Growing your restaurant.
100 guides on the things that actually move a restaurant: where the orders come from, what they cost you, and what makes somebody order a second time. Written for people running a kitchen, not for people writing about them.
Get found locally
Most orders start with a search. This is how you come up first, and what to fix when you do not.
15 guides
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Answering the bad ones.
The reply is not for the person who wrote it. It is for the fifty people who read it before deciding.
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Getting into the three.
The map pack shows three businesses. Everything below it gets a fraction of the clicks. This is what decides the three.
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Getting quoted by the assistants.
People increasingly ask an assistant rather than scroll a results page. Being the source it quotes is a distribution channel now.
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How people actually decide.
Almost nobody types your name into a search bar cold. Understanding the real routes changes where you spend.
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How to get more restaurant orders.
Seven things that work, in the order that pays back fastest. The first three cost nothing but attention, and most restaurants find money sitting in them.
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How to get more reviews, without begging.
Review count is one of the few things that lifts both your ranking and your conversion at once. Most restaurants ask badly, or never.
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Knowing who you are actually up against.
Your competitors are not the restaurants you admire. They are the ones appearing beside you when somebody is hungry.
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Local SEO, for people with a kitchen to run.
You do not need an agency retainer to rank in your own postcode. You need about six things right and the patience to leave them alone.
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Photograph the food you actually serve.
The photo's job is not to look beautiful. It is to look like what arrives, and to make choosing easy.
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Say your address the same way everywhere.
Small inconsistencies across listings quietly weaken every local search you should win.
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Slow sites lose hungry people.
Your visitor is on mobile data, standing up, and deciding between you and two other places. Seconds matter more here than almost anywhere.
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Social, with ten minutes a week.
It is a discovery channel and a proof-of-life signal. It is rarely an ordering channel, and treating it as one wastes a lot of effort.
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Structured data, explained plainly.
It is a set of labels that tell a machine what your page says. Increasingly the machine reading it is not a search engine.
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The maps that are not Google.
Apple Maps is the default for every iPhone user who taps an address. Most restaurants have never claimed theirs.
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Your Google Business Profile, done properly.
It is the single most valuable free asset a restaurant has, and most are half filled in. This is what to fix, in the order it pays.
Own your ordering
What the marketplaces actually cost, and how to move volume onto a channel you keep.
15 guides
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Collection is your best margin.
No driver, no commission, no delivery risk. It is the most profitable order you can take and the least promoted.
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Direct online ordering vs third-party apps.
Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat bring orders you wouldn't otherwise get, and they take a hard cut for it. Here's the honest arithmetic on running your own channel alongside them.
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Do you need an app?
Probably not first. An app is a retention tool for restaurants that already have regulars, not a way to find them.
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Drawing zones that make money.
A circle on a map ignores rivers, dual carriageways and one-way systems. Your driver does not.
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Moving the regulars across.
You do not need to leave the apps. You need the people who already order every fortnight to order somewhere cheaper for you.
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QR ordering, used well.
It speeds up the right rooms and ruins the wrong ones. The decision is about your service model, not the technology.
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Setting up your own ordering, properly.
The technology is the easy part. The menu build and the first Friday are where it goes wrong.
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Should you leave the marketplace?
Usually not yet, and rarely all at once. Here is how to work out where you actually stand.
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The orders worth twenty of the usual.
Office lunches and party platters are predictable, high-value and planned in advance. Most restaurants make them hard to order.
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The phone is still ringing.
Every unanswered call at half seven is an order that went to the shop across the road.
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What a restaurant website is for.
It has one job. Somebody hungry should be able to order in three taps, or find your hours in one.
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What taking a card really costs.
The headline rate is one of four numbers. The other three are where the money goes.
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What the apps actually cost you.
The headline commission is the part everybody quotes. It is rarely the whole bill, and the largest cost does not appear on the statement at all.
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Where the orders leak out.
Somebody chose your food, built a basket, and left. That is the most expensive thing that happens on your website, and it is usually fixable.
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Your own drivers, or theirs?
The answer depends on your order density, not on your opinion of the platforms.
Bring customers back
A regular is worth several first-timers. This is how you keep them without chasing anybody.
11 guides
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Email, still the cheapest way back.
You own the list. Nobody can change an algorithm and take it away from you.
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Getting regulars to bring people.
Word of mouth already happens. A referral scheme is just making it slightly easier and worth mentioning.
