As a restaurant owner, it’s your job to hire staff who can curate a top-notch restaurant experience. From start to finish, what exactly makes that experience worthwhile?
Here are the factors that contribute to a good restaurant experience:
- Attentiveness
- Short wait times
- Spacious lobby
- Variety of seating available
- Good lighting
- Pleasing music
- Reasonable music volume
- Appealing décor
- Easy-to-read menu
- Five-star food
- Quick check delivery
As the above list exemplifies, a customer’s restaurant experience starts from the moment they enter the door and concludes when they leave. This guide will explain each element that makes up that experience, with tips and recommendations for maximizing them.
These Elements Create a Good Restaurant Experience
Attentiveness the Moment a Customer Steps Through the Door
One of the worst feelings when visiting a restaurant is being ignored. Sure, waitstaff gets busy, but even during those most hectic hours, you can’t let the customers just arriving slip through the cracks.
If you do, they’re the likeliest to leave, as they have yet to be seated and thus have the least to lose.
If you don’t have enough waitstaff to attend to everybody, hiring more is a good idea. Some of the waitstaff can be installed as hosts or hostesses who stand in the lobby, greet customers when they come in, confirm reservations, let customers know the wait time, and help them to their seats.
Of course, the work doesn’t stop once the customers are seated. However, the host or hostess will next pass the baton to the waiter or waitress, who will give the customer individualized attention to maximize the enjoyment of their meal and restaurant experience.
You should train your waitstaff to offer menu recommendations, especially when a customer visits your restaurant for the first time. The staff should know the menu inside and out so they can answer any questions a customer may have about a dish.
Once a customer has their meal and is happily chowing down, the waitstaff should continue to check in on the customer to inquire if they need anything further, want their plates cleared from the table, were interested in looking at the dessert menu, or if they just want the check.
Short Wait Times
Nothing ruins a night out faster than stepping foot into a restaurant and finding out that there’s an hour and a half wait to get a table. Some people might tough it out, but many more will just turn around and leave.
After all, there’s always another restaurant in the vicinity.
However, the last thing you want is for your customers to go to the competition. They could be the ones who end up winning long-term business, not you.
So how do you prevent excessively long wait times? Well, you can’t necessarily, as some times will just be busier than others, especially evenings and weekends.
However, there are some things you can do to streamline the dining process and get customers in and out without feeling rushed. Here are some examples:
- Hire enough staff to attend to tables
- Hire enough cooking staff to prepare meals during busy periods without too much downtime
- Train servers to keep an eye out for when customers are ready for their checks to be processed so customers don’t wait too long
Spacious Lobby
Even if you do all the above, you will still sometimes have bottlenecks where customers are left waiting. That’s why your restaurant lobby must be an appealing place to spend time in.
The lobby should be sizable so people aren’t crushed together waiting to get a seat in your restaurant. Ample seating should let almost everybody who wants to sit do so.
The music that’s piped throughout the restaurant should be audible in the lobby to give customers a taste of the atmosphere they’re in for once they’re seated.
You could even give out small samples of what’s on the drink menu, an appetizer, or the meal of the day. This will whet the customer’s appetite and give them a reason to stick around and wait it out.
Variety of Seating Available
Another way to craft a good restaurant experience is to provide plenty of seating options. Unless yours is an upscale establishment, some customers who come in won’t mind being seated at the bar.
The bar area shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be a large, well-lit area with many television screens for watching sports games. Position the TVs across the bar so that no matter where someone is sitting, they can still see.
You should also furnish the bar with a speaker system (although don’t turn the volume up too loud) and plenty of bar stools to accommodate a full house.
For those who don’t want bar seating, your restaurant should have booths or tables that are far away enough from the bar that they create a completely different ambiance. The table should be able to fit at least two and up to four.
You should also think of how you can accommodate larger groups, whether that’s by pushing several tables together or by offering a few jumbo-sized booths.
Good Lighting
Lighting is an overlooked but important element of crafting the optimal restaurant experience. Like many things that surround us, lighting can have a psychological effect, altering the mood of your customers.
First, there’s the matter of the light brightness. Dimmer lights create a more intimate, romantic environment. Partial darkness is also relaxing and might encourage customers to stay longer, ordering a dessert, a few drink refills, and maybe an extra appetizer or two as well.
Brighter lighting comes across as cleaner and more energetic. Your customers will feel more rejuvenated, as will your waitstaff, who might be inclined to work that much harder.
Usually, bright lighting is reserved for ice cream parlors, pizza places, fast food restaurants, cafés, and fast-casual establishments. Sit-down restaurants often benefit from mid-level to lower lighting.
The temperature of the lighting is also important. Lighting can be warmer or cooler. Cooler lighting tends to contribute to the energetic feel of your establishment, while warmer lighting lends itself well to the intimacy of a low-light dining room.
