Shift4 just announced their partnership with Mesh, which enables Shift4 merchants to accept crypto payments globally, with Mesh’s API converting crypto into local currencies.

Restaurant and business owners, what do you think about accepting crypto as a form of payment?

Cheers!

Source: https://thepaypers.com/cryptocurrencies/mesh-and-shift4-partner-to-enable-global-crypto-payments-for-merchants--1270749

I told my manager that I want to do the least amount possible on Thursdays. Basicaly, just be here. She took me seriously on today's deployment chart

Running a restaurant can feel pretty lonely sometimes, and there’s a ton of stuff I’m still trying to figure out. I realized that maybe some other folks are in the same boat and might be up for collaborating, so I’m pulling together a small group of local restaurant owners to chat and share ideas.

I’ve got a few things in mind to discuss:

• Benchmarking: Stuff like sales, customer numbers, ad/marketing spend, labor hours, etc. Just to see where everyone’s at and maybe get some ideas for improvement. (am I missing anything here??)

• Vendor Recommendations: Good and bad vendor experiences. I’m especially curious where people are getting things like chicken (prices are wild right now!).

Anything else you think would be good to throw on the agenda? I’m hoping this could turn into a regular thing, so any ideas are welcome!

Probably a dumb question: But i'm an outsider, never worked in a commercial kitchen before. When watching kitchen nightmares they always emphasize fresh food, fresh produce , no frozen. But when you talk to any resturant owner, or browse this sub you quickly realize that's not the case, it seems you can't make a profit a lot of the time if you do that from what I gather there are certain foods that are fine frozen and certain ones that are really noticeable, but KN doesn't mention that nuance ever. I get that KN is a reality show and those are far from "real" but this seems like such an easily refutable premise the show has, or is there more to it?

What is the difference between the Regency wire shelving and Steelton wire shelving? The Steelton is considerably more affordable, is the quality bad?

Also, can the parts of the two brands be used interchangeably?

Avoid them at all costs. They do not care about anything but money. In a contract too bad even though they know they are at fault they will hold you to a contract. They will make your life a living hell. STAY AWAY FROM POPMENU

Long story short, I'm a prospecting with my local city to change the city code that requires the 50% of sales be food to maintain a liquor license. My business would be a speakeasy, so 50% food sales would be nearly impossible with the business model of a traditional speakeasy. And there are too many other good restaurants in the area for another restaurant to enter the scene. The area this would be located is a pool of very wealthy individuals, so the market is saturated as far as normal restaurants go. Thus, I'm working to create something truly unique that will capture a segment that doesn't yet exist unless you're willing to drive 30 minutes.

I'm currently working with the city, which has told me that they really don't want to change the code. Because it's not within their "strategic plan" to do so. Other cities with speakeasys further away have abolished their code requirement entirely that restricts alcohol sales. But again, they don't want to change it (surprises surprise). So that brings me to my main question, have any of you heard of applying for an exception? Where the business get's a pass on a specific element of the city code? Lastly, are there any ideas you all may have that you think the city would be receptive towards that would meet their needs as well as the business model of a traditional speakeasy? I'm open to ideas if anyone has any. I've run the numbers and this speakeasy could be a money making machine. So I'd like to look at all options before throwing in the towel.

Now, before I get a ton of nay-sayers, know that I'm a planner and a doer. I'm looking for ideas, not torrential downpour of criticisms. Please be respectful and productive. I'm fine with some hard truth if that's true reality, however, I don't take stuff lying down. I don't need to hear about how restaurants are hard and how this idea won't work, I'm looking for those that can add value to the conversation. Thanks ladies and Gents.

My parents opened a pizzeria around a year and three months ago. Right now we are open 6 days a week and average $1k/mon-thur, $2k/friday, $1.5k/sat. We have 5 employees (3 outside of the family) on payroll and the business supports itself and our entire family of 5. So far we have been paying off debts created when starting the business and have knocked off about $20k, with $63k left to go. The way things are I am pretty much the backbone of our operations. I work the front 5 days a week and am somewhat the "General Manager." On top of this I handle all payroll, taxes, bills, inventory ordering, and when something breaks I'm the one that calls to fix it (internet, ovens, fridges, mainly becuase my Dad's english is very poor and my Moms is good-ish but they still have me do it). I do get some time off but the business consumes a lot of my energy and really limits my future opportunities.

I graduated college with a degree in computer science about a month ago and have not committed to looking for tech jobs purely because I can't leave the pizzeria. I've pretty much abandoned getting my masters for similar reasons. I'm 22 so I want to do normal young adult things like move to a city, live with friends and start building my career. What advice would you give me to start the transition to the next phase of life outside of the family business?

