Rambling restaurant ideas
No table service. Right off the bat. Food runners only. It's faster and accommodates larger groups and single riders getting to-go stuff at the same time.
Industrial plywood fixed seating. Tables wobble, someone sticks sugar packets under the legs and now we have wobbly tables AND ants. Under no circumstances should there be picnic tables. They are hard to get in and out of and being triangle shaped take up more room than real benches. (I used to have bruises all over my shins from the seats trying to get close enough to the table to wipe down those things.)
Limited padded seats, the springs will go out on them and drinks/sauce will soak into the padding. Plot out the exact dimensions available and use fixed seating to maximize customers in chairs while giving them more space to walk around without tripping over loose chairs/tables. Kids can't tip over and fall out of a bench seat. And if they look like this:
Then you can easily clean the seats and table no matter what the people sitting there spill on it. People will spill drinks and food no matter how fancy your place is.
No carpet on the floor. Carpet the walls, put up sound dampening stuff , do not carpet the floor. Do you know how gross it gets? Do you know how many vacuum cleaners you will kill trying to vacuum up rice twice a day from a grease and soy sauce covered carpet? You don't want to know I like a good sealed/stained concrete floor, tile is fine too if it's kept in good shape.
I know this all sounds very industrial and cold and promotes efficiency over atmosphere but to make money with a restaurant you need to sell as much food as you can every day. Food is expensive for both the restaurant and the customers. Investing in the food and making dining as efficient and simple as possible is the way to go. If half your orders are takeout, don't go crazy on the interior - just like a pizza place.
My perfect restaurant has a limited menu. It doesn't take the customers 20 minutes to decide what to get because it's just pizza or just tacos or just burgers. You will have food go bad before it sells if you try to cater to everything. Why does every menu have a random salmon plate? How old is that? How long does it wait in the freezer before it gets ordered? The restaurant can minimize costs by offering a limited selection of quality yet customizable options.
Again, pizza - tacos - burgers. Sandwiches too, but folks can make a sandwich at home. I am terrible at making pizza at home in my oven that gets to maybe 450F. As easy as they are to put together I can't for the life of me season taco meat correctly. Burgers I can do just fine but grilling is time consuming and folks spending over ten bucks on a burger are going to expect a proper greasy American diner burger.
I'm trying to think of even easier foods like soup. Offer like, 5 kinds of soup per day and make your own bread or noodles in house. Same could be done with various types of curry. BBQ is very easy to plate and sell but has a huge time cost and risk to prepare. You need to be as consistent as possible so people know what to expect which keeps them returning.
Back when I had an office job I would go get lunch on Thursdays. I would pull up the online menu and order before driving over to pick it up. I just walked up to the counter and grabbed my food. Easy. When I was actually sitting down to eat, thats literally all I was doing. Like 99% of other working people my lunch break only lasted so long. Being able to order, pay, and eat in a timely manner was paramount. If I was eating in a group we typically were headed somewhere soon after. We are there to eat. Anytime I've eaten with a group of people and the food takes forever, the waitstaff is stretched too thin, whatever the management issue, could have been handled better if the place was set up better for service than aesthetics, eclectic menu, and live music.
You don't even have to be swamped to run into time management issues when cooking. We've all been to places where there is literally nobody else in the restaurant and the food takes ages because they have to start from scratch on each individual order because none of the dishes share ingredients and nothing is prepped for easy assembly. Your kitchen is now in the weeds for no reason because they are battering chicken, shredding cheese, and slicing tomatoes to order. Prep prep prep.
I used to wait tables. I've worked in a place that had 4 of us for an entire restaurant of 120+ customers. I've also worked in a place that had 1 waitress per 3 tables. You can guess which one I made more money at. With only 4 of us we got a larger cut of the tips, but we were in fight or flight mode from 6:30 to 9:30 every night. At the place with a dozen staff on hand, we would get through about two rounds of tables in our section before getting cut and sent home as the service wound down. I made enough to pay for gas to and from work.