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Loyalty that pays for itself.
Most schemes reward people who were already loyal. A good one changes the behaviour of the people in the middle.
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Not every customer is the same customer.
Four groups is enough. Sending everybody the same message wastes most of it.
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Occasions do the selling for you.
A birthday offer arrives when somebody is already planning to go out. You are not creating demand, you are catching it.
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Restaurant marketing ideas that work.
No brand workshops and no agency retainer. These are the things a working owner can set up between services, in the order that pays back fastest.
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Text, used sparingly.
Almost every text gets read within minutes. That is the strength and the reason to be careful with it.
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The list is the asset.
Recipes can be copied and a location can be matched. A list of people who have already paid you cannot.
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The second order is the whole game.
A first order proves you were findable. A second proves you were good. Only one of them predicts a business.
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Which of it actually worked?
Most restaurant marketing is judged on how it felt. A few simple habits tell you what it did.
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Winning back the ones who drifted.
Nobody decides to stop ordering from you. They just stop. The window where a nudge still works is shorter than most owners think.
Make more per order
Menu design, upsells and pricing. The cheapest growth available, because the customer is already buying.
11 guides
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Average order value, read properly.
The number itself means little. The direction, split by channel, means a lot.
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Bundles that make money.
A deal should move somebody up, not give a discount to people who were already spending that much.
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Getting modifiers right.
Badly built options are where online menus leak money and where kitchen mistakes come from.
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How many orders include a side?
You probably do not know, and it is one of the most profitable numbers in the business.
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How to increase restaurant revenue.
Ten moves, in rough order of how much they're worth to a typical independent. Most of them cost nothing to start and none of them involve serving less food for the same money.
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Menu engineering, without the jargon.
Every menu has four kinds of dish. Knowing which is which changes what you promote, what you reprice and what you quietly retire.
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Pricing, beyond multiplying by three.
Cost tells you the floor. It does not tell you the price.
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Raising prices without losing people.
Most restaurants leave it too long, then move too much at once, which is the version customers notice.
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The dish that sells other dishes.
A high-priced item at the top of a category changes what looks reasonable underneath it.
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Upsells people actually take.
A euro fifty on the average order is worth more than most marketing campaigns, and the customer is already buying.
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Writing a menu for a phone.
Online, the description is doing the job a member of staff would do. It has to answer the question, not decorate the dish.
Protect your margin
Food, labour and the quiet leaks. Busy and broke is the most common shape of a failing restaurant.
15 guides
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Auditing what you pay to take money.
Most restaurants can name their rate and cannot name their total monthly cost. Those are different numbers.
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Better terms, without a fight.
Most restaurants have never asked. Prices that were competitive three years ago rarely still are.
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Food cost percentage, calculated honestly.
The formula takes a minute. Getting a number you can trust takes a stock count, which is the part most restaurants skip.
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Full every night, and no money.
This is the most common shape of a restaurant in trouble, and it is nearly always one of four things.
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How to reduce restaurant costs.
Cost cutting that customers notice isn't cost cutting, it's decline. This is the version that goes after waste, commission and admin instead of the plate.
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Labour cost, and the rota that causes it.
Most labour problems are not pay rates. They are hours scheduled against a rush that is narrower than anybody thinks.
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Packaging is not a rounding error.
Buried inside food cost, it makes your delivery channel look healthier than it is.
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Prime cost is the number that decides it.
Food cost alone will not tell you whether you are making money. Food plus labour will, and it is the figure most owners never calculate.
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Profit is not cash.
Restaurants fail with money owed to them and stock in the walk-in. Timing is what kills them.
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The bill nobody reads.
Energy is one of the largest fixed costs in a kitchen and one of the least examined.
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The costs that do not care how busy you are.
Fixed costs are the same on a dead Tuesday as on a full Saturday, which is what makes them dangerous.
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The discounts nobody counts.
Comps and staff food rarely appear in any report, which is exactly why they drift.
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The heavy hand costs more than you think.
A few extra grams of the expensive ingredient, repeated all week, is a real number.
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Waste is margin you already bought.
Every bin is food you paid for, prepped, and will never be paid for. It rarely appears on any report.
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Why is my restaurant struggling?
If the room feels quieter than it should, or the month ends worse than the takings suggested, it's usually on this list. Each one has a fix you can start this week.
Know your numbers
The handful of figures worth watching weekly, and what each one is actually telling you.
