Straight answers on operations, costs, staff and growth — written for owners who are busy, and free to read whether or not you ever use DinePilot.
Each topic has a guide of its own, plus the shorter articles underneath it.
Run a service that holds together on your busiest night.
4 guidesKnow where the money goes before it is gone.
5 guidesEverything to sort out before you open the doors.
4 guidesBuy the tools that earn their keep, skip the rest.
4 guidesFill tables, and get those guests to come back.
4 guidesHire well, train fast, and keep the good ones.
3 guidesThe few numbers worth checking every week.
5 guidesEvery menu has a dish that looks like a star and isn't, and one that looks unremarkable and is quietly the reason a table of regulars keeps coming back. Your sales data already knows which is which.
A daily sales report has maybe nine lines on it. Most owners read one — the total — and it is almost never the line that would have told them something.
Ask a floor manager when the rush hits and you get a confident, specific answer. Measure it for four weeks and it is usually wrong by the best part of an hour.
Digital menus get sold as obviously better and printed menus get defended as obviously warmer. Both are wrong. The right answer depends on how often your prices move and how your room actually feels.
The FSSAI application is not difficult, but it is unforgiving about documents. Most rejections are a mismatched address or a missing NOC, and each one costs weeks.
Most opening budgets are roughly right about the fit-out and badly wrong about the six months afterwards. That second number is what decides whether you are still trading in year two.
Recent reviews drive walk-ins more than almost anything else a small restaurant can control, and it is free. Most restaurants do nothing about it because nobody owns the job.
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