Choosing a restaurant concept

In the face of stiff competition, you need to stand out. Your task is to offer visitors something that no one else has ever offered. And here it is not necessarily about an exotic menu or spectacular decorations. You can also entice customers with convenient service, great deals, and additional services.

How to choose a concept? Three key questions must be answered

Who are the visitors to your place?

Where is the restaurant located?

What can attract your target audience?

The concept of the institution is as important as the food in it. It includes not only the choice of direction (pizzeria, Chinese restaurant, youth cafe, coffee shop), but also characteristics such as: corporate identity, design project, the philosophy of the institution, the atmosphere, the portrait of the visitor chips that will distinguish your restaurant from many others.

By the way, you can entrust this stage to specialists. Today in the restaurant industry developed service for the development of the concept of the institution. Specialists will help you not only to develop a corporate identity and design, but also to solve organizational work on the design, repair and configuration of the restaurant. Such services greatly simplify the process of preparation, but “eat” a large chunk of your budget.

Writing a business plan for the restaurant.

Once you’ve decided on the idea and concept, you need to make a business plan. It will allow you to avoid unnecessary costs and errors at the start, to assess the amount of work to determine the timing and timing of the project. The business plan should answer the following questions:

What items will be on the menu?

How much money do I need to open a restaurant?

What equipment must be purchased?

How many employees will need to hire?

How much money can be made?

How to advertise your establishment in the market?

Thus, the business plan – a kind of model of your institution, which will determine the algorithm for the project and the resources that will be required. You will calculate the key indicators of the business:

The initial investment;

Revenue;

Monthly expenses;

Net profit;

Payback period.

When writing a business plan, one of the most common questions is how to plan for profit. Counting expenses is a little easier. Practice helps. But the income has to be counted in advance. And here it is important to get real sums.
The catering market is a specific business, where it is not so easy to calculate the level of income. This figure depends on many factors. Therefore, an assessment of the restaurant’s income is quite subjective and relies on the performance of other establishments. But for you, these amounts will be a guide, not a guarantee of earnings. Since profit planning is akin to guessing by coffee grounds, it is customary to make three scenarios of events – negative, positive and most expected.

Profit calculations can be made based on the number of seats, the average check, the level of occupancy and the average length of time a person stays in the restaurant, but the results can come out very inaccurate. It is wiser to visit several competitors in a similar price range and count their customers on weekdays, weekends and holidays, during the day and in the evening, and then derive averages. Of course, the calculations do not need to be present inside the restaurant, and even around the clock. Counting can be done, for example, from the car with a calculator in hand and a multiplication table in your head. This study will help you get rid of unnecessary illusions and predict the real numbers.

You won’t make much money in the first months anyway, so be sure to build a financial cushion to cover operating costs in the initial stages when planning your budget. An active and competent advertising campaign will speed up the process of finding customers. Try to run the promotion in advance so that you can attract your first visitors by the time you open.

Finding premises for a restaurant

Finding suitable premises for a restaurant is not easy – difficulties are created by the many requirements, norms and restrictions that apply to them. That’s why you need to start your search in advance. Try to find a space that previously housed a catering establishment. In this case you will save on bringing the premises into conformity with the norms. And you will save not only in money but also in time. In addition, such premises are sometimes rented with part of the equipment: extraction, ventilation, air conditioning.

When choosing is worth paying attention to two parameters: the location and the condition of the room.

Place under the future restaurant chosen subject to the concept. For example, the youth cafe is better placed near the educational institutions and the family cafe – in a residential neighborhood. Improperly chosen location can leave the restaurant without visitors.

Assess the location with services like Yandex.Maps, Google Maps, 2GIS. This way you will know if your direct competitors are nearby, if it is possible to meet your target audience there, how convenient is the transport interchange, so that the visitor can drive up to the institution.

Evaluate the space: whether it meets regulatory requirements, whether there is the possibility of redevelopment, whether repairs are required, whether there are all necessary communications… Also, pay attention to the power of electricity, because the food equipment consumes a lot of electricity.

The basic requirements for the premises of the restaurant:

Square footage of about 100 square meters;

the presence of artificial and natural ventilation;

the presence of sewage;

The presence of additional rooms (storage room, bathroom, staff room).

One of the most important issues at this stage is the cost of rent. For a restaurant, a considerable amount of space will be required, and not every entrepreneur has the opportunity to acquire the property. Rental rate depends on various factors: in what city or district the premises are located, pedestrian traffic and proximity to other public facilities. On average, renting space will cost 80-150 thousand rubles per month. Experienced entrepreneurs recommend paying at once for six months – then by the time of the second payment you will have time to unwind.

The menu of the restaurant

Menu development is a very important step in opening a restaurant. The menu must match the concept not only in content and originality, but also in price. If you position yourself as a democratic cafe, then the prices should be appropriate.

In drawing up the menu, take into account the following nuances:

Provide consumers with variety. Add to the menu new items or special seasonal offers. This will help to keep regular customers;

Be guided by the prices in other institutions. This is probably the most important factor in the policy of pricing. The vast majority of customers do not care about the cost of food. Today they use the formula “all the best for reasonable money”.

Make a flow chart for each dish. Be sure to specify the consumption of products per serving and its volume. This data is needed for the SES and the calculation of necessary raw materials;

follow the principle of full and varied use of products. This will reduce the risk of food spoilage when a particular dish is unpopular;

be sure to take consumer preferences into account. Keep track of your order history to identify the most popular and unpopular dishes. For the most popular items, you can raise the price slightly over time. Unpopular dishes are better eliminated or replaced with analogues. Also remember that computer analysis of demand for many dishes should be supplemented by visual analysis – at least occasionally look at the sink to see what is most often left on the plates.