The restaurant business is much the same as any other. You are providing a service and a product for which new and hopefully recurring customers are willing to exchange their hard earned dollars. We have all enjoyed movies like "Ratatouille" and "Notting Hill" that followed the progress of restaurants to either their brilliant success or their sad demise. These stories, though fictitious, maintain the key elements of the emotional and practical elements involved in running a restaurant business to success.
Passion in the Restaurant Business
Without passion, life is pretty much grey and dreary. Grey and dreary on your dinner plate does not excite the palate. This can represent a severe loss of income to the restaurateur in the cost of the food, the staff, and the table which could have seated a client seeking the misery of grey dreariness. The most successful restaurant business is built on passion. For Ratatouille that passion was serving exceptional food seasoned to seduce the palate. For McDonald's, it is to open as much real estate as possible to produce predictable food that you can trust.
That passion must communicate itself through the entire organization of the business. In Notting Hill, the chef friend was passionate about his food and selected wine that perfectly complimented his menus. However, only his immediate circle of friends even knew that he existed. He failed to communicate his passion to the rest of the neighborhood and invite them to his table. In fact, he had no idea if his fervor was even shared by anyone else in Notting Hill and so failed at the outset.
Marketing in the Restaurant Business
Whereas in Notting Hill we saw that the fundamental failure of the business was a lack of communication, both inflowing to the passionate owner of the business and out flowing to the rest of the world, in Ratatouille we saw the ultimate success of communication in the world of the restaurant business. Word of mouth had kept the clientele in hand but the rave reviews of the food critic resulted in food lovers starving for excellent fare arriving in droves.
This is also a two edged sword. Any skeletons in the closet or rats in the hat need to be handled delicately with pro-active marketing strategies. Marketing is what you tell your public what you have and why they should avail themselves of it. But reverse marketing, stories that may damage your reputation and smother the fire on the stove have just as much if not even more effect. Any dissatisfied customers must be handled with grace and professionalism but first, you must deliver the product that you promised.
Deliver That Which You Market
No number of pretty pictures and apologies for the rats in the kitchen are going to cover up the emotional impact of a person with whetted apatite sitting down to enjoy their meal and crunching on an unmentionable in their cream of asparagus soup. "Caper!" "Rat Turd!" Let's not make your customer have to figure out what on earth they just sank their teeth into.