Chapter 159: Tips for Running a Restaurant (Part 1)
At three o'clock in the afternoon, the restaurant's dining peak finally passed. The customers who had been queuing at the door had found their seats, and the number of customers leaving after eating gradually increased.
The ravens piled up at the takeout window and flew away one by one with the meals. The waiters collected the various coins and smiled from ear to ear.
Whether it is the greenhouse hall of the garden restaurant or the small building, the number of empty seats is increasing. The waiters are quickly cleaning up the empty bowls, wiping the tabletops, and then carrying the dirty bowls, chopsticks, knives and forks into the kitchen in thick bamboo baskets for washing.
The cooks, having finished their orders, stretched themselves. Following their shift schedule, they left two people to take turns and went to the small room next door for a nap.
The helpers began to busily wash the dishes using magic and manual labor, while the kitchen helpers in charge of preparing the food began to wash the ingredients, drain them, dry them, and then cut them into strips, pieces, and slices, so that the chefs would have the ingredients they wanted at hand during peak hours.
Despite the hustle and bustle, everything in the restaurant, from the front desk to the kitchen, was in perfect order. The boss had prepared contingency plans for any eventuality, and the employees at Juanwang had memorized them by heart.
A carriage carrying Heidi rumbled into the west city of Easton and stopped in front of the gate of the Garden Restaurant.
Having already resumed a normal diet thanks to the nutritious meals Takumi had provided, the rosy-cheeked Heidi disembarked from the carriage without assistance. She was still thin, but at least not the frail, skinny figure she'd once been, looking as if she were about to die. She greeted Jericho, who had come to greet her, and followed his instructions as she ascended the stairs, followed by the housekeeper, carrying a trunk.
Heidi came to Jiangyou to bring money and cooperate.
Business at the Dream Garden Restaurant was booming, and the Lothar family not only profited handsomely but also garnered numerous offers of goodwill and wooing from the nobles. Of course, as Andrei's ally, the Lothar family couldn't arbitrarily decide whether to accept these nobles' offers. Naturally, Heidi had brought letters from these nobles with her on her visit.
She easily found Jiangyou, who was leisurely drying his skeleton on the small garden platform on the roof. After greeting him, the housekeeper stepped forward and held out the box in her hand.
The housekeeper smiled widely, and when she opened the lid of the box, Jiangyou's pure white skeleton was almost coated with a layer of golden light by the reflection of the gold coins!
"Wow! That's a lot of money!" Although Jiang You knew how popular Mengyuan Restaurant was, he was still shocked to see so many gold coins. "It seems that Mengyuan Restaurant's business is even better than before!"
"Yes!" Heidi's voice was filled with excitement. "The popularity of Dream Garden Restaurant has attracted many nobles to come here. Many nobles can't get a reservation, so they ask to hire our chefs for home service. We've recently taken on a lot of banquet catering work, so we've specially recruited a group of chefs and selected those with good skills and loyalty to train.
"These chefs specialize in catering for door-to-door customers. Due to their limited training, their seasonings are somewhat lacking, so they can only reproduce about 80% of the restaurant's flavor... But if we add the curry sauce, which is prepared, sterilized, and sealed in the restaurant, we can make up for this shortcoming!"
Jiang You understood: "A second-rate chef combined with the restaurant's pre-made sauce is an idea."
"I specially ordered three dining carriages for them. Each carriage is pulled by eight horses and is fully equipped with cooking utensils, stoves, and small magic constant-temperature refrigerators! With these equipment, they can travel to noble territories across the country and provide meals for their banquets and balls!"
This is a super profitable business, just like the Rose Villa before - although a murder occurred, Jiang You made a fortune in just a few days.
Nobles were known for their extravagant spending when flaunting their power, and even those with less confidence often had to maintain their appearance. If we were to simply consider profitability, then doing business exclusively with the nobility would naturally yield the highest returns.
"However, this business model has also encountered a small problem." Heidi said, "The recipes you taught me before are a bit insufficient."
Takumi realized that a restaurant only needed to offer a few signature dishes over a period of time. Due to custom, nobles rarely went out to eat in groups, usually going to restaurants outside with close family and friends.
In this situation, there aren't many people dining at a table; three or five is the maximum. With so few people and limited appetite, and everyone wanting to try the signature dishes, their orders tend to be quite concentrated.
Although Jiangyou only taught the chefs at Dream Garden a few dishes, once these dishes became popular, the main reason for customers to come to the restaurant was to try all of them. If they served a large, all-you-can-eat menu, a bowl of curry rice per person would be enough to fill them up, but customers would also want to try Tom Yum Goong udon and other dishes.
Nobles would not share meals with others, as they considered this to be a very degrading act.
In this way, restaurants can simply offer special "tasting menus" based on this concept, reducing the portion sizes of each dish and adding some fancy side dishes and drinks, thus expanding the menu to more than a dozen dishes. Under the guise of allowing all guests to enjoy the restaurant's most exquisite signature dishes, this not only satisfies the discerning patrons but also saves on ingredient costs and chefs' time.
To ensure quality, a high-end restaurant must discard any unused ingredients, including pre-prepared dishes, soaked dried goods, and thawed frozen goods. If no customers order these ingredients, the restaurant loses money. However, if they reuse them, they enter a vicious cycle of declining quality and flavor, leading to bankruptcy.
If you only sell a few dishes, the menu will appear monotonous and the flavors will be repetitive, which will not attract many customers.
If there are too many varieties of dishes on the menu, the cost of preparing them will be high, but not preparing them is not an option.
When customers order a dish and the restaurant apologetically says "out of stock," and this happens two or three times, the customer experience plummets. After all, customers are not fools. If they are repeatedly blocked from ordering, they are likely to lose interest in dining and not want to come again.
How to reasonably arrange the main dishes and the ingredients used is the little trick to running a restaurant.
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