Getting a restaurant SOP done or being revised regularly within certain periods of time is really important. This Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) is used as a guideline to all your team members in the business. Without a proper restaurant SOP, your restaurant business will not be able to satisfy and meet your guest’s expectation while dining in.
So, how important is the restaurant SOP to your business? This simple question means a lot in the actual service and practical implementation. All procedures written in your SOP are the system required in order to run a successful restaurant business and to compete with other competitors. Your goals and objectives, as the owner or the manager, are to provide all guests with excellent dining experiences at your restaurant. Therefore, to ensure that you have been able to monitor and coordinate all these tasks to your team members, you must write a comprehensive restaurant SOP to cover all aspects, both front of the house and back of the house, of your restaurant business.
In general, according to my personal opinion, there are three main aspects we need to cover when creating a restaurant SOP, these aspects are as follow:
- Preparation process or mise en place
- Operational skills
- Customer service skills
What is in the preparation process? Basically, this aspect covers both restaurant service and kitchen. Everything you need to prepare before starting to serve your guests. such as: cleanliness, hygiene and sanitation, checklist system, refill procedures, preparing stocks, etc.
While operational skills are required to brief your team members how to interact with guests with excellent service standards. For example, you need to explain how to take an order and suggestive selling, how to carry service tray and perhaps how to clear up dirty plates and empty glasses from guest’s table.
And the most important thing is how to communicate with the guest with good customer service skills. This part covers how we greet the guest when they enter our restaurant, how to please them to a table and every single thing that your crew needs to interact with the guest.
Briefly, those three aspects are considered the crucial part of the restaurant SOP, while there are many things you may also include when creating your own procedures. Every restaurant business has its own different way to prepare their standard operating procedures. But, all restaurant will aim one goal which is guests’ satisfaction.