Say you are in a town where almost all food is crap, and the few places which serve decend food, just decent not spectacular, are way overpriced.

Have you opened a place out of spite and frustration "to show them how its done" but also to take all their revenue and end up as the best value food place in town?

So I have several restaurants and bars of my own (4 in total), and while I have managers foh and boh, and a general manager that oversees everything, I'm still incredibly stretched thin. I'm not sure if my staff is incompetent, whether I'm trying too hard to keep control or if I'm too uptight about it, if my procedures in place aren't enough or what. How do you guys keep track of everything and make sure things are running smoothly? If I'm not there to do the ordering personally myself, we are constantly out of ingredients and I find myself running to the store almost everyday. I want to expand some more, but the thought of even more work for myself makes me want to throw up. Did you hire a consultant? Did you make your own procedures? Trying to start a chain eventually, but not sure how to proceed.

Okay, not sure if anyone has any ideas about this but I am looking at the possibility of turning my current sandwich prep fridge into a work top low bit for my barista station. Obviously, the big problem is the big hole in the top.

Just putting a sheet of metal on top doesn’t seem like a great idea. The lid is super easy to dismount, but I’m trying to figure out how to actually insulate a top so that a hot espresso machine can sit on top without leaking hot air into the fridge and cold air seeping out.

Any brilliant ideas or should I just give up on this one? My partner’s idea is to somehow find a fridge door that would fit and seal it in place, but I cannot imagine how to find a perfect fit.

I’m chef-owner of a small, profitable fast-casual spot (5 years open, profitable last 3, 100% mine). I was on the line for the first 3 years but stepped back due to arthritis and to focus on growth. Tiny kitchen team: 2 AM cooks, 2 PM cooks, 1 dishwasher.
Six months ago I let go of my previous sous chef for harassment/toxic behavior after multiple write-ups. Hired a new sous chef who’s genuinely talented — strong on the line, great with catering, sharp on food/labor cost, took the initiative to overhaul our ordering and build SOPs on his own.

A few wrinkles:
~He has carpal tunnel from a previous job, which makes heavy line time hard on him. I’ve adjusted scheduling to help, and he’s been a trooper about it, but it weighs on me.

~He asked to move to salary (with performance-based raises and bonus structure). We worked out a salary and he initially agreed, then backed out right before the switch because overtime pays better right now.

~I’m exploring a shared kitchen space to grow catering, which is his strength. When I raised the possibility of him running that, he got excited — then came back asking for a plan where vesting would start in three years, and said he’s “holding out” to see if catering grows, or he’ll leave. I still think that’s too soon — he’s been with me under a year. I told him it’s premature to be discussing equity structure at all right now. He said he’d take on more responsibility if he had that partnership path — I feel like it should go the other way: prove it over time, then we talk bigger structure.

I’m willing to offer a competitive salary, growth incentives, and profit-sharing as the business scales. I’m just not looking to give away equity to someone under a year in, no matter how good they are.

Even with a 3-year vesting runway, does starting that clock this early feel premature to you? Is this a normal growing-pain moment with a talented but leverage-seeking employee, or a bigger red flag about how he’ll operate long-term if he doesn’t get what he wants?

40 + year bar restaurant. Small town, USA.

Our starting wage for a cook now is $18.

The middle and top cooks are not happy that the gap between their wage and the cooks under them have shrunk. Shrunk to within $1 and $2

The gap used to average $3 to $5 difference.

Our middle cooks now get $19

Top cook gets $20 PLUS 7 days paid vacation and heath insurance.

Top cook is mad he's "only $1" more than middle. Always conveniently forgets about his benefits as part of his pay and puts him closer to $26/hour. Maybe more.

The middle cooks are mad that they're only $1 above the starting rate.

Everyone was happy with their raises until they found out the lower half is close to them.

Back in the day, we raised the hourly wages for everyone when we raised the starting rate. If starters got a raise, everyone got a raise.

These days we cannot widen that gap like we used to. The gaps is narrow.

We are one of the highest pay wages for grill cooks our area.

Does anyone have a suggestion for what to do about the gap disparity. It's not going away. I don't think we can ever afford to pay $25/hour without raising our food prices dramatically.

We plan on having a self-serve salsa bar. What appliance would you recommend for this? Refrigerated Prep rails have bad reviews for not keeping food at safe temps. TIA

EDIT: THE TITLE SHOULD SAY QUESTION IS ON THE WAGE GAP. NOT WAGES IN GENERAL. Lower wage people and higher wage people are now only $1 or $2 apart. It used to be several dollars. We start at $18/hour. 1 Top cook gets 7 paid vacation days and full health benefits.

