Two restaurant owners argue that cost-cutting alone kills a restaurant. They focus on strategic moves instead: quality ingredients like real butter, staff training, and smart menu choices that protect your brand without nickel-and-diming customers.
You can't save your way into success in this business.
A lot of people think they can.
Yeah. Or cut.
Cut expenses to and you know. Yeah. You just can't.
No, you just can't.
Cut, cut, cut. Eventually, it's the law of diminishing returns, and you just cut yourself.
Out 100%. And image to me is everything. Like, we do so much little nuance. Like, it's a brunch concept. I buy these little French jars of jam and preserve that. That, you know, individual look kind of like the Knott's Berry farm. I'm not sure if you've seen those little ones with the glass jar, but it's a French style one that it's a beautiful, beautiful product. And people are like, why do you do that? We do real butter, right? Like, we do no seed oil anywhere in our cooking process. But we don't promote that shamelessly and tell about it. We love it when people ask us and we can answer the question, like, why would you use real butter? Because real butter is better. It's a lot more expensive, but it's better. We didn't take an egg surcharge. It's just the cost of doing business. Now. We redid our menu and we started promoting a lot more things without eggs. And we told our staff, trained them, like, hey, let's promote these items that aren't egg items. Let's have some fun and sell some of this other stuff so we can take the burden off of the ratio of eggs. But it's about intent and it's about having a knowledgeable staff that you're transparent with and that you're strategic with.
If your restaurant only works because you work 80 hours a week, it doesn't work.
