Page 33 - foodservice magazine September 2019

MANAGEMENT
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After all, the aim of the exercise is communication. Menu presentation is simply internal advertising. You’ve paid through the nostrils with your hard-earned marketing and advertising dollars to get people into your restaurant, it would
be a shame not to separate them from the contents of their wallets and purses while they’re there.
For most restaurants, the best sales method would be
by the use of a supplementary menu blackboard or tent card on the table, so the customers can digest the message at their leisure and not be forced into trying to comprehend a waiter’s specials overload. Besides, relieving your waiters of this task will speed up service
and assist front-of-house productivity. How much time does it take your staff to deliver a sales speech at each table?
If you really want to get sophisticated, new technology is rapidly making the pictorial method of menu presentation quite feasible. Easy-to-use digital cameras and high quality colour LCD screens that link to a computer have come down sharply in cost and are now within reach.
It’s not difficult to produce high-quality, laminated photographic tent cards or
menus, or to cycle photos of your dishes on a screen quickly, cheaply and easily. Imagine being able to put a up pictorial display within an hour of the chef first producing a new dish.
To me, restaurants are factories with sales offices attached. Often the factory part gets the blame for customer dissatisfaction, when it’s usually not the product that’s at fault, it’s the way it’s sold.