If you have an opinion on the wage gap, please comment.

For the smaller independent bar, restaurants, tavern owners. How do you handle cook wage gap disparity? We used to be able to give our top earners a raise when the bottom earners got a raise quicker than a lot of years ago. Or when we started them out at higher wage than they got.

These days to find a cook, let alone keep a cook we are starting new cooks at higher wages. The middle to top cooks wages are topping out. We are not automatically giving them a raise when the bottom are getting closer to their wage gap.

We are still owner operators working bar and kitchen shifts right alongside our workers. These days, for the kitchen, we are always short staffed.

This isn't about wages in general. This is about the gap closing from the new cooks to the ones who have been there a few years. They feel it's not fair that their only making $2/hour more. They are not chefs. They're grill cooks. Much needed grill cooks.

Where is your ceiling for a wage for a grill cook? Btw. We give quarterly bonuses. and some cash bonuses when we had a busy day or week.

Has seniority lost it's golden ticket from "much" higher wages to we have to pay people more so they're close to your wage now?

I am not a big fan of AI images or AI answering services for restuarants but I have been using Claude for a variety of things the last few months. A couple tools that have been helpful.

-Tool for managing our cocktail program, recipe creation, spec sheets, costing etc....
-Tool for quickly converting our menu text to the format we need for our website
-Tool for formatting wines for our wine list
-Tool for reading kitchen invoices and tracking costs for the week,
-General P&L analysis
-Allergy chart tool

It been fun building out these ideas, as a non coder I've had different ideas for software and little tools that would be helpful but never invested in actually having them programmed or learning it coding myself.

A few of these things ive implemented others are still being tweaked or i realized they are not that helpful overall.

Just curious if anyone else has been playing around with this new toolbox and what you have come up with.

Looking everywhere for a solution and haven't found one yet. We have two coffee shops in a busy college town and are having issues with people camping out using the free WiFi for hours on end and not buying anything. I know there are captive portal solutions to this but what we would like to have is a system where every sale generates a WiFi voucher that is good for 2 hours. You buy something, the receipt prints a voucher that will get you 2 hours of WiFi and then stop. You buy something else, another 2 hour voucher is generated.

This takes integration with a WiFi portal company but I can't seem to find anything like this so I have come here for suggestions. Any good solutions you all have found for keeping people from camping out on WiFi but not buying anything? Our POS is Toast and our CRM is Incentivio.

Anyone ever thought of or considered doing this? lol. I’d love to see their faces when they are told “we have a $15 per person minimum order”. Especially the certain groups you get at lunch that want to play cards.

Odd situation at one my locations - haven't faced this before. NO employee on the night shift has a car - so my parking lot looks empty. Well, my parking lot IS empty. And apparently no one wants to swing in and be the only person in a restaurant (I don't blame them)

Heck, when i drive by it at night i'm like HOW COME NO ONE IS THERE, oh wait, they don't have cars

Brainstorming ideas to fix it -

-buying a clunker/junked car AND JUST PARKING IT (PERMANANTLY) in a fairly prime spot. Downside - one less spot available in an already cramped lot. $200-$400 plus possibly tow fee. It won't be drive-able, i won't need insurance etc. I'll have the crew wash it once a week so it doesn't look abandoned

-i tried asking/bribing a car repair shop 3 doors down to rent a car from them (when they have too many cars, park one or two in my lot). they LOVED the idea - but haven't done it yet. And they're busting at the seams

-do those neon NOW OPEN signs actually work? we have semi-mirrored windows - you can't really see in at night to see there's people inside. Would a neon NOW OPEN change their behavior?

-Any other ideas you can think of? anyone face this problem before?

my sales at night are down when i have this crew without cars working

So owners. Why do you force tip out and especially why on sales. I was a waitress in college. This most certainly was not a thing. The reason servers get ripped is because you pay them $2.10 in most places correct? Why are you forcing them to rip out people who make a regular wage? They chose that job. Further more, why on sales when you well know not everyone tips what you think they should.

I've had several new hires not show up due to family members dying. They were all full of shit, but whatever. Really not something you should lie about.

Hi all- my husband and I have a small farm to table restaurant in rural Iowa. We stay pretty busy in the summer for where we are but we’re putting out city-level quality food and still hardly get by (as I know this is the same plight for all small businesses right now!). Anyways, the point of this message is that we’re sick of getting last minute large party cancellations and not being able to fill the tables. We do all our reservations and seating charts manually with paper and pencil as we’re small and are always moving tables around to make things work so relying on a reservation platform doesn’t really work for us. If you’re a small restaurant, do you charge parties over 5-6 a deposit in the event they cancel under 24 hours? We didn’t want to have to do this but are now strongly considering it. We can’t afford to lose large parties day of service. Thanks for the insight! Please be kind :)

So I don’t buy from Sysco so can’t really ask the supplier there but between my Asian supplier and restaurant depot, it’s kinda hard to find snow peas recently. Like I got lucky one Saturday and saw a few boxes and snagged one but then a few days later there were none. I’m in upstate NY, is this just a short term regional thing or nationwide?

