How Square for Restaurants Enables This Chef/Owner To Be Creative On-the-Fly

Chef Mike Yakura is a veteran chef who has used many point-of-sale systems in his multiple restaurants. With his current venture, Spinning Bones in Alameda, CA, Square has delivered on the robust capabilities he needs. Hear how he’s been able to stay current and serve his community with the help of Square.
Apr 18, 2024 — 2 min read

Transcript

Mike Yakura: It's the water heater going off. Okay. Yeah, it'll turn off right now.

I'm Mike Yakura. I'm the owner and chef of Spinning Bones in Alameda, California. Been a chef for about 18 years in San Francisco. I moved my family out to Alameda about 14 years ago, so I've built the restaurant to be closer to them so I could see my kids grow up. The priority was way more to be the long haul, the long walk, and be part of the community, and not to be a flash in the pan.

I started with Square with my other restaurant. We just wanted a lighter POS, but what we got was something that has all the information that we needed, the same things we got with our heavier PSS before. Within our larger restaurants. There's a lot of the stuff behind the scenes that people don't know about That Square does for me. The platform itself is so easy to use, and as a chef, I can go into that software in the back, put in a menu item and have that on instantaneously.

I tried to do that at my old restaurants and then I would just essentially mess it up because it was tagged incorrectly and I could be creative at four o'clock and have a program ready at five o'clock when we opened for service. So during the Pandemic Square Online really helped us. Outreach to the community Square was a huge part in that, allowing us to serve a different style of restaurant that obviously I had not planned for. We had planned for a dine-in restaurant, and all of a sudden we're doing a quick serve style QR code restaurant that I had no knowledge and no infrastructure how to do. But again, just going off the Square websites and this tutorials allowed us to create those menus and those tags onto the tables to facilitate full restaurant service.

Square for Restaurants has been really the even keel within a really rough season that we've gone through within the last three years. They flex for us as far as within the pandemic and allow us to change our dining style, but this has been the one constant to help us serve our community, to help us stay current with our accounting and our invoicing, and to allow us see our sales on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis. And the important part is having sustainable restaurant that's going to feed the community, that's going to allow me to enjoy the rest of my family into my life.

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