Skip to content 
Restaurants are known for providing delicious food and cozy hospitality to their guests, but these aren’t the only duties a restaurant is responsible for. There’s a lot more that goes into running a restaurant than coming up with a list of recipes.
Restaurants have a responsibility to cook and serve delicious meals in a sanitary environment, respect dietary restrictions, and provide hospitality. Restaurants also have to coordinate strong communication between the kitchen and the wait staff for effective service.
The duties of managing a restaurant involve several different areas of expertise, which is why few restaurants are managed alone. If you know how these different parts of the restaurant work together, you can figure out how to make them run efficiently.
Restaurants Need Quality Food and Service
The most important responsibility of a restaurant is to provide quality food and service to the community where the restaurant is located. These two factors are the major duties of a restaurant.
Restaurants Must Provide Quality Food
Every restaurant that starts up wants to build up the reputation of serving quality food, but what makes food high-quality? Here are just a few goals that restaurants should strive for when it comes to food quality:
- Fresh ingredients: Farm-to-table food and locally sourced ingredients are increasingly popular in restaurants since this helps ensure the peak level of freshness. (Source: Orange Cova)
- Herbs, spices, and seasonings: One of the biggest complaints against cooked food is a lack of seasoning, and it’s the downfall of many home cooks. Restaurants have to know how to use herbs and spices skillfully without allowing them to overpower the food.
- Hot off the stove: It doesn’t matter how good the food at a restaurant is if it isn’t served hot and fresh. The time elapsed between cooking and service makes a big difference in the final quality of the food.
Without high-quality food, a restaurant won’t pull in the repeat customers it needs to stay profitable.
Restaurants Must Provide Quality Service
Along with serving good food, restaurants also have to be able to provide high-quality service to their customers. After all, many people are capable of cooking delicious, high-quality food in their own homes. They go out to a restaurant to have food served to them that they didn’t have to cook or serve themselves.
Here are some of the ways that restaurants can provide high-quality service to their customers:
- Hospitality: Part of running a popular restaurant is making sure that all staff members are courteous to visiting patrons and make them feel welcome. Restaurant staff must be polite even to difficult or picky guests.
- Speed: Good service in a restaurant means that people are seated quickly without having to wait, their food arrives in a reasonable amount of time, and they don’t have to wait for drink refills or their checks. (Source: NCR)
- Cleanliness: The area where guests are served their food should be clean, well-lit, and well-decorated. These are all key to creating an ambiance that makes patrons of the restaurant want to return. (Source: Earthtronics)
- Communication: The key to running a successful restaurant is ensuring seamless communication between the back of the house (the kitchen and prep area) with the front of the house (the wait staff, bus staff, and hosts). This helps keep service fast and the customers happy.
Having a strong menu isn’t enough. Without the capable staff and service to back it up, a restaurant can go broke in a hurry.
Restaurants Should Respect Dietary Restrictions
While restaurants aren’t necessarily responsible for making sure they can meet the needs of every dietary restriction that comes through the door, accomodating some basic and common dietary restrictions can result in happy customers.
These are a few dietary restrictions that restaurant managers might want to work around:
- Vegetarianism: Vegetarianism is a popular dietary restriction that prevents a guest from eating meat, poultry, or fish. Having a vegetarian dish or two on the menu can help provide a few entrees that are lighter in calories, too. Veganism is a stricter form of vegetarianism and excludes other animal products such as honey and dairy. (Source: Harvard Health)
- Ketogenic: A ketogenic or low-carb diet is quite popular in the 21st century and involves reducing carbohydrates while increasing the ratio of proteins and fats. Keto options are popular with restaurant guests who are avoiding bread and other starches.
- Food allergies: Many people are allergic to common food products such as nuts and dairy products. Keeping cooking stations compartmentalized and isolating nut products can help keep the kitchen safer for guests.
- Religious restrictions: There are several types of religious restrictions on diet, such as halal diets or kosher diets. These dietary restrictions are often complicated and involve specific food preparations. (Source: Healthline)
At the end of the day, it’s up to restaurants what kind of dietary restrictions they’re willing to entertain with their guests. But a willingness to work with guests on their dietary requests can increase a restaurant’s popularity.
Restaurants Must be Safe and Sanitary
Watching out for food allergies isn’t the only safety protocol that restaurants are responsible for. There are also other aspects of the restaurant’s safety that need to be managed. Here are just a few of them:
- Sanitation: All food needs to be prepared and cooked in a sanitary kitchen that is easily able to pass health department inspections.
- Fire safety: Since restaurants involve a large group of people in a single building, making sure that there are plenty of unobstructed exits and making sure that cooking units are maintained is part of keeping the restaurant fire-safe. (Source: National Restaurant Association)
Keeping a restaurant safe and sanitary isn’t just a matter of keeping guests happy. It’s also a matter of keeping your restaurant legal to operate.
Restaurants Are a Huge Responsibility
Lots of people have a dream of opening a restaurant, but this line of work isn’t just cooking and entertaining. Restaurants are responsible for more than just a great menu to stay in business. They need organization and management, too. Without a solid business plan to back up food and service, even the most popular restaurant won’t be able to keep its doors open.
