Top 5 Ice Cream Spots in San Francisco

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(FOODIES) http://t.co/Z7GWXK5vNR Check out the 5 Best Ice Cream Spots in San Francisco #TeamDinnerWire
— DinnerWire (@DinnerWire) August 14, 2013

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Pinterest Party

Whether its Hitting the Town, Dining Out, Sharing Photos, or whatever you do for fun - Experiences are so much better when shared with friends! So grab some friends and join us on Pinterest!

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Congratulations Bay Area Top 30 Under 30!

There's no denying it, San Francisco and the Bay Area have some real talent when it comes to the food and beverage industry! While the "Top 30 Under 30" were recently celebrated (and are now being discussed all over the web!), we wanted to help you foodies find and rate the delicious meals that got them there! Not everyone from the list works in a "traditional restaurant" (click here for original list), but quite a number of them do!

Click on the restaurant name to be taken to their DinnerWire page. From there you can connect with the restaurant's website, social media, and browse food photos. When you make your venture to the establishment, bring your free DinnerWire App with you! Check-in, post your own photos, review, and recommend the restaurant to your friends.

If your favorite restaurant has set up their Free DinnerWire profile, you can engage with their owners, chefs, managers, and make reservations right from the page. If they haven't, let them know you want to interact with them on DinnerWire! Then send them here: CLAIM YOUR RESTAURANT with a Free Profile!

Click Restaurant Title to View Restaurant Page!

Celebrating: Heidi Bron  

Culinary Liaison (29) 

Celebrating: Laura Cronin  

Pastry Chef (25)

Celebrating: Jessica Entzel 

Pastry Chef (27)

Celebrating: Maya Okada Erickson

Pastry Chef (22)

Celebrating: Christopher Gaither

Wine Director (29)

Celebrating: Brian Gremillion

Chef di Cucina (28)

Celebrating: Duncan Holmes

Chef de Cuisine (27)

Celebrating: Robin Kloess

Pastry Chef (27)

Celebrating: Lucas Knox

Executive Chef (27) 

Celebrating: Jessica Largey

Chef de Cuisine (27)

Celebrating: Michael Lay

Lead Bartender (28) 

Celebrating: Michelle Lee

Pastry Chef (29)

Celebrating: Jeremiah Morehouse

Sommelier (28)

& 

Celebrating: Gianpaolo Paterlini
Wine Director (27)

Celebrating: Ryan Pollnow

Chef de Cuisine (27)

&

Celebrating: Mike Reis

Beer Program Co-Director (25)

Celebrating: Brandon Rodgers

Chef de Cuisine (27)

Celebrating: Jared Rogers

Chef & Partner (29)

Celebrating: Cappy Sorentino

Bar Manager (27)

Celebrating: Chad Zeigler

Head Sommelier (28)

National Cheesecake Day

Happy National Cheesecake Day! Celebrate this inspired holiday by grabbing a few friends and hitting the town in search of the best slice of cheesecake. :) In San Francisco? We Recommend "Gaspare's Pizza House" for their homemade "Robin's Cheesecake"!

Don't forget to bring your DinnerWire app and share your photos with other foodies!

Turning Problem into Profit

by Paul Katsch

There are a variety of management styles when it comes to running a restaurant, but ultimately how you treat your customers plays a big role in their repeat business. From a marketing standpoint, it's 10 times more effective to ensure repeat business than it is to attract new customers to your establishment. Your patron's satisfaction is directly related to their expectations, which reflects on the food and ambiance, as well as the service.

It's naïve to think that everything is going to go perfectly all the time. Mistakes can and will be made by the waiter/waitress, chef, bartender, or multiple parties. Sometimes even if you staff performs exemplary, you'll have a very difficult customer that just isn't happy. Whatever the cause, if your customer feels like your establishments performance was less than satisfactory, how you respond can either lose you business or convert that customer to a life-long patron. There's more than a single transaction on the line, when 90% of consumers trust peer reviews and only 14% trust advertisements, it's important your customers leave your establishment satisfied. Their satisfaction will influence their friends, family, and anyone else on the web they share their review with. What are your customers currently saying about your brand, and how can you maximize the positive reviews.

In the customer service industry, it's a common phrase that “the customer is always right”. Even when they're wrong, it's your job as the restaurant manager to ensure your employees treat your customers accordingly. If they get their food and say they wanted their meal with no tomato, it's not the waitresses job to say “but you said WITH tomato, I have it written down right here”. It's important to train your staff not to argue, but to agree with the customer's assessment. It's not about pointing blame, it's about going above and beyond for your customer to solve the problem quickly and efficiently. When your patrons have a range of choices for their dining establishment, it's up to you to dazzle them so the next time they're looking to eat out, your restaurant is the first name on their mind.

My aunt has never been one to complain too much about her food, in part because her fear of the horror stories of sending food back and having it spit in by rude and inattentive staff. At the same time, when she goes out to eat she expects the quality and satisfaction with her food to be comparable to what she's paying for it. We went out to dine at a local steak house, and her meat was grossly overcooked. She politely told the waitress who immediately apologized, took the steak back and had a new one cooked perfectly and brought out to her. Not only did they fix the problem, the managers gave the waitress permission to comp that item, which pleasantly surprised her and surpassed her expectations. The real icing on the cake was that after we had finished our meal, the manager came to our table, personally apologized for the error, and brought us a comped dessert. The quality of service was remarkable, and for that reason whenever we discuss going out to eat this restaurant is always my aunt's first recommendation.

