Keeping Short Ticket Times During High Season
As we emerge from the lull of the long, cold post New Year period we begin to look at our restaurant anew and to try and shape things up for the season of high business to come. Your success as a restaurant has many factors involved in it, but there is one that is often a defining factor and that is guest satisfaction. If your guests are not happy then they will not return and spend their money with you; and they may warn their friends and family against doing the same.
There are a multitude of factors affecting guest satisfaction, but one of the main ones is ticket times. If your food and drinks are not coming out at an acceptable rate than your guests will be disgruntled; and this is often a sticking point. When high season kicks in and your restaurant is running at full capacity ticket times are going to be your biggest concern. Here’re some tips for Keeping them down.
Kitchen
Remove items from your menu which take a long time for your cooks to make during service. There will only be 1 or 2 of these items and they might be very popular, however, making this sacrifice can noticeably increase your speed of service and keep all your guests happy, Secondly, look at your stations and ensure that the workload is weighted fairly. Is grill too light whilst sauce is always snowed under by tickets than require their services? To fix this you may want to tweak some menu items, or switch a few tasks around between stations where possible so that everyone gets a somewhat fair workload.
It’s not menu related, but the skill level of your staff -and their moral- is a factor when trying to increase your ticket times. Assess your staff and their skill levels, and if someone isn’t up to standard consider either coaching them further or switching them onto a station more suited to their skills.
Bar
Exclude muddling from any of your menu drinks; this is one of the things that really causes a bottleneck for bar tickets. Still muddle things for cocktails that require you to but don’t give yourself more muddling that it’s worth. Use fewer ingredients in your cocktails, and a great tip here is to pre-infuse spirits with fresh ingredients. This gives the appearance that your producing top quality, made-in-house items without having to create complex, multi-ingredient cocktails at the point of service. Also, use pre-prepared garnishes. Garnishes might look great however if they’re taking your bartenders thirty seconds to put together then are they worth it? If you can pre- prepare these items great! But if not, consider swapping them out for something either prep-able or something less time consuming.
The BIG secret of keeping ticket times down is prep. Prepping as much as possible before the shift begins leaves your with fewer time consuming tasks to complete whilst trying to pump out tickets as fast as possible to hungry, thirsty and expectant guests. Prepping will help you to streamline your service during the high season, whilst still attaining the highest heights of quality you’re always seeking. Sit down, not just with your management team, but also with your trusted members of staff and ask for their input. From their perspective in the trenches they will see things different to you and can often offer valuable insights that you might otherwise overlook.
