The Top Restaurant Trends in 2023
The restaurant industry is putting innovation and adaptation first in 2023. The most popular restaurant trends show that owners are finding ways to elevate the on-site and off-site experience for guests, whether they’re running a fast-casual restaurant, a full-service establishment, or exploring a completely new concept entirely. As consumer dining preferences and economic conditions continue to evolve, it’s important to understand restaurant trends and strategies that work. Whether that’s investing in kiosks for convenient ordering, experimenting with automation, or finding new ways to be sustainable, restaurants are finding creative ways to build meaningful relationships with their staff and customers. To discover the strategies that will shape the restaurant industry in 2023, Square teamed up with Wakefield Research to investigate what 500 restaurant owners and managers and 2,000 consumers across the U.S. are thinking about the current state and future for food businesses. We analyzed the survey results, insights from the Square restaurants team, and interviews with restaurateurs leading the charge to identify the most popular restaurant trends for local businesses to explore this year.
Bielat Santore & Company – Restaurant Industry Alert
MONMOUTH COUNTY, NJ – RESTAURANT & BAR FOR SALE
Photo used to illustrate a “Restaurant/Bar” and not actual representation
Well-maintained Monmouth County, NJ restaurant and bar; highly visible highway location; 180 seats + 20 at bar; additional 50 outdoor seats; paved parking lot with 38 spaces; operating business with liquor license grossing $22k+/week; business only open 5 days/week for dinner only; unlimited potential for new owner/operator; financing available to qualified.
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The QR-Code Menu Is Being Shown the Door
A dining innovation that once looked like the future has worn out its welcome. Heavenly Buffaloes, a chain of restaurants with locations in three North Carolina college towns, would seem tailor-made for QR-code menus. Its customers tend to be young and tech-savvy. Most come in hungry, many tipsy. And the menu isn’t exactly complicated. “It’s chicken wings and beer,” said Bo Sayre, the company’s district manager. “That’s what we do. Not a lot of people are asking, ‘What beer pairs well with this chicken wing?’” Like other restaurant owners and managers around the country, Mr. Sayre put digitalized menus on all his tables in the early, don’t-touch-anything stage of the pandemic, when contactless service was considered essential. But over time, fewer and fewer diners have paid them any notice. “If they had a choice, I would say, 90 percent of customers would say: ‘I’d just rather place my order with you.’” Heavenly Buffaloes may be at the vanguard of a shift in the national experiment with online menus, an invention that not long ago seemed like the way of the future. Today, even though many restaurants still have “scan the code” cards tucked into napkin holders or pasted onto the corners of tables, customers seem to be ignoring them. And many restaurants have returned to using only paper menus.
How to Grow a NextGen Casual Restaurant Brand
Growing an emerging restaurant successfully requires building brand awareness. Developing a solid reputation and establishing a scalable infrastructure. The restaurant industry is forecast to generate $997 billion in sales in 2023. Yet, seven out of 10 eateries in the United States are single-unit operations, according to the National Restaurant Association. Taking your brand to the next level requires recreating the system you established at your first location and can feel like starting from scratch if you don’t do the work behind the scenes to facilitate growth. Many foodservice establishments turn to franchising to help make their eatery a household name. Franchising allows a restaurant brand to expand rapidly without the need for significant capital investment. Having local owners who are invested in the community gives your brand leverage and enables it to gain a foothold in new areas. We launched the first Toasted Yolk Café in 2010 to provide a breakfast and lunch experience with chef-inspired menu items and fresh ingredients. We’ve come a long way since Matthew DeMott and I had our first conversation about opening a restaurant one evening at church. Today, Toasted Yolk Café has 30 restaurants in seven states and plans to have a total of 50 locations by the end of this year. But we weren’t an overnight success. It took four years of careful planning and trial and error before we added our second location, and then we waited until 2018 to start franchising. We now plan to open an average of 15 to 20 new restaurants annually. If your existing restaurant is exceeding expectations and you’re willing to put in the time and energy required to grow your emerging brand, take these steps to scale your concept.
Payment Security
Does the hospitality industry need to improve customer data measures? Accepting fast payments has, after all, always been crucial in hospitality businesses. If there’s a long line – in a cafe, a pub, or a restaurant, for example – customers need to be able to pay quickly and securely. Quickly – and securely. The advent (and continuing evolution) of contactless technology has ticked the first box. Customers are able to purchase a coffee, beer, or wine at the point of sale in mere milliseconds – seamlessly, and with just the flick of a wrist. Yet the big question remains – how secure is it? Below, we’ll examine the state of payment security in the hospitality industry. How do payments at the point-of-sale work – and how safe are they, really? Moreover, does the hospitality industry need to improve how it handles sensitive customer data? And, if so…how? Let’s start by acknowledging the obvious – the hospitality industry is extremely reliant on debit and credit card payments. Even before COVID-19, these types of payments were popular for their convenience and speed. But since the pandemic’s onset, their hygienic qualities (unlike cash, there’s no hand-to-hand contact to encourage the transmission of viruses) have seen them become the most popular way to pay. But for the hospitality industry in particular, the benefits of contactless are particularly clear. With contactless card readers, servers can take the payment directly to the customer – rather than being restricted to the bar or counter. What’s more, people spend more when they pay with a card. One 2021 survey suggested that non-cash payments were 73 percent higher than cash payments – good news for bar and restaurant owners! By accepting card payments, hospitality businesses can also utilize other (also COVID-friendly!) ways of settling the bill: including ordering from the table via a QR code, or online. Card payment infrastructure can also help businesses in the hospitality space create more personalized experiences for guests. Card payments, then, aren’t just growing. They’re absolutely vital. But are they secure?
