25 Restaurant Survey Questions to Help You Gain Valuable Insight

Restaurant surveys are one of the best ways to gather customer feedback and improve your menu, service, and overall guest experience. However, not all restaurant survey questions will help you get the answers you’re looking for.

You have to pay attention to how you phrase them to motivate customers to give you an honest and valuable response. Below are 25 restaurant customer survey questions you should focus on to get the most out of your questionnaire.

Benefits of a Restaurant Survey Form

1. Collects honest feedback: You will get your customers’ unfiltered opinions on your food, service, and ambiance.
2. Improves quality of service: Based on the feedback you get, you can identify issues with your menu and service and solve them for a better customer experience.
3. Maps out improvements: Asking some restaurant service survey questions regularly will help you keep track of how the changes you’ve made have impacted customer satisfaction.
4. Gathers customer data: Asking questions that help you learn more about your customers, like their age group and how often they visit your restaurant, will be a lifesaver when you want to come out with targeted promotions and offers.
5. Avoids negative reviews left on third-party platforms: Finally, a questionnaire for a restaurant owner is like a life raft. Dissatisfied people tend to post negative reviews online to complain about a bad restaurant experience. But if you anticipate their move with a restaurant feedback survey, they will tell you directly what they didn’t like instead of posting about it publicly.

Types of Restaurant Survey Questions

We will preface this by saying that the sample restaurant survey questions below were chosen to cover all aspects of a restaurant experience. That includes food quality, service, cleanliness, ambiance, as well as food ordering and delivery.

That said, 25 questions is a lot for just one survey so before you select your customer feedback form questions, think about what you want to achieve with the survey.

For example, you can send one solely dedicated to your online ordering and food delivery service to find ways to improve it. Pick and choose from the questions provided to form your ideal customer feedback survey.

There are several types of questions you can ask in a restaurant survey:

• Customer discovery survey questions
• Food quality survey questions
• Foodservice survey questions
• Online ordering and delivery survey questions
• General customer experience survey questions

These questions can be further divided into Yes/No questions, rating questions (on a scale of 0 to 10, for example), likert scale questions (from strongly agree to strongly disagree), multiple-choice questions, or even open-ended questions that require longer answers.

However, we wouldn’t recommend too many of the latter, just one or maybe two per survey. Customers are usually put off by having to write long answers in surveys.

25 Restaurant Survey Questions Every Restauranteur Should Ask

Customer discovery survey questions

1. What age group do you belong to?

You can adjust the answers according to your needs, but here is an option: 18, 18 to 30, 31 to 40, 41 to 55, over 55. This is a standard question to help you learn more about who your customers are.

2. How did you discover our restaurant?

This question will help you figure out if and what marketing strategies are working for you. If many people answer, “from social media,” capitalize on that to get even more customers. You can also give specific answer options if you want to test out the effectiveness of a promotion.

3. How often do you dine with us?

A classic multiple-choice question to help you separate first-timers from regulars. The answers can be: “This was my first time,” “I visit you occasionally,” “I come by at least once a month,” or “I dine with you weekly.”

4. Did you use any of our discounts or special offers?

These types of restaurant marketing survey questions will help you figure out if your promotions are working or not. If you want feedback on specific promotions, you can follow this up with a multiple-choice question asking, “If yes, which one(s)?”

Food quality survey questions

5. How would you rate the quality of our food?

The rating can vary from 1 (Poor Quality) to 5 (Great Quality). One of the top survey questions about food, this is a straightforward way of finding out whether people enjoy your menu items or not.

6. What did you like best about our menu?

This can be one of your survey’s open-ended questions. Customers can rave about their favorite dish or about other aspects of the menu that they liked, such as variety.

Additional resources:

• 3 Secret Menu Writing Tips: The BEST Food Descriptions that Make You Hungry
• 4 Menu Engineering Design Tips & Secrets That Will Boost Your Sales

7. Did you feel that the restaurant accommodated your dietary restrictions?

This can be a simple Yes/No question. Still, suppose you want to gauge your customers’ actual restrictions or allergens (like gluten-free or vegan). In that case, you can follow it up with a question about their specific restrictions for people who answered “No.”

8. In your experience, is our menu varied enough to satisfy every preference?

Similar to the question above but focused more on types of food preferences, this can help you figure out if your menu has at least one option that satisfies each customer. You can also do a food preference checklist if you want to test several options.

9. Were you satisfied with our drink menu?

Not all survey questions have to be about food choices. It’s essential to figure out if the drink menu is varied enough or if you need to add more drinks to satisfy everyone’s taste. This can be another Yes/No question, or you can phrase it differently like “On a scale of 0 to 5, how satisfied were you with our drink menu?”