If you search my old posts, you'll see that I've been struggling with my business for pretty much the whole last year. Downwards sales trend, the rent is too high, and mostly taking out some bad loans (MCAs) that are just destroying my cash flow.

I finally decided to post an asset sale and someone wants to put down a deposit. 🤯 I'm a little bit in shock and have so many mixed emotions. I have poured my heart and soul and sweat into this place and our food is amazing and our crew is amazing and the customers love us but every two weeks when I run payroll I'm beyond stressed about my finances. I'm behind on rent, I'm behind on vendor payments, etc.

I feel like a failure and yet also feel like I can see the light at the end of this mess - with my first real vacation in years at the end. Maybe in a few years I'd be up for trying this again with all the lessons learned in mind.

Hi all, I’m an owner of a cinnamon export company and we produce organic ceylon cinnamon syrups, sugars and powders. The products that we sell can be used to add a very rich flavor to most dishes and drinks.

Right now we’re purely selling to B2C retail and I’m planning on expanding our products to restaurants, cafes and hotels on a bulk basis.

I wanted to get your opinion on the following:

1. Understand how often you add in new dishes to your menu

2. What would you actually look for from a supplier thats trying to sell you a new ingredient

3. What your current understanding is of ceylon cinnamon

Would really appreciate any sort of feedback! Thank you in advance! 🙏🏽

We are a fast casual Pizza shop, currently doing $13-15k a week and would like to be closer to $18-20k a week. How I achieve that. Have started marketing on social media recently so let’s see how that goes. I think catering would be easiest way to increase but need some tips on how y’all started growing pizza and sub catering revenue. Thanks

Hi everyone, Me and my business partner after running our place since 2017 (5 of those years in our current brick and mortar in April) we have decided we will most likely be closing come April since it is our contract end ( we have option to renew for 5 more years)

We just don’t want to keep adding more to our tax debt and it’s just a tough business with too small of margins and way too much overhead.

We are def not happy about it but want to quote while we have the opportunity

MAIN QUESTION:

When and how do you let both staff and patrons know of this decision ?

Hello All, I run a 100% Gluten Free sandwich shop in Toronto Canada.

We have been open for 4 months now and we have been steady since the open. The business is taking care of all the expenses.

I have realized we are not in the right location because we are hidden inside a plaza plus the neighbourhood has older population who do not like to spend or believe in gluten products. They like simple and cheap things.

Majority of the customer we receive come from far or they order on food ordering platforms - Uber etc.

Do you think, I should look into opening another location or should I increase my marketing budget.

Thank you in advance.

Need some help. We are to find out how many of one item each server has sold using touch Bistro for tip reasons.

Anyone ever been able to do this?

Hey all, I'm the owner of a computer tech startup in Kentucky. I could give you my pitch but I'm not here for that.

I'm only dipping my toes in so far but I've worked in restaurants, credit card payment processing tech support, and restaurant POS support.

I don't know about designing and selling my own POS system; the market seems pretty saturated, so I was thinking being a distributor and servicer for a high quality system instead.

Do you have any recommendations of which companies I'd want to read up on for this purpose, and on the inverse, systems that are total pieces of garbage that I could offer incentives to switch from?

I've read your anti tech bro posts so I'm aware of the slim margins. My city is heavily dependent on the restaurant industry right now and my long term goal is to invigorate my state's tech sector to help fight poverty; that's years if not decades away though, so I'll spare you the inspirational messaging.

I currently print in house but the ink is insanely expensive.

Any ideas? I have to update drink lists and menu regularly.

Where are we buying nice tables that aren’t an obscene amount of money? We use table cloths now but would like to move away from that at our next location. The only table I’ve found that I like is $700 and that’s not feasible with the amount we need for the space. Any places I’m missing?

Need advice, got an opportunity to buy a restaurant inside food court in US

The food court is new and currently will only have one more place. The owner selling this place fully build and quite cheap for the work

In my opinion the restaurant opened didn't server the demographic (e.g Phillipines restaurant with 0 Phillipinos community around).

The restaurant is all trun key (will need sign update) and I already have a chef (family memeber) who cooks amazing worked in resturants (but not as chef).

What scares me.. Have 2 kids (1 and 6), full time job, both me and my wife has zero time for the restaurant

What pushes me in favor Cheap price (will probably never get it at same price) the restaurant will allow us w2 Deductions and looking more as an investment (the place is surrounded by office and gym. Will need to advertise to pull in croud.

Looking for advice, please let me know whatnother thinks?

Also when opening a restaurant how many months buffer should I keep. Does any sales offset the expenses in the beginning or do I prepare for the worse (e.g 0 sales 6 months).

It's my first round of hiring staff. Since it's very common practice here to take someone on for a couple of days to see how they work and get along with others, that's what I am doing.