 So how can you develop this kind of customer loyalty in your own restaurant? The first step is to anticipate the issues your managers and staff will face and implement a streamlined system for dealing with it. If you're not sure what your biggest customer complaints are, its a great opportunity to discuss it with your staff. You can begin by searching review sites, taking note of the best, worst, and average tone of your customers' responses. Once you have a starting place, its important to discuss it with your staff, both to hold them accountable and receive feedback from the employees that have the most face time with your guests. Say your problem is that you're tossing a lot of wrong orders. Is the error in the way your staff takes the orders? Are they being clearly communicated to your cook? Is your cook making the right thing? Are you customers just not satisfied with the finished dish? Whatever your personal complaints, start by attempting to address and minimize the problem. After you've worked that out, put an order of operations together for your staff to follow with a clear chain of command. Anticipating the problems will make your response time quicker, more consistent, and it will let your customer know how important their happiness is to you. It's your job to make sure your customers leave with a smile, and they'll do there job of telling everyone they know and coming back time and again. 

The Face of Your Restaurant

The Face of Your Restaurant

by Paul Katsch

Whether you're an Italian Bistro, Mexican Taqueria, Western Steakhouse, or any other type of dining establishment, you're brand is built on more than your own marketing efforts. Once you get your patrons to your restaurant, your host or hostess is the very first impression they'll have of your company. So how well are your employees representing you?

Restaurants can be stressful environments, and a meal-time rush can come at you all at once. It's important to train all your employees to deliver service with a smile, and your front-of house staff need to be excellent problem solvers as well. The importance of the host or hostess is often overlooked, but they serve as the ambassador of your restaurant. One thing that can help the process is having a superior reservation management system, like DinnerWire, that makes it easier to take reservations and manage the floor. By minimizing the wait time, your hungry patrons can be sat quicker, maximizing your turnover and your potential for profit. Even with a reservation management and seating system, there will be times when you patrons just have to wait to be seated. This wait time affects their opinion of their service and experience at your restaurant, so is your host capable of keeping those patrons happy and making them feel valued?

Engage with the customer the moment they walk in the door, you have the opportunity to set the precedence for their experience. How do your staff greet your guests? Will they open the front door for them? Is your patrons' happiness your hosts' Number 1 priority? Satisfaction is directly correlated with expectations, and your host can help show your customer the quality of service they can expect. You don't want to under-estimate the wait time, and leave your customers feeling like you've forgotten about them. Quoting a longer than expected wait could lead them to be pleasantly surprised when they're sat sooner, but it can also point them to the door if the wait is overwhelmingly long. By training your hosts to anticipate this, they can word their conversation in a way that makes your customer feel like you're excited they chose your establishment for this dining experience. Your patrons have a variety of dining choices, it's up to you to demonstrate why no other restaurant compares, not just in food quality but in customer satisfaction.

So your host may have done a fantastic job getting your new customer in que to be seated and making them feel like their business is important to you. The next step is anticipating how your guest will experience their wait. Is there enough seating, a good ambiance, and something to occupy your patrons as they wait? Ultimately, it takes much more time and energy to put out problem fires as they rise than to prepare for the possibilities beforehand. When problems do arise (they're almost impossible to avoid), how will your host react? Nobody is perfect, and mistakes will be made, but what's more important is how they're handled. You can train someone how to go through the motions of a job, but it's much harder to teach people to have a good attitude. It's harder to change a negative opinion once it's been developed, so from your first interaction, how are you making your customer feel?

“People will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
- Maya Angelou

Granted not every customer is a pleasant patron, so it's your employees' job to please even the most difficult of guest. It's difficult to work under the motto that “The customer is always right”, because in today's world it's taught customers that those that complain the loudest will get special treatment. What you also need to realize is that as important as it is to keep your rabble-rousers appeased, it shouldn't be at the cost of your other patrons' experience. Your quieter patrons may not make as big of a fuss in your restaurant, but in today's world your online customer reviews can make or break you. According to 2013 Socialnomics (http://youtu.be/QUCfFcchw1w), 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations, whereas only 14% trust advertisements. It's important to have a clearly established chain of command, so your hosts know when it's time to get a manager involved. Having an established process for comping or offering alternative added value will give your staff the ability to deal with these problems, and there needs to be safeguards to ensure these benefits aren't abused.

 What's the best way to ensure that your employees behave in a manner that ensures repeat business? Well the easy answer is to focus on hiring team members with a track record of superior customer service and a good attitude. Training can help, rather than expecting your employees to know how to deal with difficult situations, giving them wordage and tools to anticipate these situations will lead to a quicker response time. Possibly the best way to engage your front of house staff is by finding a way to help them make their job personal. Whether it's offering incentives for superior performers, rewarding with scheduled shifts, etc., as the employer you need to find a way to help your staff see your customers as their guests with a personal pride and responsibility for their treatment. They can be aware of the way you want to treat your guests, they can pay attention to your branding as a company, but when they find a substantial purpose for personal responsibility, you will undoubtedly see a call-to-action by your staff.  

Episode 4: Writing a Sense-ational Dinner Review

Stay Tuned as the Saga Continues!...

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