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If you own a restaurant, you understand the importance of your front of house. The front of house represents what customers experience at your restaurant, and customers’ impressions are key when it comes to garnering recommendations and loyalty for your business. From staff training to floor plans, here’s what it takes to keep your front of house restaurant staff in top shape and manage your restaurant effectively.
What is the ‘front of house’ in a restaurant?
Your front of house is the part of the restaurant where your customers order and dine. It includes everything from the host stand and waiting area to the dining room, bar, outdoor seating, and restrooms.
Your front-of-house staff might include a host or hostess, waiters, bartenders, and the general manager — basically anyone who might interact with customers.
What are key areas to manage the Front of House Works?
There are various areas that you need to be across when managing the front of house, include the following but not limited to:
- Delivering outstanding customer service
- Employee management: hiring, training and developing
- Managing stocking and the front of house area design
- Planning menus, promotions and events
Front-of-house staff
Front-of-house responsibilities can be split up among the staff you hire, but below are the key roles and their usual front-of-house restaurant duties.
The general manager (GM) runs the restaurant, ensuring service goes smoothly; hiring, training, and managing front-of-house staff; and setting the bar for customer service. The GM oversees front-of-house staff and sometimes back of house, if the head chef does not.
A GM often plays a role in designing the floor plan of a restaurant—giving input on everything, from wall colour and scents to noise level and lighting, that might affect customers’ appetite and comfort. They may also plan restaurant promotions and other company events.
The host or hostess is the first front of house restaurant staff member to interact with guests and therefore imparts that all-important first impression. They greet guests and show them to their table. They also take reservations and, if a table is not ready when guests arrive, estimate the wait time. The host or hostess, to the best of their ability, keeps things running on schedule.
Waiters explain and answer any questions about the menu, take food and drink orders, serve customers, and, at the end of the visit, give them their check and process payments.
Bartenders greet customers, take drink orders, and then mix and serve drinks. They might also wash glasses and manage bar inventory with Square’s bar point of sale.
While waiters take customers’ orders, in some restaurants it is the job of the food runner to transport meals from the kitchen to diners. Food runners might also assemble appetisers, refill water glasses, and clear plates when diners are finished eating.
Hiring front of house staffs
People might think working in a restaurant means serving food to customers, which is easy. Customers come to the restaurant not only for food but also for the experience so the waitstaffs require special skill sets to run the food service smoothly, wait tables, tend bar and host events. The characteristics to look for in a front of house staff are friendliness, organisational skills, and ability to think on their feet. Experience would definitely help in this environment but the right person can quickly adapt and learn from on-the-job training.
Best practices for managing your front of house
Managing front-of-house operations requires strong leadership, effective team management, attention to detail, and the right technology. Here are some ways to manage your restaurant effectively and make things run smoothly:
- Plan ahead
When creating your front-of-house restaurant experience, it’s important to experience your space as a diner would and shape your restaurant accordingly. Walk through each path a diner would take—entering your restaurant, going to the restroom, ordering at the counter—and take note of what they see along the way. Make their entire experience as enjoyable, purposeful, and seamless as possible. - Create an employee training program
When every restaurant staff completes the same training program as everyone else, there’s a standard level of service. In addition, back-of-house staff and even veteran employees should complete the same training to get an in-depth understanding of front-of-house responsibilities, customer interactions, the food and wine menu, and logistical things like your restaurant POS system and how to accept payments using a POS system, like a Square terminal. - Hold pre-shift meetings
Before every shift, gather your front of house restaurant staff to go over everything from special menu items to events, VIP customers, and service issues that you want them to focus on. - Keep track of restaurant reservations
Managing restaurant reservations is key to planning each shift (and making customers happy). Using an online reservation system allows customers to easily make the booking and get reminders. - Invest in a fully integrated restaurant POS system
Managing your restaurant through COVID-19 can be made easier with Square’s POS technology. It is the best way to get a true picture of your restaurant’s performance, like tracking sales and employee performance. It can also be a great tool for boosting operations, creating efficiency with waiters with pay-at-table technology, and improving table management. - Use sales data and analytics to make improvements
Data from a POS system can be used to improve your overall operations. For example, if data shows that certain days and times tend to be busier, schedule more front-of-house staff at that time, and vice versa. POS software features can also be used as a restaurant performance management system to create invoices, track the performance of new promotions, and determine which front of house restaurant staff are the highest sellers.
