then let me just repeat that i consider your menu too long and complex for the start, you always can enlarge later

one comment to the drinks though: might be good to have a hot drink as well, could be just coffee for starters
and for those who really want to have a rounded meal, where is the dessert? could just be a 6 flavour ice cream display unit leased/rented from a supplier
(not sure how many flavours but the local fish restaurant/take away has one of those and good trade on it especially in summer)

Vegan option(s)

The prices should be 3x the cost of what it cost to make it.
To cover :
Ingredients,
Electricity,
Labor

So, use the calculator, and start punching in the weight of the food,
And triple it by the cost per ounce. I believe that is correct but you can always look that up.

Remember that the customers aren't just buying the food.
But they are buying the labor it takes to make the food,
And the electricity it costs for them to sit there
And the tip for the waiter/waitress.

You might want to just go back and look at that again.


I would also give off coupons to get them coming back.
So buy one entree get the other half off
Or some thing like that.


Or because its not a fancy shmancy place
You can get away with using a punch card system.

You know how like coffee shops
Have a punch card, and they are like
"Buy ten drinks, get the 11th free"
You could do like buy 5 entrees get a free appetizer
On your next visit

Not in demand in my area. Not a lot of hippies around here.

As said in one of my earlier posts I haven't had the chance to shop around for prices yet, so they're not set in stone. Place is pretty much going to start out as my wife and I, and maybe a friend or two running the place every day till I figure out how many people I need to hire.

But yeah when I started advertising (about a week or two before opening), I was going to include stuff like bring this ad for 10% off total check or buy one entree get one 50% off. And yeah I was going to do punch cards as well.

the more meals that share the same ingredients with others, the better.

It's better to start with to much staff than not enough. You can always fire people. It's much more difficult to regain a good name if you get off to a bad start because you are understaffed.

Or gluten free options

prices look low to me but menu looks good

ive always wanted to have my own restaurant

good luck!

Your margins are definitely too low, your menu is really scattered, you should do less, and do it better. It's going to cost too much to keep all of that on hand, and with such a large menu, you're going to have a lot of waste.

All of your apps are fried, you should consider doing some sort of dip that can easily be shared.

House salad/side salad kinda redundant, just call both a house salad and offer a sm and lg option

Why is there no soup? You can commit murder on margins with soup, it's like you get to ladle out free money.

This post was edited by Azajay on Aug 2 2013 03:01am

Really solid advice here.

Also, if you live next to a university you may want to get a hold of some of the business professors. My old bosses opened up a vegan place and received some very solid advice from the professors. However, they failed to utilize any of it and went out of business within 6 months. You need to talk to people who have been there before and actually listen to their advice. Utilize those who have been there before you.

With businesses, one tends to ignore advice because it's your baby and you want to do it your way. That's fine for small projects but in terms of the amount of debt you will be taking on, it's not OK.