Figuring Out What You Want to Be

Menu and Style

Once you have found your location you most likely have a pretty good sense of your menu and style. You should have also already decided if you want to be and fine-dining, take-out, or causality eatery. But if you are still not completely sure about what you want to sell or how you want your restaurant to look you should remember that you are serving a customer.
Consider this list of menu musts:
1. Determine Style- family/ semi-formal/formal/take out/ + definition of items based on level of causality, formal = more description
2. Study other establishments with similar sets of food to your own
3. Breakdown menu items either by region ingredients or style, i.e. BBQ, France, Seafood.
4. Pricing figure out variations for add-ons/ special preparation/ substitution, compare to other places
5. Be familiar with the demographics

Diving into Demographics -The best way to sell to your customer is to know the experience they want out of the restaurant they are eating at, and of course the only want to know that is to know who you are serving. You should check information of the age range of the surrounding population, race, occupation, and income. This all feeds into, who buys (eats) what, where. This also gives a better idea of what is missing or what group of people has not been catered to. Hence presenting an opportunity for your restaurant to be a new niche for an unaddressed market. These are a few charts detailing that information.

click here
For example the age graph shows there are about 240,000 senior citizens in the city, presumably many of which have the time to eat out for breakfast or lunch. So if you decide you want to create an all American diner open only from 5am to 5pm, it would be smart to print your menu with a large and clear font like Arial size 18. Or if you look at the industry and occupation chart you may notice that there is a large number of people classified as "professional or administrative" for industry and "management" for occupation that means there are a lot of busy professionals that can afford a more expensive lunch but just do not have the time to get out of the building. This provides you with the opportunity to institute a delivery service that brings foie gras from your French bistro to their corner office.