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Add Healthy Options to Your Restaurant Menu

More and more people are choosing to go the healthy route, and that means that they might not be eating out as much as they once did. Does this sound like a frightening prospect for you and your restaurant?

It shouldn’t.

You can take advantage of this new trend and start adding healthier menu options to drive your business back up.

When you are making these changes to your menu, consider just how much you want to change. Are you going to make sweeping changes to your menu, or are you only going to add a few healthier choices?

You may only want to add a few different options here and there and slowly overtake your menu with healthier choices. The way you do it is up to you. You might want to have a separate menu so that you don’t have to change the layout of your old one that your customers are familiar with. The cost to print these additional menus shouldn’t be too high.

As you make the change and start adding these healthier choices to the menu, you need to make sure that you advertise the changes that you are making. Send out a press release to the papers as well as online. Tie it in with the rising trend of health problems and obesity and tell everyone what you are doing to help combat that. Promote these healthier changes on your blog and anywhere else that you do your advertising so you can be sure that everyone is going to see them.

Changing just the menu might not be enough to start enticing new customers to your establishment. You might also want to make some cosmetic changes to your restaurant. They don’t have to be drastic, but a few décor changes and even buying new restaurant booths, chairs and tables can give your place a new look that matches in with the new theme of your menu. As always, you want to make sure that the restaurant furniture is comfortable and that the seating arrangements work.

How long will this healthy trend last? No one can tell for sure, but it certainly looks as though it is here to stay. With so many people wanting to get into shape and live a better, health conscious lifestyle, there will always be a large segment of the population that wants to have healthy options at their local eatery. Remember, even if your menu isn’t the healthiest around, adding an option for the health enthusiasts can only increase your clientele base. So don’t leave them out.

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The Seating in Your Restaurant Makes the Difference

black vinyl club chair

Let’s pretend that you are not a restaurant owner or manager for a few minutes. Let’s imagine that you just moved to a new city and you are looking forward to trying out a restaurant that serves your favorite food. So you head over to the place for dinner one night with your spouse. The atmosphere seems warm and inviting, and then the pleasant host takes you to your table.

On your way to the table, you notice that everything seems cramped. The tables are too close together. Once you sit down, you find out that the chairs aren’t comfortable at all. After a long day at work, you wanted to be able to find a nice comfy place to have dinner, but the chair is worse than the one you have in your cubicle.

By the time the appetizer arrives, you are already complaining to your spouse about the chair. You barely register the taste of the appetizer. It might have been good, but you just don’t care. When the food arrives, you are even more uncomfortable. People trying to get past your table have bumped and jostled you half a dozen times and almost spilled your wine. You don’t care much about how your food tastes. Once it is all over, you head home and write a negative review about the restaurant online. And only because of the restaurant seating.

Now, let’s step back into the shoes of the owner or manager of the restaurant. (more…)

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Designing Advertisements for Your Bar and Restaurant (Part 1)

When it came to designing the elements that went into your bar or restaurant, you probably had a large hand in everything. You chose the flooring, the décor, and you probably spent hours trying to decide on the perfect restaurant furniture, knowing just how important it was. You’ve had your hands in every part of the establishment, and it shows. It is truly your place.

If you are really hands on with your bar or restaurant, you might want to take part in designing the ads as well. Your involvement can be as large or as small as you like. If you only want to come up with the different specials and coupons that you are going to offer on the ads, that is fine. However, you might want to get your hands dirty with digital ink and create the ads from the ground up. In this post, I will discuss the basics of getting your advertisements ready on your own. In part two, I will discuss how to choose the right graphic designer for all of your bar or restaurant’s needs. (more…)

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Elements of a Good Restaurant Website

One of the last things you probably thought about when you were coming up with your ideas for your new restaurant was the website that would go along with it. You spent your time looking over the location, the décor, the restaurant chairs and tables that you would buy, and the menu. All of those are very important things, and you need to make sure that you have the best in all of those areas. However, on the technical side of things, many restaurant owners falter.

In today’s world, you need to make sure that you have a great website if you want to be able to compete with other restaurants in your area. More and more people are using the web to find places to dine, whether they are at work or looking on their smart phone.

It is important that you have the right elements on your site, and it must be easy for customers to navigate.

One of the most important things to have on your site is your restaurant’s menu. If you have specials, have a place on the site that is easy to update so that visitors will know what specials are available for any given day. One of the things that many restaurants do, but which is frustrating to their site’s visitors, is offer their menu only in PDF form. Not everyone wants to open up a PDF just to know what is on the menu. Even if you do have downloadable PDFs, make sure that they are just an option. You want your menu to be available right on your site. (more…)

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Sporting Events Should be the Lifeblood of Your Sports Bar

Swivel bar stools

If you are the owner of a sports bar, you have plenty of chances throughout the year to really capitalize on the major sporting events that are happening. While you might always have the games on at your bar, it really isn’t enough to drum up the excitement you need to pack your bar. There are plenty of other sports bars in town, and you need to make sure that you are constantly doing something special that is going to draw in larger crowds.

As a sports bar owner you have an advantage over many other types of bar owners. People are already coming to your bar because they love sports. How you handle the big events is going to determine how well you do in the long run though. Consider the largest events in the world of sports: the Super Bowl, the World Series, the World Cup, the NBA finals, collegiate sports . . .  the list goes on and on.

Whenever there is an event such as those discussed above coming up, you need to make sure that you advertise your bar and what you offer. Have game day specials, appetizers for half price, discounts for people who come in wearing jerseys, etc. There are dozens of different things that you can do to get people excited about your bar. Something that you might want to try if the hometown favorite loses is to offer “drown your sorrows” discounted drinks. Make sure that you don’t just focus on the “Big Game” though. There are plenty of playoff games that can get people just as excited.

What are some of the other things that you have to do to make sure that you have repeat customers coming back to your bar time and again? You need to make sure that you have an adequate number of TVs, and that they are spaced throughout the bar so everyone will be able to see, and so that you can have more than one game going at a time. You also need to make sure that you have adequate bar seating that is comfortable and that doesn’t make your place feel too crowded. If your seating is old and shabby, consider buying new as soon as you can. Ever little bit you do is going to help your sports bar become memorable in the minds of your customers.

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Three Ways to Advertise Your Bar without Breaking the Bank

Spring is here (almost). And many people are glad to get out of the house and enjoy a nice evening outside that might, more often than not, end at a restaurant or bar.

As the owner, you love your bar, and you know that others would love it too if they just knew about it. Advertising and marketing is one of the most difficult things for businesses to understand.

The reason it is so difficult is that people really don’t know what does and doesn’t work with advertising. Some things you do are going to stick, and some won’t. The trick is to market as much as you can until you find what works for your bar. However, you can’t constantly spend thousands of dollars on advertising and not get results. You would go broke quickly.

The following are three simple ways that you can advertise without spending a fortune. Implement all of them and see what works the best for you.

First, look at your website. You do have one, right? If you don’t have a website, you need to put in the effort to set one up right away. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to do this. See if you have someone working for you that can set up a site and have them do it for you. It will be much more cost effective than hiring out. You might even want to choose a blog instead. You can set one up on your own in just minutes. You can have separate pages that have images of your bar furniture and interior design, of happy customers, drink specials and much more. Turn it into a community for you customers, a place where they can gather even when they aren’t at the bar. It is a good idea to keep your site updated and post on your blog at least once a week about what is happening at the bar. (more…)

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