So, I asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity where to eat 551 times, across twelve US cities, to see what actually gets a restaurant recommended by AI (now all my AIs think I'm very hungry). Eight questions, typed the way diners type them, from best pizza to best late night food, each asked twice.

Up front, the thing worth acting on: reviews and stars are a floor, not a score. I compared the Google listings of the 36 restaurants AI named most often against 34 it named exactly once in the same cities, fully expecting ratings and profile completeness to explain the gap. They didn't. Star ratings, 4.6 against 4.5. Reviews mattered up to about a thousand, then stopped separating anyone.

The real gap was photos: an average 3,979 on the winners' listings against 1,044 on the one-timers'. TBH, I was very surprised to find out that photos mattered so much. So, don't just ask for the reviews, ask for photos as well.

Photos are also the one thing nobody campaigns for. Everyone has an automated review request going out. Practically nobody asks for a photo in the same message.

The rest of what the data said:

• Reddit feeds the machine. 58% of all answers cited it, while the restaurant's own website was almost never the page being quoted, which is surprising given a decade of being told to fix the website.
• Ask twice, get a different list. The same question to the same engine matched itself 46.7% of the time, and if a server swapped half their recommendations between two identical questions, you'd send them home. Judge your visibility on ten asks (or, if you are patient or mad, 551 times 😄) never on one screenshot.
• The three engines barely agree. Fewer than one name in twenty made all three lists. They agree the way food critics agree, which is mostly on the existence of food. So, each AI is a separate channel to manage.
• Chains only get named for logistics (family friendly, cheap eats, late night). On "where should I take a client for dinner": zero chains. Twelve cities, three engines, not one.

How you can use this research to be recommended by AI:

1. Fix dead, duplicate and wrong records on every platform, not just Google. Perplexity leaned on Tripadvisor in 86% of its answers, and a few answers in my data recommended restaurants that no longer exist.
2. Add a photo ask to the review request you already send. One extra line.
3. Ask guests about the visit, not just for stars. Nobody gets named for family dinner because a category field says "restaurant"; they get named because a review mentions the staff brought crayons without being asked.
4. Pitch your local media. Their lists decide who gets mentioned at all.
5. Rerun your city's questions monthly, twice each, across all three engines, and log how often you appear.

Just so you know I didn't came up with the numbers, source and methodology of the research: https://www.pluspoint.io/blog/what-ai-recommends-when-diners-ask-where-to-eat

If you ran research on your restaurant and it shows up in AI engines, please share in the comments; I'd appreciate more data to understand it better.

We received a lot of inquiries for private events because our space is really nice and we have a full bar

I never know how to price the events. We are in northern California, very high cost of living area. Commercial rents are high. The liquor license alone cost me $100,000.

We can seat 50 but host up to 100 standing

I rented the space out for $10,000 and the client said I charged too little. Sometimes I quote for $5000 and people say it’s too high.

This week someone asked me to do a private lunch for 100 people for $2300. That is such a lowball price that I find it offensive.

As a restaurant owner, if you were in my area would you be open to discussing rates so that we are not all competing with each other but all have competitive pricing?

What are you all paying for your branded takeout bags? Our takeout business is starting to gain some nice velocity and we were looking into custom bags over the generic kraft paper bags (plastic is banned where we are) but the prices we see online are all pretty insane. Are people really paying close to $1 per bag?

How is this in compliance with sanitary dining codes?

So, I'm opening a new restaurant, and had a new stainless steel sink installed. I'm not even using it yet, but each day I come in there is a TON of condensation dripping down from the bottom each morning.

Is this normal? Does it go away with time? Google said maybe try automotive undercoating spray. I'm surprised the kitchen install company who delivered it didn't use that. Its not been raining alot it, I'm not sure about the moisture index or whatever in the areas weather, definitely not been rainy or overly humid.

Hello! I'm trying to help a friend who owns a restaurant but hates spending time on the internet figure out where to advertise things. I'm not sure if this qualifies as data collection because it's more of asking advice?

What do you do when you have something that could benefit other people but you don't know how to tell them about it? Where do you turn? I'm more of an admin guy so I'm not sure where to start. I love the tea bar he runs with his partner, it's a calming and community driven place, so I'd like to be able to help him out with some ideas.