15th June, 2022
Restaurant Service Trends
Covid Pandemic or not, restaurants have and always will need to find creative ways to serve their diners and customers. We’ve shared some of the top trends that are being embraced in 2022 to improve the way venues are serving customers and to enhance the dining experience.
Engaging Diners
We know many diners are opting to dine at home and venues need to come up with new and engaging reasons to attract diners to come back and enjoy the service experience. This is going to mean it’s time to get creative.
We are seeing some great initiatives that are working such as cooking classes, food and alcohol pairing experiences. Some are offering corporate team building cooking classes to bring people back during lunch periods. There are seriously no limits and consumers are loving it!
Menu Consolidation
As venues feel the continued pressure of increased running costs along with the challenge of getting enough staff to man the fort, the menu and pantry is the first place some are looking at with a plan to reduce costs and simplify operations.
Reduction in choice and creative shorter menus give great advantages that go beyond the obvious benefits to a short-staffed kitchen. Diners are looking for a great experience over a huge plate of food. So quality over quantity is where it is at.
Pantry consolidation is now common practice in kitchens and venues are looking to suppliers for innovation with ingredients to enable them to be successful in their do more with less approach.
Dark Kitchens
The prediction of Dark Kitchens and white labelled restaurant spaces has been talked about for a few years now. The pressure of introducing new revenue streams and building efficiencies has fast tracked this and is now major trend. It’s not looking like it will be a fad either.
As we outlined in our last article, delivery is increasing rapidly and now many restaurants are forgoing a physical location and adopting the virtual or ghost kitchen formula. This is a smart way for operators to increase their profit and turnover and manage overheads. The big advantage is that done right it will allow the venue the financial flexibility to meet consumer demands that would otherwise not be possible.
Contactless Ordering and Payments
The genius technology developments that we are seeing are really helping operators manage the skills shortage and the increase in demand for less contact in service is just one popular introduction. While this is popular and the prediction is that we will see many more innovation that removes human interaction out of the dining, we know this is how premium and fine dining want to interact with their clients.
It will be up to the tech sector to problem solve this missing piece of engagement to satisfy the owners desire to stay connected with the diner as they look for new experiences to entice them to come back again.
There is no doubt the movement of “zero contact everything” is upon us and contactless technology will be applied by more businesses as restaurant-goers come back to the dining room.
Stay tuned for our next article in the series: Top Restaurant Trends we will see in 2022
For more information about the FSAA visit www.fsaa.org.au.
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