What are the best practices for managing a restaurant during a crisis?

Assessing the situation: Crisis can be of multiple types: 1) Staff Attrition 2) Cost of Sales is higher than sales [means Loss] 3) Inventory mismanagement [stock outs/ wastage/ expiry date products 4) Customer complaints Understand that it is important to control finances and maintain quality to start with. In your entire set of problems [Example customer complaints- Understand that there will be a few specific reasons leading to multiple complaints. For instance: quality of food, taste and temperature So it is important to address the reason of the issue, declutter your menu if it is leading to operational hassle and serve the best quality with limited good menu

The best way to handle a restaurant during the time of crisis is to hire less staff, check on food cost, make sure food items is not cooked in excess, handle items with care so that less breakage may occur. Don't requisite more stuff & control budgets.

I would have to say having the ability to remain the triple Cs (Cool, Calm, and M Collected) during a restaurant crisis is imperative to making sure your staff and establishment come out on top. Being transparent with customers without giving too many details is another practice I have found to be much appreciated during difficult moments with in the service industry.

1. Prioritize safety: Ensure the safety of your staff and customers by following health and safety guidelines and staying informed about local regulations. 2. Communication is key: Maintain transparent and frequent communication with employees, customers, and suppliers to keep everyone informed about changes in operations and safety measure 3. Health and hygiene: Implement stringent cleaning and sanitization protocols, and ensure that staff follow them rigorously. 4. Inventory management: Monitor and adjust inventory levels to reduce food waste and control costs. Consider sourcing local and sustainable. 5. Future planning: Develop a contingency plan for future crises and regularly update it based on lessons learnt.

Every restaurant needs to create its own data base to reach out to customers to let them know about changes, offers etc. [Retention marketing will pay more compared to generating leads and losing them] Also the communication with staff is essential to tell them the reality. This will help you get your loyal staff, support and also manage the scale of operations. Retaining customers is essential to generate good average order value

A crisis leading to hygiene, staff issues will definitely change the scale and ways of operations. Aggregation platforms serving on commission basis can help you reduce cost on delivery staff and order management [getting orders] They also take the responsibility of delivering the orders on time. This helps you focus on hygiene, operations and serving quality

Restaurant management means long hours, lot of physical activity, and a lot of mental stress as well because these are purely people based operations as of now. This means dealing with emotions. If staff contributes and is taken care of properly, they stay for a longer time which reduces your training and recruitment cost. Giving them proper regular training can help them perform better in situations and the manager/ owner can take care of bigger activities

Customer engagement is essential in order for you to generate database, understand preference, personalize communication which makes them feel important. Loyalty cards can generate more sales in slow hours. Feedback can be taken and implemented based on the size of the sample

When crisis comes, they come in 2 possible way: 1- As External forces: which we cannot change e.g: Climatic change, earthquakes, public policies, economic breakdown, situations above our interventions, which only allow as to adapt and readapt in order to maintain the business. 2- Internal forces: Managing staff, managing financial resources, managing operations, managing internal conflicts, managing customers, situations that are under our power to solve. After finding out in which category your crise fits in, time to start solving. You solve it or not, by analyzing the crise and it’s all fundamentals break it in two, what is important and what is emergency.

In my experience, I’ve found that the sooner the Restaurant, or Food and Beverage Manager responds to the crisis; acknowledging the environment, assessing the risks, and shares the concerns openly with their team, the sooner the empathy and unity is restored amongst the team. Next, seek mutual understanding with your guests ensuring you focus on their safety first, before openly sharing the challenges.