How To Generate Restaurant Loyalty The Old-Fashioned Way

There’s something special about Morrisville Cafe, and it is not their company website.

Morrisville Cafe isn’t even a company. It is a small diner along Chapel Hill Road owned and operated by Naomie Jenkins. She bought the business 30 years ago, during that time she redid the menu only four or five times, and replaced the countertop once just four years ago because the old one had worn out.

Do you still feel like asking Ms. Jenkins her online marketing plans to go viral?

And yet, Morrisville Cafe has timeless appeal.

According to Ms. Jenkins, the business maintains strong restaurant loyalty among patrons by simply giving them what they want: good food. No tricks. No antics. No gimmicks. Just delicious old-style home-cooked American cuisine.

As a restaurant operator, here’s what you can learn from Ms. Jenkin’s way of doing things.

1. Serve food the way fast foods don’t
The food at Morrisville Cafe is a part of it. A big part of it.

Jimmy Davis, 67, goes to Jenkin’s for breakfast at least once a week. He’s been doing it since 1979, when Ms. Jenkins first opened the place. His friend, Jimmy Winters, 45, spends his breakfast and lunch time there everyday. A true picture of restaurant loyalty.

He says, “I like the old-style home cooking. I don’t like fast food.”

2. A meal should be satisfying, not pre-cooked
Nobody likes to eat pre-cooked food at home. So why should you pay twice as much to eat them at a restaurant?

“Nothing is pre-cooked,” says Harold Heath, Ms. Jenkin’s only employee. He says when people come in asking what’s quick on the menu, the only answer he has for them is, “We don’t have nothing quick.”

Freshly-cooked meals are a specialty at Morrisville Cafe. And their success speaks for itself.

“If you don’t want to eat it at home, I won’t serve it here,” Ms. Jenkins says.

3. Maintain a personal atmosphere
The comfortable feeling of home goes beyond food preparation.

The main dining room at Morrisville Cafe can hold around a dozen people, just about, and maintain a relaxing atmosphere. It’s a hit among Ms. Jenkins’ patrons. Some of the diners, when Jenkins is busy, go right ahead and walk behind the counter to refill their coffee.

“I guess they’re not supposed to do that, but they do,” Ms. Jenkins says. She doesn’t mind.

It’s small touches like these that distinguish Morrisville Cafe from the uptight high society restaurants that continue to shut down one after the other in the face of the on-going recession.

Restaurant loyalty is something Ms. Jenkins can be proud of. Sadly, it’s more than what I can say for the rest of us. Ask yourself and the next person what it is you really expect when you walk into a restaurant, and eventually you’ll discover we all have the same answer to that one: fresh and delicious meals, and a nice place to enjoy it.

Ms. Jenkins sure taught us a thing or two about restaurant loyalty.

Restaurant Promotions: Four Simple Steps To Catapult Your Sales Through Fast Food Lunch Service

There are things you need to give up when the country goes into a recession.

As a restaurant operator, you need to figure out what this thing is for your customers because, believe it or not, it is going to hurt your business. But I’ll save you the trouble and just tell it to you straight. This thing that restaurant customers are going to cut back on is their lunch time.

People no longer have as much time for eating lunch as they once did. Time is money, both for you, the restaurant operator, and your customers.

Now do you get why fast food chains like McDonald’s seem to get by just fine even during these economic downtimes? McDonald’s maintains a knock-out combination of affordability and convenience as its flagship restaurant promotion, making it the restaurant of choice during a recession.

But wait! There’s more!

Fast food chains turning tables quickly during lunch hour doesn’t mean fine dining restaurants can’t do the same. There’s also this growing trend of healthy eating among diners. I have no doubts that restaurants still have the upper hand—that is, if you’re okay with tweaking your restaurant promotions to focus on what customers need at the moment.

Here are some tips that’ll help you implement speed lunch as your new restaurant promotion:

1.    Cut down the menu.
Anything that is complex and superfluous creates unnecessary complications. So cut down the menu and stick to your core offerings, meals that have good margins and easy to prepare.

Take Houlihan’s for example. This establishment requires servers to enter orders within two minutes of taking them, another two minutes to get the prepared meals on the tables as soon as they leave the kitchen. I suggest you develop similar benchmarks in your restaurant.

2.    Leverage POS technology.
Putting up speed lunch as your new restaurant promotion means you are ready to invest in more POS terminals for your restaurant. It should be noted that a POS system is vital to this promo because it increases efficiency of relaying orders from the servers to the kitchen by a long mile.

Already have a POS system in place? Consider adding more terminals. Don’t have one yet? It’s time you think about getting one.

3.    Leverage restaurant equipment.
A POS system is essential, sure, but don’t get me wrong. The kitchen has more to do with the success of a quick meal and service operation than any other aspect of your restaurant.

Make sure your kitchen staff could consistently keep up with your food preparation standards under a given time limit. Cooking equipment like microwaves, broilers and steamers are indispensable in this process. Other equipment like vegetable cutters and food processors should speak for themselves once you have them in the kitchen.

4.    Make sure the staff is ready.
Teamwork is harmony.

You might want to add some extra staff during speed lunch days, especially during the first couple weeks of your new restaurant promotion. Then make some staff evaluations. Put people that work well together, train those that aren’t doing so hot, etc. You know what to do from here.

Chain restaurants like Houlihan’s and Applebee’s seem to have got it down with this simple formula.

Value – time = more customers…

…where “value minus time” means the more value you serve in the shortest amount of time, the more customers you are going to see walk through those doors during lunch hour. It’s a simple and effective concept that definitely warrants its own restaurant promotion.