Years before I ever worked with Chick-fil-a, it was obvious that their linguistics training created an advantage that other chain restaurants ignore altogether. I began implementing "My pleasure!', "No worries.", "How can I serve you", and other phrases into my training programs. Over time, and especially over the year and a half running a Chick-fil-a, the psychology behind Hospitality Language became crystal clear. Hospitality Language. First, the word hospitality can be defined as "Giving without reward". When people feel they received something for which they hadn't paid for or didn't expect, like an exceptional experience, a positive emotional connection, or a superior quality product et al, that is hospitality. Second, language is the arrangement of words that can move mountains; i.e. language is power. So Hospitality Language is a powerful giving without reward. But let's simplify that in practice. The key training point is, "Hospitality language has NO passive-aggressive element to it." That's been the easiest way to understand it. Imagine a person comes out with their friend to eat at your restaurant, and is in a foul mood. They could be depressed, or facing a cancer diagnosis, or dealing with a difficult child. Anything remotely passive-aggressive can trigger a negative reaction from such a person. "You're welcome." begets "Was I not going to be welcome?" | "No problem!" begets "There better be no problem!" | "Can I help you?" begets "Help? Do I look like I fell on my a** and need a hand up?" For the best television example, just think of the mother-in-law on the classic "Everybody Loves Raymond" series. I once had a waiter who always complained he made only 10% tips. It was no surprise because he would insult his tables multiple times during his service without even realizing. I tried to get him to lead the dessert segment with a glowing description of one of our signature desserts. Instead, he'd invariably bellow, "So, are we going to spring for dessert tonight?" I explained that the guests felt as if he was saying they didn't look like they had enough money for dessert. His customers never felt fully welcome and they tipped him accordingly.

Accountant nightmares, runaway insurance costs, terrible employee productivity, landlord is a terror? It always troubled me that restaurant owners suffer in silence. I'm here to serve you, so feel free to ask for whatever you need.

I became aware of AI's uses for restaurants in writing catchy marketing quips and even press releases for our events. Then it became the Go-To for recipe research and development. The fullest example of this was finding an amazing Japanese Shoyu Cream sauce out at a restaurant one night, then asking AI what it should be called in our New American restaurant, and our stellar Savory Southern Chicken was born - apologies to cultural appropriation fanatics. AI has advanced into the POS realm with top POS star Toast and its "Toast IQ". Here are a few teasers: - Operators can ask complex business questions in plain language (e.g., “Which items sell best at lunch?”). - Toast IQ analyzes real-time and historical sales, labor, and menu data and returns actionable answers. - It also provides proactive, personalized recommendations in a “For you” feed — highlighting trends, opportunities, or issues to explore. - Beyond insights, Toast IQ can execute tasks directly in Toast. For example: adding menu items, updating shift schedules, or modifying menus across service channels, all through conversational prompts. - AI can surface guest preferences and relevant data (like special occasions or dietary notes) right on handheld POS screens — helping staff tailor service without separate note-taking. Toast is clearly the current leader in using AI to reinforce your POS, organizing your data into actionable information. Nory.Ai is another AI tool for restaurants that can help with inventory and purchasing. At the very least, at this stage, AI can track your inventory of beginning inventory units, units purchased in the time period, and units at end of inventory, to track your usage, compare it to sales, and tell you how much you need to order this week. It pays to stay on top of AI's development as it relates to your restaurant business. As skyrocketing labor costs, taxes, insurance costs et al create greater challenges every day, it's important to remember that there are always new resources that fortunately counterbalance the grief. Make AI a priority in your restaurant. It can tighten your costs to grow your bottom line, and it can unlock revenue enhancements you didn't know were possible.

In an industry where thousands of restaurants and bars compete for attention, one question sits at the center of every successful operation: What makes your place an interesting place to go to? It is the most important question in hospitality—separating memorable concepts from forgettable ones, and profitable destinations from “just another place to eat.” Many restaurants open their doors, serve food, and hope guests will notice. But hope is not a strategy. Branding is. Branding is not a logo, a color scheme, or just a slogan. It is the total impression your restaurant makes on guests—the picture they carry in their minds, the emotional story they tell after visiting, and the sensory memory that brings them back. Effective branding establishes expectations before a guest ever walks through the door and shapes how they interpret every detail of their dining experience. It gives meaning to your menu, personality to your service, and direction to your decisions. Branding: The Identity Behind the Experience Hospitality leaders like Danny Meyer remind operators to “write their own story before someone else writes it for them.” Guests today want a restaurant with a clear point of view—a defined identity that tells them what you stand for and why your business exists. Branding is the way that identity is communicated. Branding answers four essential questions. And, for a real-life example, I’ll answer them for the original concept of Fish Camp on Lake Eustis in Tavares, FL: - What do we stand for? Raising up the community, revealing unique offerings from local farms, food and beverage businesses. My wife and I love road tripping in Florida, but were always disappointed after passing farms and seafood stands, when we were served pre-breaded Sysco shrimp out of a box at the nearby restaurant. Our priority was bringing the best a culinary road trip had to offer – focusing on vendors within a 2 ½ hour drive.  - What do we offer that others do not? “What the others do not” equals the “problem” that any business plan hopes to solve. And, for Fish Camp, the problem was a lack of local shine on the menus in the area. We literally created a restaurant we’d love to go to, and you need to do the same. 

The top tier of Critical Success Factors in restaurants and bars is inventory. If you're too busy to track your food and liquor, stop something you're doing, cancel something. Make time. In my consulting era, I kept seeing the same dilemma. An owner calls me in to help him find where they are losing money, and it was always the same; no P+L, no inventory. The first steps on setting up a business or turning it around are those two do-or-die tasks. Inventories need to set up to complement your POS system. You are counting portions of fish, steak, Patron Silver, Bud Light, et al. **** I can help you create a spreadsheet that breaks down the bottles to portion sizes and pounds of meat to ounces so you can discern exactly how many portions you used, and square them with your actual portions sold. **** Ways to measure. While the method of eyeballing a bottle to determine to the tenth or to .05 of the bottle is effective, I prefer the old liquor scale. With that, we tracked things like a bartender who was pouring 2 house margaritas with Don Julio Anejo for her friend instead of well Tequila. While it may seem exhausting to weigh all your bottles, keep in mind, you can mark the level of the slow moving bottles with a Sharpie pen to free yourself from counting the Green Chartreuse every week. Since you've copied and pasted the last inventory in the new spreadsheet, you just leave those bottle counts the same. If you have 100+ brands, one third to a half of them won't be poured in any given week. Food is trickier, and we always focus on auditing the proteins. I have spreadsheets to get you started on any of those, if you wish. I still am a huge camera fan, as I had 29 cameras filming every corner of my restaurant when I sold it. They catch the actual theft in action; over-pouring at the bar, the dishwasher hiding a bag of beef in the garbage can - cameras can help cancel all those tricks...if they know you're watching the cameras. I'll cover the many uses of cameras for restaurants in one of the next posts. But inventory is perpetual. And you must know what you are buying every week is getting sold.