How to Manage & Profit from Restaurant Rush Hours

Any food business will inevitably face these two situations: slow periods when the establishment is mostly empty and restaurant rush hours when you have a hard time serving a large number of clients.

While having a busy restaurant is good for business because you sell more, it also has a couple of challenges. For example, you may not be able to provide high-quality client service and even encounter some food preparation problems.

In this article, we’ll share a few useful tips to help you not only manage but profit from your restaurant’s rush hours:

How to Identify Your Restaurant’s Rush Hours

Generally speaking, a restaurant will be full when its target customers are off-work and looking for a relaxing meal with friends or family. Here are a couple of examples:

• During lunch hours, 12 a.m. to 2 p.m., if your restaurant is near office buildings and you have lunch promos;
• In the evening, after work hours, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.;
• On weekends, starting from lunch if you are open that early and usually until closing time.

If you want to identify exactly when your restaurant’s rush hours are, you will need to use software, such as:

• A restaurant POS system: because you input every order, you can generate a report at the end of each day or week and notice when you had the most orders;
• An online ordering system: if you provide online orders, the rush hours may be different. Therefore, it would be helpful to use an online ordering system with an analytics module, like the one from GloriaFood, to easily check your busy hours.

7 Tips to Efficiently Manage Restaurant Rush Hours

Your restaurant’s success is directly tied to its reputation. To prevent negative reviews from unhappy clients, you must learn how to manage your restaurant’s rush hours while providing irreproachable food and customer service.

1. Use a table reservation system

The key to handling busy periods like a pro is organization. For this purpose, you need to allow customers to book a table. This way, you know an estimated number of clients that will visit you and you can plan accordingly.

Here are a couple of tips for getting the best table reservation system for your business:

• Make it easy for clients to book a table directly on your website: your restaurant’s website is the most trustworthy place for people looking for a place to eat. Moreover, if they see something interesting on your menu, they don’t have to go to a different app, they can just click on the booking button;
• Save your money: you don’t have to spend a lot of your hard-earned money to get a good table reservation system, you can get one for free from GloriaFood;
• Allow customers to pre-order: if you want to increase table turnover and serve more customers during rush hours, you can let people choose what they want to eat (and even pay) when they make a reservation. With GloriaFood, you can save your employees’ time and make your business more efficient.

2. Train your staff to handle every situation

Your staff represents your business, and they are the ones under pressure during restaurant rush hours. Not only do they have to cook a variety of dishes in a short amount of time, but they also have to face challenging customers who don’t appreciate the long waiting times.

Check out these tips that will make your staff’s work easier and help them do their best:

• Schedule more employees: when you identify your rush hours and have an approximate number of orders per hour, you can start scheduling more staff to handle the added workload. It is better to have higher labor costs than to lose customers;
• Cross-train employees: when everybody is busy, employees will inevitably have to fill other roles, for example, servers will take on hostess responsibilities. Therefore, train them in multiple roles so they have the knowledge to do each job when needed;
• Show appreciation for their efforts: don’t let your employees foster indignation that may lead to them leaving and you have to pay a big cost to hire a new person. Use both words and material rewards to encourage them to keep doing their jobs to the best of their abilities.

Read more: How to Motivate Restaurant Employees and Increase Retention

3. Optimize your restaurant’s menu

One of the main challenges of restaurant rush hours is the kitchen not being able to prepare all the ordered dishes promptly. If it takes more than 30 minutes from when a client orders to when they receive their food, you will have some complaints.

To prevent this, you can create a special category at the top of your menu where you list your easy and fast-to-prepare menu items for which you can guarantee a 15-minute delivery time. For example, burgers and pizza are some of the fastest dishes to prepare.

You can make this rush hour restaurant menu only available during busy periods and even change the items listed in the category constantly, at no extra charge, with the intuitive menu creator from GloriaFood.

Read more: Restaurant Menu Planning: How to Optimize Your Menu to Sell More

4. Make ordering simple and fast

After people are seated, they are presented with a menu and left to decide what they would like to eat. During lunch hours, customers may have a hard time getting a server’s attention to place their order because your employees will be very busy.

To solve this problem, you can allow customers to order directly from their table, using a QR code. Here is what you need to do:

• Sign up on GloriaFood, complete your profile, create a menu, and publish it on your website;
• Generate a free QR code menu for on-premise dining. You can have the same code for every table or a separate one;
• Print out the code on a flyer and stick it to every table.

That’s it, now you can just confirm each order with a simple tap on the order-taking app and send it to the kitchen to start preparing it. Moreover, if you set up online payments, clients can easily pay using the same QR code with no extra trips needed from your employees.

If you need help setting up on-premise ordering, follow the steps in this video tutorial:

5. Take advantage of technology

As we’ve previously mentioned, anything that you can do to take the load off your employees will make restaurant rush hours more manageable. Technology can be a great help because it makes restaurant operations faster and eliminates errors. Consider integrating:

• A POS system: to take orders accurately and process payments faster;
• A kitchen display system: so you can send orders automatically to the kitchen, without noting them down on papers that could be lost;
• An online ordering system: that allows you to pause services whenever you are overwhelmed and your kitchen can’t cook any more orders.

6. Create a waitlist system

Even though you have a table reservation system, some customers are spontaneous and will show up hoping to find a free table. When you are fully booked, you need to create a waitlist system that allows you to approximate when the next availability will be.

Afterward, you can offer customers the option to wait for a table in a designated space, ideally at the bar, where they can order drinks and snacks before they are seated. If clients want to wait outside, you could take their number and let them know 15 minutes before a table becomes available.

7. Communicate with your customers

Just like in any relationship, a lot of problems between your restaurant and its customers stem from the lack of communication. During restaurant rush hours, it is important to tell clients what they can expect to not disappoint them. For example:

• If the food will take longer to prepare, provide them with a realistic waiting time;
• When they have a complaint, train your employees to listen to them and try to come up with a solution on the spot.

Final Words

Restaurant rush hours are great for profit if you prepare for them. Don’t let them surprise you understaffed and with a small inventory. Take advantage of technology and train your employees so you can easily make a big amount of clients happy.