The secret to providing the perfect restaurant guest experience is simpler than you may think. We’ve found examples from across the world to help your restaurant improve its guest services — including information about a free restaurant management app available right now.
What do you think is the best and most unique dining experience a restaurant can provide? After reading this article, contact us to share your ideas on the perfect restaurant guest experience.
Why is the Perfect Restaurant Guest Experience Important?
Of course, there is an obvious answer on the importance of getting a restaurant guest experience just right. It is, in other words, the heart of a hospitality business: to provide guests with a top-grade experience is on of the central principles of the hospitality trade.
Otherwise, your restaurant is wasting time on trying to do business. Without a great experience to share, a customer may find it difficult to form a bond with a particular venue, limiting the chance of their return later with a repeat booking.
Not to mention that hospitality has a stake in the lives of their customers. This is a business that provides customers with the most essential commodity of all — food. In Spain, for example, nearly 70 per cent of consumed out-of-home food takes place in restaurants. So in short, a great restaurant guest experience is key to the lives of customers.
Part of ensuring a guest return is the ability to offer guests a convenient way to find seating. Find out how a virtual queue works for a waitlist restaurant to create a stress-free experience for customers.
The Unique Dining Experience
What is it about your restaurant’s personality that makes it worth visiting? When trying to create a unique dining experience for guests, restaurants must think about their concept, their unique selling point on what they have to offer. Here’s what to know.
Ambience and Atmosphere
Design is important. The physical spaces that your customers inhabit plays a central role in their enjoyment of the food and beverages on offer. Since all of their dining takes place in your venue, it is super important to get right.
Some have argued that a restaurant’s architecture — its set-up, its spatial arrangements — that enhance enhances the food on a customer’s plate. There is a key term that always pops up in these discussions: ambience, meaning the mood and general quality of a restaurant environment.
When judging ambience and atmosphere, restaurant owners have to take into account:
- Lighting. Various shades and styles of lighting can help to suggest or establish the mood of a venue.
- Colour. Engage with colour theory to discover which colours suggest certain thoughts and moods — for example, calm colours like white and beige suggest a calm environment.
- Concepts. Does the furniture and general surroundings suggest a certain tradition or way of life outside the restaurant.
Eating out, wining and dining, is ultimately a collective experience, that is social and entertaining. The ultimate dining experience depends widely on atmosphere — from the snug and cosy to the wide and spacious.
Food and Flavour
Distinctive restaurants produce distinctive dishes. Do your dishes reveal a taste the chef’s imagination? Or are the same dishes readily available at any other restaurant in the area?
Providing a unique culinary experience is central to overall guest satisfaction, and the best person to consult on this topic is ultimately yourself.
The hospitality sector depends on gastronomic excellence, and culinary style is what a good restaurant is really all about.
The world’s best-rated restaurants, for example, all individuate themselves through unique and special selling points. This could be something they do with food. Dishes are typically an expression of a chef’s ideals and personality, rather than a typical run-of-the-mill menu item.
Check out any big name on the world’s 50 best restaurants and you’ll find creative ambition written all over their stories — of daring cuisine and incredible individuality.
So is your restaurant seizing the opportunity to create independent foodie experiences for customers? The central lesson is to create a hospitality space that people want to eat in. Some of the most inspiring restaurant stories tell us that personality is everything: to find the unique you there are really no right or wrong answers.
Plus, the most valuable asset is the food your competitor restaurants don’t have. One highly rated restaurant in Madrid, for example, has a reputation for surprising guests. The cuisine is unusual, in a good sense, requiring a great deal of care and precision. As a result, Diverxo is one of the nation’s most popular restaurants, known singularly for its creativity and infinitely experimental mash-up of various styles.
Communication
When done well, dining out forms a relationship between guest and restaurant.
However, if a restaurant owner or manager is absent from a venue floor — that is to say, absent from the eyes of customers — how can businesses expect to formulate and enrich a bond with customers?
Well, the good news is that restaurants can now create a unique communication experience without all the physical effort.
One example comes from a restaurant in Florida, a dessert shop that greets guests with Carbonara App.
Using a free restaurant communication app, Bar Harbor Cheesecake Company could text, send, and receive messages to customers. The experience was an ocean breeze, formulating a greater bond with guests — the owner even told us that attending to guest queries, questions, and concerns via text “was like messaging an old friend.”
Service and Support
If running a reservation-based restaurant, a pen-and-paper guest management system is perhaps unique — but is certainly not helpful.
On the other hand, a stress-free booking process can provide the perfect starting point to a guest’s ideal night out. This beats:
- waiting times held up on a phone call to make a table reservation
- mistakes associated with manual processes, such as misspelled names
- delays caused when the register book is out of sight — or lost
Now restaurants have nothing to lose: our restaurant technology is completely one-hundred per cent free, ready to download at a moment’s notice. Try it today!
Don’t believe us? If you like the sound of Carbonara App, with features catered to create the perfect restaurant guest experience, read about some of our clients in the USA who are using the app right now: “When Houston Hired Carbonara App”.
