Restaurant Planning 101: Tips For New Ventures

Posted on: 15 February 2022

Running a family-style dining restaurant gives you a unique opportunity to set yourself apart. Guests — particularly those with families — tend to enjoy being able to sit down to a meal and share dishes, rather than ordering separate plates for each person at the table. However, running a family-style dining restaurant also has its intricacies. In particular, there are a couple of little mistakes you should seek to avoid along the way.

Mistake #1: Offering dishes not well-suited to family-style dining.

There are some dishes that are very well-suited to family-style dining. Stews, pasta dishes, stir-fries, and casseroles are among them. It's easy for diners to help themselves to some of the dish and then pass it along. What you want to avoid offering is dishes that are not well-suited to this type of service. Sandwiches, for example, aren't easy to serve with family-style dining unless you cut them into pieces before putting them on the serving plate. Really messy dishes, like soup that diners have to ladle into their own dishes, tend not to work well, either. So, before you add a dish to the menu, ask yourself, "will guests be able to easily serve themselves this food from a large platter?"

Mistake #2: Only offering one size of each dish.

Some tables may only want a little of certain dishes, either because they want to order a larger variety of things or because some people in the party don't love a particular dish. Others may want more of a certain dish because they really love it. So, offering just one size of each dish doesn't play out very well. Instead, it's better to offer small, medium, and large portions of each dish on your menu. You can make recommendations about table size on the menu. For instance, you can say the small portion serves 2 - 3 people, the medium 4 - 5, and the large 6 - 8. 

Mistake #3: Using too-small tables.

When parties are passing dishes around, they need a little more space at the table. If you seat them at the standard, square dining table for 4 or 6, they'll bump elbows a lot, and there may not be enough table space for all of the plates and all of the shared platters of food. So, always use larger tables when serving food family-style.

If you can avoid the small mistakes above, your family-style restaurant should find success! For more information, contact a business like National Coney Island.