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Best Restaurant Books – For the Chef/Business Owner in You
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Running a successful restaurant in today’s highly competitive market isn’t easy. The increase in cooking programs on TV and YouTube masterclasses make every person believe they’re a great chef, and expectations in food and service reached new and dizzying heights.
How do you make sure that your restaurant is running effectively and efficiently, allowing you to stay ahead of the game? Two ways you can instantly stay ahead of your competition are by hiring a strong team and watching your waste.
1. Hire a Strong Team
Before you even try to win more customers, make sure you have a winning team behind you. Find out what their goals and aspirations are. If they want to make more money, help them by offering customer service training to increase their tips.
A happy team is highly dependent on you as a manager. Are you a good manager? Consider searching for ways in which you can improve as a manager to help them stay motivated, feel like a valued member of the team, and enjoy their work.
2. Watch Your Waste
Design your menu around a smaller number of ingredients. By featuring several dishes that use the same key ingredients, you can cut down on a lot of waste.
Rather than throw food away that’s spoiled, consider cooking and handing it out at reduced prices or to lower-income and homeless people. Invite the press along for some great PR and free promotion!
If you’re looking for the best restaurant books to help improve your business, then we’ve got a fantastic list of choices to help. As recommended by top professionals in the restaurant industry, this list contains books that will help every aspect of your business, from operations to marketing.
Buy them, borrow them, but, most importantly, read them to gain insights on how to run the best restaurant in town!
Best Restaurant Books
The Restaurant Manager’s Handbook
This is the bible for starting and running a restaurant. I recommend you get the printed version and the Kindle version. Use the Kindle version for quick reference and the printed version for study.
The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets
Restaurant Man
Restaurant Success by the Numbers: A Money-Guy’s Guide to Opening the Next New Hot Spot
Remarkable Service: A Guide to Winning and Keeping Customers for Servers, Managers, and Restaurant Owners
The Encyclopedia Of Restaurant Training: A Complete Ready-to-Use Training Program for All Positions in the Food Service Industry
1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover’s Life List
If one is to name the single most knowledgeable person about food on planet Earth, it would be Mimi Sheraton. She is also --by far-- the most experienced food critic in an area where experience matters the most, a field in which the expert is the expert.
She has an insatiable curiosity, does her homework, visits countries, argues with locals, tries all manner of restaurants, and is never fooled by hot air or pseudosophistication. I have seen it with my own eyes. Over the past 34 years i watched her in action, particularly when after my graduation, I would go order for her in restaurants so the food would get to the table before the waiters recognized her. She did not use her priviledge as a food critic to get the better quality food and service than the rest of the people --a testament of both ethics and curiosity.
As I said she is the real thing; this book is the real book.
Raise the Bar: An Action-Based Method for Maximum Customer Reactions
The Underground Culinary Tour: How the New Metrics of Today’s Top Restaurants Are Transforming How America Eats
Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook
Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
The MouseDriver Chronicles: The True-Life Adventures of Two First-Time Entrepreneurs
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control
How Happiness Happens: Finding Lasting Joy in a World of Comparison, Disappointment, and Unmet Expectations
Kitchen Confidential
Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos
This is an outstanding book on the side effects of interventionism, written in extremely elegant prose and with maximal clarity. It documents how people find arguments couched in moralistic terms to intervene in complex systems they don't understand.
These interventions trigger endless chains of unintended consequences --consequences for the victims, but none for the interventionistas, allowing them to repeat the mistake again and again. Puri, as an insider, outlines the principles and legal mechanisms, then runs through the events of the past few years since the Iraq invasion; each one of his chapters are models of concision, presenting the story of Ukraine, Syria, Lybia, and Yemen, among others, as standalone briefings to the uninitiated. It was high time that somebody in international affairs has approached the problem of "iatrogenics", i.e. harm done by the healer.
This book should be mandatory reading to every student and practitioner of foreign affairs.