Practical advice to manage your reservations, reduce no-shows and grow your restaurant.
Every "sorry, we're fully booked" said on the phone is a guest who reserves at your competitor, often for good. Here is how a well-run waitlist turns those refusals into served covers, and into guests who come back.
Service fees, credit card surcharges, automatic gratuities: US junk fee laws now regulate all of them. Here is what a restaurant can still charge, state by state, and how to stay compliant.
Your first paying guests will judge a team that has never worked a real service together. A soft opening fixes that: formats, duration, invite lists, pricing trade-offs, and how to keep early reviews from hurting you.
A full dining room does not guarantee a profitable restaurant. Prime cost, break-even covers, seat occupancy: here are the numbers to track every week to steer your margin, with sourced US and UK benchmarks.
It's 8:15 pm, the dining room is full, and the phone rings. Answering means abandoning a table; letting it ring might mean losing a party of six. Here is how to escape that dilemma, with a voicemail script ready to copy.
Yes, US restaurants can charge no-show fees, but only if the policy is disclosed and agreed to before the reservation. Here is what the law, the card networks and your guests expect.
Deposits and no-show fees are legal in the UK, but only if they are fair, proportionate and clearly communicated. Here is what the law actually says, in plain English.
A markup copied from the previous owner, prices matched to the place next door, an increase postponed for two years: most menus are priced by habit. Here is the full method, from recipe costing to menu engineering, with a worked example.
You do not need a 30-metric dashboard to run a restaurant. Nine KPIs, all computable from your POS and your reservation book, tell you where the money is going, and a simple weekly scorecard keeps them honest.
Health inspections are unannounced, scored, and in some cities the result hangs in your window. Here is how the US system works, the violations cited most often, and a routine that keeps you inspection-ready every day.
Every scraped plate and every unsold special costs you twice: once at purchase, once in the bin. Here is how to measure your losses in one week, what the law now requires in the UK and the US, and the levers that actually work, from purchasing to your reservation book.
Same room, same team, same menu: one restaurant serves 40 covers a night, another serves 70, with guests just as happy. The difference is the floor plan and how the tables turn. Here is how to win covers without turning your dining room into a train station.