Read more: How to Increase Beverage Sales in Your Restaurant

10. Was there anything missing from the menu?

This is your opportunity to get some new menu item ideas straight from the people who visit your restaurant. Ask this as a Yes/No question and follow it up with “If yes, then what would you like to see in our menu?” to see what you’re missing and potentially increase your profits.

Foodservice survey questions

11. Was the staff friendly and welcoming?

Moving on to a new restaurant survey questions topic, this is a simple way of finding out if your customers enjoy the service and feel welcomed at your restaurant. Plus, it also helps you figure out if your employees have the right attitude.

12. How was the speed of service?

Make this a rating question ranging from Very Fast to Very Slow to ascertain whether you have enough servers and an efficient operation. If not, you will have to make some changes to increase speed of service and customer satisfaction.

13. Did your waiter recommend any of our menu specials?

This simple Yes/No question is designed to test your staff’s proficiency and responsiveness to your training program. Could you be doing more to increase your average check?

14. Did the waiter ask whether you’d like to see the dessert menu and/or have a cup of coffee at the end of your meal?

Of all the questions to ask a customer in a restaurant, this is a true marker that your priority is customer satisfaction. Make sure your staff lives up to that promise by finding out what they ask their tables.

Online ordering and delivery survey questions

15. Which platform did you use to place your food order?

The options should be your website and any third-party platforms where your restaurant is listed, such as Doordash or GrubHub (if any). When a customer chooses a third-party, ask the following question: “Is there any particular reason why you didn’t order directly from our website? (by the way, we have a 15% discount on first orders).”

This follow-up question is going to do two things. It will tell you what you should improve to get more people to order from your website. Second, it will let customers know of your first-order discount and entice them to switch over from a third-party app. If the customer chooses your website as an answer, move on to the question below.

If you don’t offer online ordering on your website, here’s how to set it up in a handy video tutorial:

16. On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied were you with the online ordering experience on our website?

This is your chance to determine if people who place orders on your website are satisfied by the online ordering system you chose. You can use a rating scale of 1 to 5 or turn this into a Yes/No question.

17. Was your order correct?

Although mistakes are less frequent with online ordering as opposed to phone orders, they might still happen. A robust order management system ensures the accurate processing of online orders. If customers still flag mistakes, figure out what’s causing them to improve the customer experience.

18. How quickly did your food arrive?

One of the most crucial restaurant survey questions for customers who order online is whether their order was timely. You can give several options like under 30 minutes, 30 to 45 minutes, 45 minutes to an hour, and over an hour.

The answer will tell you whether you need to adjust your estimated waiting time and streamline your operation from food preparation to delivery, so customers don’t have to wait as long for their order.

19. Was the safety seal intact when you opened the delivery bag?

Food safety is critical when everyone orders food at home and looks for restaurants that take their hygiene measures seriously. Tamper-evident labels do a good job of enforcing that. Ensure you can trust your delivery riders and that customers don’t have any reservations about consuming the food they’ve ordered.

20. Was the food as fresh and tasty as it is when you have it in the restaurant?

A vital aspect of food delivery is how well the food travels in terms of taste and look. If you get many negative answers to this question, you might want to rethink your menu options (choose items that travel better) and your packaging.

General customer experience survey questions

21. On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate the cleanliness of our restaurant?

Restaurant customer satisfaction survey questions don’t just include the food and service. You should also find out if your cleaning staff is doing a good job.

If you’re having trouble remembering all the maintenance tasks you need to keep an eye on, download our free restaurant maintenance checklist template. You can also use a digital checklist app on your mobile phone.

22. How did you find the ambiance in our restaurant?

Depending on what you want to find out, you can also split this question into multiple questions and be more specific in asking about seating, music, background, etc. You can use a larger scale for this question, like 0 to 10, to give responses more nuance.

23. How likely is it that you will recommend our restaurant to a friend or family member?

Give them the option to choose from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). This way, you’ll know whether you can rely on word-of-mouth marketing or you need to work harder to improve your service.

24. How likely is it that you will visit our restaurant again?

The daunting question every restaurateur should ask as a final test of their restaurant’s success. You can use the same 0 to 10 scale as above. Follow it up with the next one to get more insight into what makes your customers tick.

25. Is there anything we can do to motivate you to visit us more often?

It’s a good idea to end a survey with an open-ended question. This allows customers to voice any thoughts they might have that haven’t been covered in the previous restaurant survey questions. In this case, it can serve as a suggestion box of things people would like to see or experience at your restaurant.

Closing Thoughts

Running a restaurant blindly without knowing what your customers think is a sure recipe for disaster. If you own a restaurant but haven’t yet sent a survey to your customers, it’s time to try.

The right restaurant survey questions will provide you with valuable information that will ultimately help you boost profits and attract more people to your establishment. You can use a WordPress Survey Plugin to start collecting feedback from your customers on your website.

To make sure you start off on the right foot, you can also think of some new restaurant survey questions before opening the restaurant, such as logo testing survey questions.