10 guides
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Closing the night properly.
The cash up is the last job of the night and the only one that tells you whether the day was honest.
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Forecasting without a spreadsheet degree.
Your own history for the same weekday, adjusted for the obvious. That is most of it.
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Knowing your own year.
Every restaurant has a shape to its year. Most owners feel it and few have written it down.
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Restaurant analytics, explained.
A short list of numbers worth half an hour a week, how to read them without fooling yourself, and what to do on the Monday after you've read them.
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Ten minutes, once a week.
Most reports get glanced at for the total. The total is the least useful thing in them.
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The number that moves first.
Repeat rate falls before revenue does. It is the closest thing the trade has to an early warning.
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The number you have to hit.
Most owners can name their rent and not their break-even. It is the more useful of the two.
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The numbers worth looking at weekly.
There are about eight. Everything else is either a slower version of one of them or a number that flatters you.
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What a customer is actually worth.
Once you know this number, most marketing decisions answer themselves.
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Which channel actually pays?
Revenue by channel is the number everybody has. Gross profit by channel is the number that decides things.
Ireland and the UK
VAT, consumer rules and the local specifics that most restaurant advice written elsewhere gets wrong.
11 guides
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Allergens, done properly.
This is the one area where a guess is genuinely dangerous, and where online ordering adds an obligation people forget.
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Food safety, in practical terms.
The system matters less than whether the records show it is actually being followed.
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Opening in Ireland, in order.
The sequence matters. Several of these depend on each other and doing them out of order costs weeks.
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Selling food online in Ireland.
Distance selling rules apply to your ordering page, and one requirement in particular is missing from most restaurant sites.
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Takeaway VAT, category by category.
Hot and cold are treated differently, and drink is treated differently again. The mistakes cluster around the boundaries.
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The 9% VAT rate, and what to do about it.
Food and catering dropped from 13.5% to 9% on 1 July 2026. Drink did not. That split is where most tills are now wrong.
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The data rules, in plain terms.
Not legal advice, but the handful of things that most restaurants get wrong and that carry real consequences.
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The employment basics, in one place.
Most disputes come from a handful of the same gaps, and nearly all of them are paperwork you can fix in an afternoon.
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The tipping rules, and what they require.
Since December 2022 there are specific obligations on how tips are distributed and displayed. A lot of restaurants still have no written policy.
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UK food VAT, in outline.
Hot or cold, eat in or take away. Those two questions decide most of it, and the edge cases are famously awkward.
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Where to look for support.
Schemes change constantly, so the useful thing is knowing which doors to knock on rather than a list that dates in a month.
Run the shift
The pass, the till and the rota. Growth you cannot serve is not growth.
12 guides
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Complaints, handled properly.
The complaint is not the problem. How long it takes to resolve is.
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Keeping the people you have.
Recruiting and training a replacement costs more than most of the retention measures you never got round to.
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One queue, four channels.
The tablet shelf is the visible symptom. The real cost is orders arriving in an order nobody controls.
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One to two is the hardest step.
The second site does not double the business. It doubles everything that was held together by you being there.
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Restaurant automation: what to automate.
Written for an owner doing the admin at eleven at night. The test for every job below is simple: is it done the same way every time, and does getting it wrong cost money?
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Rotas built from data, not memory.
Most rotas are copied from last week, which was copied from the week before. Nobody knows when it was last right.
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Stock, without a full system.
Count the lines that carry the money weekly. Everything else can wait for the month.
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Surviving half seven.
The rush does not break because of volume. It breaks at one specific bottleneck, and it is usually the same one every week.
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The guide to kitchen display systems.
A kitchen display system replaces the ticket printer with a screen at the pass. This is what it does well, where it's overkill, and how to fit one without a bad Friday.
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Training that fits a small team.
Most hospitality training happens by watching somebody during a rush, which is the worst possible time to learn anything.
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What is a restaurant POS system?
The till, the kitchen tickets, the card payments and the sales report, in one system. This guide is for independent operators picking their first one or replacing one they've grown to hate.
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Where the minutes go.
Ticket time is the number customers feel most directly, and almost nobody measures it accurately.
See it run your restaurant.
Twenty minutes on your menu and your numbers. We'll show you what actually changes in the first month and exactly what it costs. If it's not right for your restaurant, we'll tell you that instead.
- Live in days, not months
- We build your menu and train your staff
- No contract, and thirty days to change your mind
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