Light fixtures aren’t the only way to illuminate your restaurant. Windows can achieve the same effect but obviously work best if your establishment is open during daylight hours.
If you can’t decide what kind of mood you’re trying to establish with your lighting, or if you like a more energetic feel in the morning and a more intimate feel at night, use adjustable light fixtures that you can brighten and dim as the day goes on.
Pleasing Music
Most restaurants play music. If they didn’t, all you would hear is the chatter of the customers and the clanging of the dishes in the kitchen.
The best music for a restaurant is so subtle that customers barely notice it unless they hear one of their favorite songs. The genre and tempo of the music will vary depending on the type of establishment you run.
For example, a fast food or fast-casual restaurant can play Top 40 hits and pop music. Bouncier, more energetic music matches the family-friendly atmosphere and enlivens the restaurant.
However, upscale restaurants can’t get away with playing the same. It’s too alienating to the clientele. Instead, classical and other soft music best suits an establishment like that.
Slow music reduces diners’ speed, making them enjoy their experience more, but at the expense of your restaurant serving fewer tables.
Don’t underestimate the benefit of live music. People will show up in droves if you can get a mariachi band into your Mexican restaurant or a rock band to play at your bar. Your regulars will be there, and new people who want to check out the live entertainment will pop up too.
However, we recommend relegating that kind of entertainment to the weekends. This way, you don’t take away from your family-friendly atmosphere if that’s what your establishment is known for.
Reasonable Music Volume
Selecting your soundtrack is only half the battle. You also have to control the volume.
If the music is too quiet to hear, it will fail to rise above the din. Then, you might as well not bother with it at all because it has the same effect (that is, none).
However, if the music is too loud, customers won’t be able to hear themselves talk. They won’t hold conversations with friends, family, or business colleagues because they’ll struggle to hear what they’re saying.
What a reasonable music volume looks like varies by restaurant. You must consider factors such as the size of your establishment (or at least the dining room), the type of sound system you have, the proximity of speakers to one another, and the type of music you’re playing.
Appealing Décor
While good food will always trump okay décor, you still don’t want to skimp on how your restaurant looks.
If you’re only renting a building, you might not have as much control over the exterior’s appearance as you would like, but you have much more say over what the inside looks like.
There is no one definition of appealing restaurant décor, so you can rest easier knowing that. What looks good will depend on the type of food you’re serving.
For example, you can’t go wrong with a retro look for a fast-food or fast-casual establishment or Italian-themed décor for a pizza parlor.
However, don’t be afraid to think outside of the box. Unique décor could be what sets you apart from the competition and differentiates your establishment. Just don’t go so far outside of the box that people don’t see your vision, as that can hurt your business.
Easy-to-Read Menu with Pricing
It’s embarrassing for your customers to squint and stare at the restaurant menu because they can’t read it. If everyone who visits always puts on readers to peruse the menu, that’s a bad sign.
The menu should be easily legible. That means providing sufficient lighting for reading the menu, using a good typeface (no overly flowery fonts), and choosing a suitable font size.
Make sure you include pricing on the menu. People want to know what they’ll pay ahead of time, not once they receive their bill.
Five-Star Food
By far, the most important element of a good restaurant experience is the food. People can excuse things like loud music and a not-so-picture-perfect ambiance if you get the food right.
That doesn’t mean you should use your awesome dishes as a crutch, but this is the area that deserves the most attention and focus.
A menu with a little bit of everything is not necessarily the right call. People generally know what kind of cuisine they’re in the mood for when they choose a restaurant, and a menu that’s 10 pages long only serves to delay their decision-making.
Your menu shouldn’t so be exceedingly short that you give customers barely any options. It must be a good in-between.
Quick Check Delivery and Checkout
Have you ever felt stranded at a restaurant because you’re waiting and waiting…and waiting and waiting…and waiting and waiting for the check to come? You just want to go home and sleep off the meal or relax on the couch.
It’s even worse if you have other plans for the evening, such as seeing a movie, a sports game, or a show. You could end up late for your plans because the restaurant holds you up.
No restaurant owner should want theirs to be the place that keeps customers for longer than they want to be there. Many people don’t come back to those kinds of restaurants as they’re afraid of being held captive again.
Hiring the right number of staff will help them process checks quickly, as will offering detailed instructions on your restaurant’s POS system.
Your establishment should have a backup plan in case the POS system goes down or has other issues. Anything you can do to expedite the checkout process will be appreciated by your customers.
However, we want to make it clear that you shouldn’t rush through checkout. That’s a good way for the waitstaff to make mistakes when calculating bills, which can hurt your restaurant in the long term.
Conclusion
Creating a good restaurant experience starts with having the right staff to address customers when they walk through the door. You also need an incredible menu, good lighting, appealing décor, and the right ambiance to keep people coming back for more.
