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More than food: How to create an outstanding restaurant experience

restaurant experience

Great food alone is not enough to set your restaurant apart. In fact, many factors can influence your customers overall restaurant experience. Creating the right ambience and atmosphere can be the deciding factor in whether the customer returns or is left with a sour taste in their mouth. If you’re looking for ways to improve your restaurant experience, we’ve put together 5 ideas which are sure to set your restaurant apart.

Lighting

Its widely known in the hospitality industry that lighting can significantly impact the restaurant experience. Getting your lighting just right will create an ambience that adds to the dining experience, ensuring customers enjoy and feel relaxed in your establishment. How you use lighting largely depends on your restaurant’s theme and cliental. But as a rule, it’s common for restaurants to gradually dim the lights as the night goes on. This creates a more intimate and relaxed environment, which is exactly why your cliental choose to eat out rather than opting for the fast-tracked eating in option.

restaurant lighting

Tableware

Tableware plays a vital role in creating an outstanding restaurant experience. Not only does it add value to your dishes, but it creates the wow factor which prompts customers to snap and share pictures of your restaurant and/or your food. When your tableware compliments your food, it creates visual synchronisation which connotes luxury and instils feelings of amazement. Sherad Dewan, Regional Director of Food Production at The Park Hotels’, explains that the sensory perception of food starts with presentation, so it’s important to invest in high quality and unique tableware that will set your restaurant apart.

(Villa Mamas tableware)

Hospitality

Your food, lighting and tableware might be outstanding, but if your hospitality is inadequate, you’re not going to create the restaurant experience you had envisioned. When your cliental choose to dine out at your restaurant, they’re paying for someone to do everything for them, whilst still expecting an amount of privacy. That means it’s important to invest in appropriate hospitality training for your staff, to ensure they don’t become over or under attentive. It’s equally frustrating for your customers to have a waiter/waitress interrupt their conversation every two minutes, as it is having to chase the waiter/waitress multiple times for the bill.

restaurant experience

Music

Music in restaurants is a controversial topic in the hospitality trade. Whilst many believe customers prefer the ambience created by chatter, others believe music can add to and enhance the restaurant experience. What works for one restaurant, won’t for another; so, it’s all about figuring out your cliental and their specific wants and needs when eating out. However, it could be said that the atmosphere of themed restaurants, such as Caribbean cuisine or Mexican cuisine, can really be enhanced by using theme appropriate music.

restaurant experience

Food

Of course, it goes without saying that that food will influence your overall dining experience. And whilst customers usually check the menu to ensure there is something they’d like before attending, offering something a little unusual or different can be the determining factor of the customer choosing your restaurant over a competitor. The way your meals are presented will also directly affect the restaurant experience. Carefully and thoughtfully placing meals on a plate can provide connotations of luxury which are not likely to be achieved by ‘chucking’ a meal together.

Why wait? Start improving your restaurant experience today by investing in new tableware that will set your restaurant apart from the rest. At Surrey Ceramics, we create unique, bespoke but affordable tableware which can be delivered in large volumes and in a timely manner. To find out more about our products, explore our website or contact us on sales@surreyceramics.com.

Feeling inspired? Let's chat about your ideas - Call us now on 01428 604 404