SO YOU WANT TO BE AN OWNER OF A RESTAURANT? CONT.

It does not matter if your restaurant is in Las Vegas, Nevada or in India, you the owner should know some serious terminology especially if you've never managed a restaurant before, and you aren't Donald Trump with his connections to fast financing. You will probably need to be in your dig many hours, overseeing every aspect of the business, after all it is your baby, and even if you've hired a GM, you need to oversee him or her. So talk to some other GMs or owners and get some tips, you'll need a crash course. And in this blog post I'll go over some terminology that's totally relative to running a restaurant. Okay here we go.


ACTUAL USAGE- This means the amount of product and the supplies physically used in a certain time period. Put it this way, if you used 50 pounds of potatoes in a week, then your actual usage of potatoes would be 50 pounds for a week. This is for of course taking your inventory seriously. Ha ha, you thought this shit was all glam didn't you? Yeah you did, you saw Mario Batali kicking back all styling, but it's not all kick back buddy, it's work! If you can't handle this, get out of the biz now! Or don't even try.


BACK OF THE HOUSE or (BOH)- Simply put, this term means any area where customers do not access or see. Such areas are, your office, storage room, break room, and of course where the foods are prepped and cooked the kitchen. If you don't know this one, man you are really messed up buddy.


BREAK EVEN POINT- Here's an illustration I'll draw for your mind, or something like that. Imagine you are running a lemonade stand, and it costs you 30.00 dollars in supplies and man power a day to run it. You hit the break even point when you sell enough lemonade to cover the 30.00 in expenses, after you hit that, all the other sales is your profits. You see, if your dig barely breaks even, you'll be... how should I say this... you'll be out of business in no time, ha ha ha ha ha ha.


BUILD-TO-AMOUNT- Otherwise known as Par Level. Okay I'll make it simple. Everyday your staff or the leader of say the kitchen will have to do some ordering of food products. Okay let's take for example, mayonnaise because I love mayonnaise, my favorite condiment. Every day, your cooks use 5 gallons of mayonnaise, you should have at least another tub of 5 gallons or a little more as a backup. You get the idea. In other words, you just don't order what you need, you order a little more in case you need it, not double the orders, but just a small percentage of backup. Same goes for everything else, like rice, if your kitchen is cooking 10 pounds a day, make sure you got a few pounds for backup for the week. And this gets tricky when the next few days become dead all of sudden without warning, now you'll have extra inventory. Hmmm, not easy eh? Ha ha ha ha ha, and you thought you were gonna be Chef Ramsay chilling in Hawaii with a Mai Tai in his hand, nope! ha ha ha ha.


Okay till the next blog post
Ron