Grubhub to Share More Detailed Data with Restaurants
Operators will be able to view how different customer segments are performing. Grubhub will start sharing more detailed guest data with restaurants, part of a few updates to its toolkit for operators unveiled Thursday. Restaurants will now be able to see how different customer segments are performing. They can view data such as total sales, average order value and average daily orders from new and existing customers as well as members of the Grubhub+ program. That data should help operators make smarter decisions about how they spend their marketing dollars, said Liz Bosone, VP of restaurant success for Grubhub, in an interview. Previously, restaurants could only see aggregate information like month-over-month sales and gross food sales. The update improves upon that but stops short of giving restaurants access to data on individual customers, something many have been asking for from third-party delivery providers. Bosone said that more segmented audience data has been a top request from restaurants. “They’re not as fixated on knowing exactly who the person is,” she said. “It’s just, ‘How do I reach this type of guest?’ “We are obviously adding more and more information, and hopefully this is a real value add for them,” she added. The company is also streamlining the process for how restaurants dispute refunds when a customer has a problem with their order.
It’s Time to Ban Young Children from Restaurants
Let’s save parents from themselves. When you have small children just getting them out of the door can be traumatic. Finding and applying each shoe can be enough to provoke a tantrum – and not just in the parent. And no, they can’t bring their Power Rangers swords, because we are going out to lunch, and everyone knows that plastic swords and restaurants don’t mix. Eventually you will arrive at the restaurant, although it will 20 minutes later than the booking. As you push the buggy inside, the establishment falls quiet like the Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf in London. There’s a scrape of chairs – a pause – then the chatter resumes. But in that moment, everyone is thinking the same thing: please don’t sit next to us. You are led to a table by a waitress who feels like a goddess – she has the power to make or break the mealtime of all she surveys. At the table, usually in the darkest, remotest and most joyless corner of the restaurant, the fun begins – coats are discarded; the buggy is folded away or pushed aside to be a tripping hazard; a high chair is wedged in against the back of a diner behind, performing an impromptu Heimlich manoeuvre on them and doubtlessly spilling a drink all over them, too. If your fidgeting children haven’t already upset the water jug, then this is the moment. The next victim will be a glass of wine – smashed to smithereens as soon as it arrives by a flying menu card that the kids can’t read but can fight over. The waitress immediately disappears to get a dustpan and brush and large roll of blue paper to mop up the mess.
Save Our Pudding! Why Restaurant Desserts Are Disappearing
They were once a high spot of eating out. Nothing baffles Grace Dent more than being deliberately served “stone-cold” bread and butter pudding: “It should obviously be hot. That’s what makes it soft, delicious and yielding. I’ve had that twice.” While it’s a quick, simple way for a restaurant to conclude a meal, cold bread and butter pudding is, for the Guardian restaurant critic, symptomatic of a wider issue. “Puddings are disappearing in Britain and they have been since the end of lockdown,” says Dent. “I talk about it all the time. That gorgeous moment at the end of dinner when the long list of different puddings comes out, it’s beginning to be a thing of the past.” There are restaurants that still go big on dessert, from the Ritz where crepes suzette are flambeed at your table, to chain pubs with extensive menus of profiteroles, sundaes and sponge puddings. But in modern, independent restaurants, places serving a disproportionate number of broadsheet critics and, yes, Observer Food Monthly readers, the story is different. “A reasonable choice of desserts is becoming rare,” agrees Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner. “If I find a proper sponge pudding and a tart involving pastry, where they’ve done something beyond creaming mousses, I’m thrilled. Real pastry work: pastry shells, sponges, savarins, require precision and patience.”.
Did You Know?
You’ll never guess how much Millionaires spend at restaurants each month. Have you ever wondered how millionaires spend their money and live their daily lives? Do they waltz into the fanciest restaurants with gold-plated cutlery and indulge in multi-course meals from Michelin-starred chefs? You may be surprised to find out that the truth is quite different from what you might expect. Recently, The National Study of Millionaires by Ramsey Solutions revealed that millionaires do indeed eat out, but their monthly expenditure on restaurants is far less than you’d think.
Employee Tip
5 ways to set up restaurant staff for success. National Restaurant Association Show attendees had a chance to hear from the three winners of Restaurant Business’ inaugural General Manager of the Year contest. During a Sunday session, the GMs discussed what drew them to foodservice, their wisdom on cultivating a strong team culture and more. Here are some of the insights they shared.
