Free Idea Factory

Standing waiting for a table at a restaurant recently and listening to the hostesses repeating the mantra “10 to 20 minutes” to everyone who walked in the door while watching servers enter orders into the restaurant’s POS system I realized those systems are not currently integrated at all. But there’s some huge scheduling benefits to integrating them.

When servers key in orders to the POS system they put in a table number. So the system could know not just what tables were “in use” but also where in the process each table is. Knowing where a table is (these people ordered appetizers, these people did not, these people have ordered dessert, these people just ordered a pitcher of beer, etc.) in their meal flow could make wait times far more accurate. And could also do a better job of ensuring there’s no double-seating or triple-seating of servers without an override.

Describing how a fish tastes is notoriously difficult. Having dinner at a nice place last weekend, and listening to the server do a pretty standard (thus highly ineffective) job of describing the fish we’d never heard of, I thought that it would be a smart thing for an upscale restaurant to do to cook off a couple of pieces of the exotic fish special for that evening and offer a scant forkful to anyone interested in giving it a taste before they ordered. The dish wouldn’t have to be hot, it could just be explained that the chef cooked a bit of the fish earlier this afternoon, and what you’ll be tasting is cooked the same, but, is a tiny tasty chilled version of it. Texture, taste, and even preparation are now all accounted for in one little smidgen. Sales of these fishes would go nowhere but up.

A guy I used to work with back when I was in the restaurant business used to dream of opening a restaurant called Just Frickin’ Chicken. He planned to have a bank of broasters (pressure fryers), and three sauces (BBQ, Honey Mustard, Hot Wings Style), if you wanted them, or serve the chicken plain out of the broaster. No cole slaw, no mashed potatoes, no soda pop, no biscuits….just frickin’ chicken.