Practical advice to manage your reservations, reduce no-shows and grow your restaurant.
No, you do not need to post every day. Here is how a restaurant attracts local diners with Instagram in a few hours a week: an optimized profile, 2 to 3 well-chosen posts, useful Stories and properly disclosed creator partnerships.
You don't need a 10% price rise to earn more. A couple of dollars extra per cover, every day, changes your month. Menu engineering, suggestion timing, dessert scripts, set menus: here are the levers that actually work on the floor.
Your Google rating is the first thing potential guests check. Here is how reviews influence your local ranking, how to collect more without breaking the rules (or the law), and how to reply well.
Your Google listing gets seen more often than your website. Here is how to claim it, complete it and optimize it point by point, backed by Google's official documentation, so it shows up on Maps and turns searches into reservations.
More than half of UK consumers now check hygiene ratings before choosing where to eat. Here is how the FHRS works, how to prepare for the inspection, and how to fix a low score.
Beginning inventory plus purchases minus ending inventory, divided by food sales: one small formula decides a large part of your margin. Here is how to calculate it, in dollars and in pounds, and what to do when the number is wrong.
On Saturday you turn people away; on Tuesday you count occupied tables on one hand. Here is a concrete plan to fill your restaurant on slow nights without slashing prices: targeted offers, recurring events, local partnerships and reservations captured around the clock.
The paper book has done the job for decades, and it does it well. Here is what a digital reservation book actually adds, what it costs, and how to move from paper to screen without upsetting your service routine.
Card hold, deposit, prepaid booking: they are not the same thing. Here is how credit card holds really work for restaurant reservations, what US and UK practice looks like, how much to ask for and how to announce it without scaring guests away.
December is the busiest month of the year, and the riskiest. Here is how to run Christmas party bookings with deposits that hold up, pre-orders that save your kitchen, and a timeline that starts in September.
OpenTable, Resy, Tock, SevenRooms, Yelp Guest Manager, Toast Tables, Eat App and ViteUneTable: an honest comparison for US restaurants, with pricing checked on each vendor's own site.
OpenTable, ResDiary, TheFork Manager, SevenRooms, resOS, simpleERB, ViteUneTable: an honest comparison of restaurant booking systems for UK venues, with the pricing models explained and every claim checked on the vendor's own site.