Higher end restaurants, now on call

All kinds of restaurants are following Fast Casual and QSR companies that have branched into Catering & Delivery.

Now high end restaurants are getting into the act.

All restaurants are affected by a downturn. To make up for the shortfall, food companies are decreasing their costs, and this is compounding the depth of the global economic freeze. More positively, many restaurants are identifying new ways of meeting new demand. McDonalds Restaurants, for instance, launched a new sandwich, continued with its annual Monopoly game promotion and saw an 8% increase in sales in October 2008. At the other end of the spectrum, fine dining spots, whose operating principle has been high checkouts for a select few, are hurting, as check totals have declined across the board: the 30 dollar bottle of wine is picked over the 70 dollar bottle, and fewer courses ordered. Danger.

Now, the Nation’s Restaurant News reports , in Fine dining spots adjust ops to add delivery, delivery is not just for fast casual any more.

Eating out is expensive and time consuming. Delivery offers a known meal cost and less time going in, coming out, and waiting. Some restaurants, like Chicago’s Café B-BA-Reeba!, have outsourced delivery of large orders of their tapas, paella and other items on their Spanish influenced menu, giving executive staff working late in the office something better to chew on. Some of these items come with reheating instructions.

But a restaurant can’t be put on wheels. Delivery makes meals different. A steak is not going to taste the same delivered; neither is pasta. Fried calamari will not arrive to the door crispy.  Fresh pepper can’t be optionally cracked on an item. There are no doting servers to handle issues as they come up. The meal that is delivered is a entirely different thing: it’s from an essentially new line of product.

There’s a danger to your restaurant if you provide the same menu for delivery that’s offered in the restaurant when the quality can’t be controlled across the two paths. Most customers will accept the change in quality, but many will unconsciously or not think less of the restaurant’s overall food quality.  So it’s often better to provide a limited, and different menu.  In other words, simply tacking on delivery isn’t so simple. The products need to change for delivery, and given different distribution, even pricing, and billing processes, we are looking at a different product from the restaurant’s usual fare.

Delivery potentially changes the game for restaurants, and can make all the difference. Companies on every end of the spectrum, and companies in between, are shifting. Enterprise rules.