Does Your Bar Sound Successful?

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When people think about their small businesses, they usually talk about the “taste” of success, the “feel” of success, and the “look” of success, but they forget all about the sound of success. When guests come into your bar or restaurant, they decide if they like your business within 10 seconds—and that decision usually happens much faster. You already know that your guests are making snap decisions based on the décor, or the smell of the place, but one thing that also helps your customers decide whether they’ll stay or leave is the soundtrack. Here’s how to fix a few blunders your bar may be making. Read more

Top 5 Restaurant Choices for Dine Around Seattle

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Dine Around Seattle is a twice-yearly month-long restaurant extravaganza, in which  over 50 restaurants offer a three-course prix fixe menu that includes a starter, an entree, and dessert. This delectable time runs from March 2 to 27, but get your feast on during the workweek, because Friday and Saturday nights aren’t included in the deal. This year’s per-person prix fixe menus follow a flat rate: $30 for a three-course dinner, and $15 for a three-course lunch. The month-long event won’t be happening again until November so make sure to investigate Dine Around Seattle’s website and check out all the scrumptious bargains. I’ve listed my top five choices for this year’s Dine Around Seattle, so when you see that person at the next table who’s really enjoying their food, that’ll be me. Read more

Top Picks for Boston Restaurant Week 2014

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Boston Restaurant Week 2014 (now called “Dine Out Boston”) is coming soon and with 200+ menus, your choices are prodigious. I’m sure you’ve picked out a few places you want to go for restaurant week, but you should celebrate Boston’s two weeks of deliciousness by making sure to go out every night. Dine Out Boston runs from March 16 to the 28, but Saturday nights aren’t part of the festivities, so the official dates are March 16-21 and 23-28. This year’s per-person prix fixe offerings fall into three tiers for lunch or dinner, and the pricing is dependent on how many courses are offered. For lunch, you’ll pay $15, $20, or $25; for dinner you’ll pay $28, 33, or $38.

I’ve looked through all the available menus for this year’s selections and listed my favorite choices in each price tier for lunch and dinner. Boston, let the feasting begin! Read more

NYC Restaurant Week 2014: Five Sizzling Choices to Beat the Winter Blahs

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In New York, it seems like people do nothing but kvetch and kvell already, and the weather hasn’t been helping. No one wants to go out and traverse the slush lakes that seem to have formed this month at every single street corner of the city, but you must! Restaurant Week 2014 is already underway in New York City – rain, sleet, snow, or hail – so what are you waiting for?

From now through March 7, almost 300 restaurants in this dining metropolis of the world will be offering lunch and dinner at a deep discount. This means three-course lunches for just $25, and three-course dinners that are going for a mere $38. People! You can barely buy a bag of groceries for that at the corner supermarket in this town, so whatever you do, don’t “fuggedabout” this.

Okay, okay – here’s the hard part: the saying goes that you could eat at a different restaurant every day for the rest of your life in New York and never run out of new options. So how exactly does one choose? Well, here are five highly recommended picks to get you started: Read more

Top 5 Restaurants You Must Try for Denver Restaurant Week

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Denver Restaurant Week is almost here, and this year is the tenth annual event. 2014 boasts a staggering number of participating restaurants, so Denverites, be ready to satiate. The prix fixe is the same for every restaurant ($30 per person) which makes it hard to narrow your options, but we’ve combed through the menus to help you make your restaurant week decisions easier. We only had room to include five restaurants on our list, but we wanted to mention two bonuses: an intriguing restaurant that we figure must be wrangling alligators in the kitchen so they can hand-trim alligator tail for their guests (Bayou Bob’s), and a restaurant that must employ wild-snail catchers, enabling them to serve locally-sourced wild snail (Coohills). Denver, you’ve got some incredible menus. Read more

Responding to Comments on Yelp? The Reviews are Mixed

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In the age of the smart phone, we’ve come to expect to be able to get a message out to anyone at any time – and perhaps even get an immediate response. Some would even say this principle of instant communication has begun to apply to reviews on Yelp.com; if a customer can post a review before he or she even pays the bill, some would even go as far as to argue that the owner (or another member of the bar or restaurant staff) could, in theory, just as easily read and reply to that review within the hour. If the situation is really that dire for business owners, of course, then running a restaurant just got a lot more difficult – unless owners and managers are willing to hire someone whose sole responsibility is to handle such matters – and, so, of course there are companies that offer exactly that service. Read more

These wines might be at your expensive wine dinner

Hosting Wine Dinners in Your Restaurant

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Do your customers come in and order the second least expensive item on your wine menu again and again? It might mean that they just like your second least expensive wine offering, or it might mean that they don’t feel confident in their wine ordering abilities to upgrade their order. Of course, a digital wine menu can help to educate and inspire your customers’ ordering habits, but here’s something you may not have thought of: hosting a wine dinner. Hosting a wine dinner at your restaurant can be a great boost for your restaurant business during the slow season, and if you set it up right, you can get not only build new regular customers, you can also get those regulars ordering expensive wines with their meals. Here is the step-by-step guide to hosting your restaurant’s wine dinner. Read more

“I Can’t Even Hear Myself Drink!” How Volume – Not Just “Volume” – Matters

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Audiologists consider a decibel level just over 80 damaging to our hearing. Sadly, it may come as little surprise to frequent diners in trendy restaurants that this is often just how loud dining out has become. While some restaurateurs might place a higher priority on restaurant décor than acoustics to draw in a young and hip crowd, it’s not only older customers who have increasingly had enough of not being able to hear each other during dinner conversation.

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Does Your Kid Friendly Restaurant Have A Great Kids Menu?

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Are you ready to build a loyal customer base who considers your restaurant the go-to for any occasion? Do you want customers who find your restaurant so delicious that coming back every day of the week sounds like a good idea to them? Well, have you considered making your restaurant kid friendly? Kid friendly restaurants can fill tables during late lunch or early dinner hours when your servers would normally be folding napkins, and because children build fierce loyalties (and have powerful methods of persuasion), your restaurant could become the new family dinner hotspot. First step: convince kids to come back again and again by building an awesome kids menu. Here are some tips to get you started.

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Top 7 Restaurants You Need to Try During Chicago Restaurant Week

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Everyone can agree that Chicago Restaurant Week is delicious and for adventurous foodies, the tastiest week of the year is a great time to splurge on exploring the exciting and unique food right here in our own backyard. We looked through the menus for this year’s Chicago Restaurant Week, and came up with seven of the most unique restaurants we could find. Some popular flavors this year included basil ice cream of two kinds and a ridiculously extravagant junk food dessert. There were also various pates, including a burger topped with pate which sounds so decadent that we have to try it. These menus are making us ravenous and our countdown has now officially begun for this year’s Chicago Restaurant Week.

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