However, I am having some trouble with identifying if someone is slow at learning and if they have potential. The meals are not complicated, pretty much grilling meat and fish, with some dishes having a sauce. Sometimes I explain 3 times in one shift how to check if something is cooked or not, and they still don't remember it. Is this normal? Should I give a month to know if they have potential or is it a red flag?

Owner operator here. Trying to be more owner, less operator. I have the opportunity to take over a second location. Pretty much turn key. Just have to sign the lease. I’m trying to pull myself out of the day to day operations so I can focus more on oversight and growing the business. I’ve got a GM at location number one and one slated for location two. Any advice? What were your biggest hurdles? Does life just get harder with two?

My basic understanding is that restaurant are priced for sale that takes its gross profit multiplied by 1 or 2. Is that accurate? Or is the range multiplied by more like 2-4?

Apologize if this is wrong place for this but here goes:

Was introduced to an owner of a pretty well respected typical upper-middle class crowd bar/restaurant through a close friend/coworker at a community event. They work full time remote and then run the bar/restaurant in the evenings. The bar fits a very nice niche and gets a regular crowd.

Before they decided to open up their current venture they had another idea for a bar but went with this one as it’s “safer”. Their original idea is one that I’ve been thinking of for the last 2-3 years and have been telling friends about as a “if only I could” type of idea.

We talked a little bit, they shared some of their ideas of what it could look like and i shared what my thoughts were and why I think it’d be successful and they ended up saying that if I was genuinely serious about it they would love to invest in it with me. I laughed thinking it was a joke but we talked some more and exchanged numbers at the end of the night.

What does an investor relationship even look like?

Everytime I’ve done any serious research into starting I immediately stop at the amount of cash that would be required and the difficulty of getting the loan needed to get things off and running.

I have about 75k in cash, 100k in stocks and bonds, an 800+ credit, a 600 month car loan, 750 a month mortgage.

If I want to move forward with this, I want to be as prepared as possible before I reach out to them.

I’m looking for bug zapper recommendations. I already understand the importance of air curtains and proper drainage, so now I just want to find a good bug zapper that can be mounted on the wall. Could you guys recommend one that would work well? Thank you in advance!

For us, at least, the graphs rarely coincide to what is going on inside the building.

We sell alcohol & food. We can be super busy and the graph is showing we are slow, worse yet, we can be slow and the graph is showing us being slow but say we are on a 30 minute wait. Yeah, we sell alcohol. We might have a google connected phone in the bar for houuuuuurs.

I'm looking at the graph right now and the bar shows us being 1/4 of normal and we have 7 open 4 tops (out of 200+ seats) and being on a 30 minute wait despite 14 minute ticket times.

Some people actually look at this logarithm generated crap and make decisions on where they are going to go.

I've contacted google (as much as you can... through the forum) and the response is just "not our fault, it's the logarithm".

There's no shortage of articles touting the feature for diners despite how inaccurate it is.

https://www.tastingtable.com/690784/how-to-use-google-popular-times-tool-restaurant-bar-busy-hours/

How much do you think the new age of connection and being able to reach out to customers (potentially real) actually benefits us? Does it benefit us at all or is it actually actively hurting us? Why, as an industry, are we putting money into these "disruptive" industries when it is not helping us?

When you post on this subreddit with your solution to a non-existent problem so that you can derive money from an industry with practically non existent margins. When you do it and pretend to be an operator...

I'm going to crawl your history. I'm going to figure out you aren't and operator. I'm going to ban you from the forum. When you ignore the forum rules to post your poll, I'm going to immediately side on the error of ban without mercy.

For the members of the forum who are actually operators. I've been aggressive on this for a long time and if you would rather me err on the side of caution vs just drop banning this crap when I see it, just let me know.

I'm just a random OP like most of you that got entrusted by the forum creator at some point to kick stuff.

If anyone with experience in this area could offer advice, it would be greatly appreciated.

I have a tea shop/catering company operating out of a rented kitchen, that’s been going for almost 4 years now. I have built up a large enough client base that I’d like to change to a full service restaurant in the near future, (2-5 years ish). I have a full menu and pricing done as well as enough budget for the first 6-7 months of produce/ingredients and staffing. I still need to find a location (commercial real estate is crazy right now) but I have a general idea on where/ a plan for once I have one. I’m just not 100% on the operating differences if there are any, and other pitfalls that I might come across, so if any of you have advice I’d really appreciate it! I’m based in North Texas if that’s helpful at all.

Hello, we are still using digital dining but not their support. I have an issue currently at work and trying to figure it out. I have two questions;

1. is the time listed in the back-server the time the table opened or cashed out?
2. if servers do not cash out the table, after midnight it gets 0 out and we can not tell if our register is short. Can we see what tables have not been cashed out?

Any tips will be helpful. thank you