“I’m very passionate about what I’m doing and don’t see this as a job. The passion is not in the food, it’s in seeing how people react to the food we make. When you’re able to unlock a memory for someone who’s been in Spain, or take a Spanish person who lives far away from home to home, that’s very powerful.”
– Gabriel Larraz, co-founder Broken Eggs.
Brother-sister duo and entrepreneurs Gabriel and Marta launched Broken Eggs from a burning desire to bring authentic Spanish homemade food to London. Since they opened their doors, they’ve been joined by sister Ada on marketing and front of house, and little brother Pachi who’s training to be a chef. The restaurant has become a magnet for tortilla lovers, where they can meet and enjoy time with friends and family while the team cooks a mouth-watering array of dishes from scratch. But for seven months they struggled with an overly complicated point of sale system before making the switch to Square and transforming their business operations.
For Gabriel and Marta, Square has simplified everything, enabling them to connect their front of house and kitchen to speed up orders and avoid errors. It’s also providing them with valuable data about how the restaurant is performing. Find out how they’re using Square to offer their diners a top-notch experience and take their business in the direction they want.
The challenges Broken Eggs faced turning the humble tortilla into a culinary masterpiece:
Broken Eggs was born out of a desire to bring the traditional Spanish tortilla to the masses and with tasty-sounding menu items like Chistorra on Brioche for an authentic Iberian dining experience, it has quickly grown in popularity, capturing the imagination of Londoners in Fitzrovia. Yet behind the scenes, Gabriel, a former investment banker, was struggling with a POS system that was difficult to run and left him spending hours trying to download the data he needed to learn how the restaurant was performing.
The main challenges Square helped Broken Eggs with included:
- Reduction of admin time
Square makes it easy to run your business by performing multiple tasks in the background. From tracking inventory to staff clocking in and out through your POS, you can keep track of the things that matter. Square’s Kitchen Display System automatically syncs all orders with front and back of house and enables you to display orders from anywhere (dine-in or takeout) all on one screen. - Easy access to business data
Through your Square dashboard you can access the metrics that matter to your restaurant, tracking peak dining times so you can plan staff rotas more effectively, save money and increase profitability. Download reports and get key data on your most profitable and popular dishes with our POS reports. - One system to link the front of house and kitchen
Square’s Restaurant POS gives you payment processing, online ordering, menu management, table management and much more. It cuts the risk of mistakes and helps avoid stressed-out staff and irritated customers by integrating order taking with kitchen prep. Use our KDS to track prep times, keep tickets in order and manage menu inventory in real time. - Simple and intuitive booking management
Square for Restaurants integrates with OpenTable so you can view your floorplan and bookings directly in your Square dashboard. Deliver a better customer experience, better predict walk-in and wait times, and maximise turnaround times with real-time visibility on table status.
How Square offered solutions
Gabriel has no regrets about switching to Square and says he’d 100% recommend it because it has made it so much easier to run his fledgling business compared to the POS system he was using before.
“Square helps provide a better service to our customers. It’s fast and efficient to use. In hospitality, customers can be a little bit impatient, so it really helps with the smoothness of the service.”
– Gabriel Larraz, co-founder Broken Eggs.
Not only is it super easy and intuitive for him to use, but it has given him access to detailed sales reports which allow him to see the performance of his business at different times of the day. It has also enabled Gabriel to segment Broken Eggs’ online food delivery sales, which are an important part of the business.
How Square has had a positive impact on Broken Eggs
Superior customer service
Gabriel reveals the restaurant can get a little hectic during busy periods and even the nicest customers will become irritated if they’re kept waiting for their food. It’s why running the restaurant through Square has given him such a huge advantage because he can analyse when they’ve been busiest in the past and plan for this better in the future.
“It’s so important to stay organised”, he says. “We use Square to understand what things happened in previous days when we were busy and then we ask ourselves what we can do ahead of that, so we can plan ahead and give our customers the experience we want to give them.”
Detailed reporting functions for better decision-making
Gabriel loves the reporting feature within the Square ecosystem and particularly the fact he can access it easily from his dashboard. Compared to his previous POS software, he appreciates being able to download real-time data at the touch of a button to give him a clear picture of where the business is at any given time.
He has used it to discover the lunch service was slower than the dinner service and make data-driven decisions around how they can improve their lunch offering to make it more attractive and increase sales. He has also been able to adjust staff rotas to allow for quiet times which has helped save money and increased business profitability.
He adds: “With our old POS I ended up spending a lot of my time trying to get data from different sources to try and understand where the business was going, or where we were performing or not. And with Square, it’s just simplified everything.”
Payment services in one place
With his previous POS, Gabriel had to contend with a different payment provider for taking payments but with Square it’s all in one place, making it much simpler to understand and easier for him to keep control. He’s a big fan of the simplicity and speed of the system, which has made it easy for him to process payments during busy times at Broken Eggs.
Reduction in admin time
While admin is a necessary part of the business it’s not something Gabriel likes to spend huge amounts of time on. Thankfully, adopting Square has led to a reduction of up to three hours, meaning he has more time to devote to cooking.
“Our old system was overly complicated and slow compared to Square”, he reveals. “The Square system is far simpler; it’s efficient, quick and there are very few issues.”
Looking for a POS system made with restaurants like Broken Eggs in mind? Get started and learn about Square’s intuitive KDS and payment devices here:
