Restau Rants

Well, I'm not really ranting. I just couldn't think of a good catchy title in a span of a minute that relates to what I'm supposed to talk about. Anyway, I'm going to share with you some tips about how restaurants are run over the years. Not that I have any experience, but I've seen these tricks being used by managers (both straight and dastardly ones).

It helps if you imagine yourself as a manager while reading this.

1. For crowd control use music.

So what do you do if you have a lot of people, few chairs and tables, and a need to make the flow of customers as streamlined as possible? (i.e. they buy, they eat, they go). Crank up the music. That's right. Pump up the music to a certain volume where talking becomes really hard.

It's common sense to know that people do only two things after getting their orders: chow down the food and talk. The latter takes up more of the time of the customer's stay, and talk does not help you earn any money. We can easily eliminate this problem with music. Loud music.

If they can't hear each other, they won't be staying to chat.

2. When rice is unlimited, lessen the salt on your food.

Salt is the ultimate rice complement. Not directly, but anything salty becomes fun to eat with rice. If your shop is offering free refills of rice, cut back on salty food items. If you do have them, reduce salt content. Try eating rice with salty vegetables and fresh unsalted vegetables. It works. Rice is generally boring to eat. Salty viands make rice interesting. But we're not here to make things interesting. We're here to cut back on spending. Cut the salt, save the rice.

3 . When you're in a buffet, make your drinks super sweet.

It's a scientific fact that sugar deactivates appetite faster than anything on the table. This is the reason why we use dessert at the end of meals - to kill the craving. How does this work? Sugar gets absorbed by the body, and being somethign so simple, the bloodstream quickly recieves the sustinence it needs. The brain senses this and deactivates synaptic pulsations that call for more food to be imbibed.

Ergo, sweetness in your drinks will kill cravings to go back again and again. Also, the simpler the sugar structure in your drink, the better. Id est, the complex sugars found in the caramel sugar of coke actually gets absorbed slower than the diluted pure cane sugar of iced tea. Go for iced tea, for the win.

4. If possible, use smaller plates and utensils.

This is actually a dieting method - one method we can use to stem off huge consumptions of buffet items. The original idea is to make small portions larger. For your case, the smaller plates will play on the thought that coming back again and again even in a buffet is an act worthy of shame. Dieting and shame - now that's two pronged way to make them stop eating without having to force them off the buffet table.

I'm not sure why I even think about these things. Talk about being random again.

Oh well, it's a rainy monday morning. Anything is excusable.