At the high staff place I took a step back and started picking up dinner shifts doing expo and made better tips than waiting the tables. (Plates were between 4-8 dollars, you had to upsell as much alcohol as possible which is hard at lunch.) But yeah, the expo job was way better. All I had to do was look at the finished ticket, set up all the plates and take them to the table so the waitress could keep getting drinks and chips for their other tables. I know fancy places want waitstaff to do things like pour wine and explain specials and make the customer feel like they are in Downton Abbey - but that kind of service is for the carpet on the floor restaurants with white tablecloths and 300 dollar tasting menus. Not a daily casual place you can just drop into for lunch.
Lunch and dinner are two different beasts. Forget breakfast that is for the hardcore. I am not going to work at 4am to make eggs 9 different ways for people who want 3 dollar breakfast plates. Restaurant food is not $5 anymore. It won't ever be again. But lunch is a quick food that needs to be ready and eaten in less than half an hour. Rarely, places will give you an hour for lunch but 30 minutes is the norm - so gear towards that. Limited menu, smaller portions, cheaper price blah blah blah. It's easier for the kitchen to prep and plate 12 burgers at once than random stuff that has varying cook times. Soups, salads, rice/noodle bowls, sandwiches are probably the best option. Pizza is tricky because it requires time to bake, that can be fixed with a lunch buffet but you'll need to ensure you can get volume for that before trying it.
Dinner is slower, you can expect people to spend over half an hour eating. It's a special occasion, it's payday, they are traveling, it's whatever. Less stress on getting in and out for the customer so you can focus on getting them to order extra stuff. Drinks, dessert, sides, etc. Lots of places around here are simply not open for lunch because the cost to run the kitchen doesn't get offset by the volume of lunch customers. Some places aren't open Monday-Wednesday for that reason too.
Dinner also invites the idea of entertaining the guests who are eating at your restaurant. Going out to eat is the event of the evening for them so places like to bring in live music. That's fine. Outside. On the patio. At the outside patio bar area. Away from the diners. Indoor live music is always too loud, even if it's a guy with an acoustic guitar or someone on the piano. Take it outside.
For kids lots of places will use their outdoor area for a playground so the kids can run around after eating 1 chicken nugget and being full. If you don't have outdoor space or don't want to deal with the insurance issues of a playground AND a bar you can put stuff inside the restaurant. What pizza place is complete without at least 1 arcade cabinet? It takes 15 - 20 minutes for pizza to bake (more if it's deep dish) and kids get antsy, adults get antsy, they've finished coloring the kids menu, here - take these quarters and go play the Ninja Turtles game. Some places will have a little arcade room filled with things to eat quarters and make you extra cash while keeping loud kids out of the dining room. Becoming a Showbiz Pizza is up to you though.
But yeah, I think my ideal restaurant would have to have to be a casual specialty diner. We have so much fried food and pizza around here, so maybe something with soup. I make good gumbo, pho, tomato, whatever. I can do soups all day and they are easy to update seasonally. A set of heavy soups for winter, lighter stuff for summer, change the rotation based on seasons so the ingredients taste better and are cheaper. "I don't want soup when it's 100 degrees out!" Oh but a giant plate of melted cheese and beef wrapped in tortillas or a slab of 400 degree bread sauce cheese and sausage is any better? We eat ice cream in the winter.
Now I know what you're thinking. Honestly how picky can a customer be about food that is already assembled? Don't want the toppings I've already priced into the portion? Lol, ok cool. Not my problem at all. But I wouldn't do a counter only setup, I'd want folks to go sit down and eat too. But also, running a soup based restaurant I could do super deep discounts for senior citizens and kids. (Yes, kids like soup. I can even serve little cute cut out toasts to go with them. Alphabet soup that isn't 90% sodium? Hello!) My costly ingredients like meat can go further. Broth can be made up in advance. I could even just sell stock ready to go for home cooks. Leftovers are easier to donate. The list goes on.
Oh man, could you imagine a "home sick day" themed soup restaurant? Put a bunch of potted plants everywhere and lofi music on. A cooler filled with bottled sprite and ginger ale on ice at the counter. Free saltines on the table. Bookshelves with stuff to read. The price is right on loop on the TV in the corner. A couple of N64 stations set up on the wall. Lol. I'd have to put up a sign like "If you are actually sick, we ask that you please place your order to-go."
A soup based restaurant making financial sense has to be a recession indicator for sure.