The technique of managing a restaurant is usually taught at schools that offer courses in hotel and restaurant management. It is a standard curriculum taught internationally.
But for smaller places, like roadside noodle and khao tom (rice soup) shops or curry and rice places, the owners will not have studied anything like that. They develop a management style of their own.
The more successful a restaurant or food shop is, the more structured, thorough, and efficient its system of management has to be if it is to maintain its popularity. Some restaurant owners master the technique of creating and sustaining a system and stay successful for years, while others do not and are less successful.
The first type of restaurant to consider is the after-dark khao tom shop. These places start serving in the evening and stay open until late. Most are roomy and serve two kinds of food, prepared dishes and others that are cooked to order.
The prepared foods are usually stewed dishes with ingredients that have been slow-cooked to extreme softness, like the Chinese vegetable stew called jap chaai, plaa chon tom kap phakkaad dong khem (snakehead fish cooked with salty pickled cabbage), phalo sai muu lae luead pet (pork intestines and congealed duck blood stewed in an aromatic Chinese seasoned broth), and plaa taphien tom khem (carp cooked in a salty broth).
Steamed prepared dishes might include steamed plaa nam dawk mai (a long, cylindrical sea fish), and khai toon muu sap nueng kap khai daeng khong khai khem (a steamed custard containing minced pork and the yolk of a salted egg) as well as pet phalo (duck stewed in phalo sauce), kai tom (boiled chicken), kai phat khing (chicken stir-fried with shredded ginger and wood-ear mushrooms), and kraduuk muu nam daeng (pork bone in a red Chinese sauce).
Dishes prepared to order are made from ingredients that are displayed on a counter or in a glass case in the front part of the shop. These usually include snakehead fish, frog, sea bass, boar meat and mussels set on ice to keep them fresh, and there will be fresh vegetables. A list of available dishes will be displayed on a board, or customers might order favourites that they have had before.
Night and day: Top, a rice soup shop and above, a shop serving curry and rice.
There is one successful night time khao tom shop that is run according to what is now a standard system. First, it is named after its owner as a selling point. It is a short, easy-to-remember Chinese name, and since khao tom belongs to Chinese culinary culture, it suits the nature of the business better than a different or fancier kind of name. Another reason for the name is that it serves as a kind of signature of the owner.
If a customer orders a variety of dishes, the prepared ones will be served personally by the owner, or by one of his or her assistants. If it is a dish cooked to order, the owner will cut and prepare the fresh ingredients personally or will order a couple of helpers to do it. The cooking is done over a strong flame to show off kitchen skills, and every dish is served quickly, with each table getting exactly what was ordered.
But before the food is brought to the table, a member of the serving staff will have taken care of the order and serving the beverages. The owner calculates the bill personally, and knows which dishes and drinks each customer has been served. If the owner has no time for this, he entrusts it to his younger brother or to his wife so that no money goes astray.
Here, everything is in place and the system is strictly enforced. The shop is roomy and well lit, the tables and chairs are clean, servings are generous and inexpensive, and, very important, service is fast and efficient, so that the rotation of customers is quick.
Another shop, this one serving curry and rice, also does good business. It is set on a busy road not far from central Bangkok. It can easily be reached in time for lunch, and is spacious with plenty of tables and chairs and a big car park. It offers a wide selection of curries, all displayed in a glass case, with a big staff standing behind it to serve customers, who arrive both in cars and on tour buses. All of them tend to arrive at the same time and order their food all at once. Since they do not form queues, the staff serve customers giving their orders as fast as possible. No forks and spoons are given to them with the food.
The customers carry the food on trays to an area where they can help themselves to drinking glasses, ice and bottled water, and then move on to a counter where the owner sits and calculates the bill.
They are given forks and spoons when they pay, and then go to find a place to sit. This system works well, because customers who have not yet paid for their food have no utensils to eat with. Since the owner can see exactly what the customer is eating and drinking, the bill will always be accurate, and no additional employees will be needed to run the register.
There is also a noodle shop that is run very well and does brisk business. Most people eating noodles get them for lunch, and all tend to show up at about the same time, so service has to be quick. This means that it is best to prepare the components to a serving of noodles in advance so that each bowlful can be dished up immediately.
A pad and pen are set on each table, with the number of the table printed on the pad. Customers write the kind of noodles they want and serving staff take the order to the cooking area. The orders are prepared and served in the order in which they were placed.
After finishing their noodles, the customers pay their bill, and this is handled by the owner's family members. But this is the only kind of work they do. The serving of noodles and beverages and maintaining cleanliness is the responsibility of hired employees.
These are all shops that have established, efficient systems of management. There are others, however, that are very badly run. One of them is another noodle shop, one that sells them pan-fried. It offers several kinds: kui tio sen yai raad naa nuea (broad rice noodles topped with beef in gravy), kui tio khua kai (rice noodles stir-fried with egg and chicken meat), ba-mee thawt krawp raad naa naw mai (crisp-fried wheat noodles topped with shredded bamboo shoots in sauce), and khao phat puu (crab fried rice). All are delicious.
But there are problems. The shop opens and starts preparing food at 11am, but even though the restaurant is full of people waiting to place orders before that, the first servings go not to them, but to others outside who ordered in advance by phone.
Many of these phoned-in orders are placed every day, and the people who called them in drive to the front of the shop to pick them up. Some people cheat by phoning orders and then, when they arrive at the shop, tell the staff to pour the order onto a plate to be eaten there, taking advantage of the customers who have been sitting and waiting.
Fried noodles, cooked a serving at a time, take a long time to prepare, and when only one person is doing the cooking it can take forever. Sometimes there is a wait of an hour and a quarter, and it is no surprise that even though the noodles are so good, there are customers who stay clear because they don't want to put up with the long wait. There are always new ones, though, who come and endure the situation until they, too, start making the decision to go somewhere else. This is a very bad way to run a restaurant.
Managing a food shop or restaurant is not especially difficult. It depends on the ability to realise what satisfies customers and how that can be done most efficiently. Restaurants that get it right attract people who return again and again. Those that don't will find their clientele coming once or twice and then moving on. n
