Accounting — helps them calculate the prices.
Marketing — helps them think over the latest restaurant actions and post them in social networks.
Human Resources — the crew training specialist proofread and communicate the updated information to the waiters.
Designer — must create the designs for new positions on the menu.
Technicians — to print these updates.

Can you imagine how many instances the menu must go from the chef to your table? And it’s not just about changes in the main menu, every 2 weeks a new “lunch”, another seasonal menu, some holiday promotions, etc. In short, without automation, such approvals turned into sheer torture.

– To calculate the outreach event. Such a program analyzed its feasibility. It’s like entering the initial data into a large calculator, such as renting a place, the approximate number of guests, the cost of dishes, prices on the menu — and it calculates how much you need to sell to break even. And we, in turn, made a decision whether it was real to make an event or not, based on our experience.

– To calculate plans for the year. After a year of existence of the restaurant, it was already possible to plan the loading of the restaurant, taking into account seasonality, based on numbers. Therefore, this managerial task was also automated. By the way, the director’s role here is to set reasonable goals. I would even say landmarks. After all, you can set up a bunch of plans in which you will have to constantly make adjustments. 2020–2022 is the best example of this. It is much better to have benchmarks based on statistics, and the actions to achieve them are flexible to change.

It turns out, no matter what anyone says, a complete transition to online, replacing chefs with robots or delivering drones is all, of course, very nice, but it will wait for us in the future. And if you want to open a profitable restaurant, then first of all think about the quality of service and cuisine, then about automating processes that will constantly repeat, take a lot of time or will be dependent on errors due to the human factor. And then about all sorts of chips. So far, they are only a good PR-reason, but quite expensive.