Mongolian Grill Restaurant - Essay Example

Mongolian Grill gives the customer a unique dining experience. The restaurant is based on four features: an interactive and entertaining atmosphere, fresh and healthy food ingredients, unlimited food quantities, and actual customer involvement during meal preparation. The fact that it gives the customers a variety of fresh food ingredients to choose from made the business very attractive to customers.

            In line with the Mongolian Grill business, this paper will discuss several important issues such as location and rent expense, food preparation process flow, number of manpower and seating capacity, pricing, and business hours in order to make the business profitable and successful.

            Location is crucial to the success of any restaurant business. The location should always be accessible to customers. Therefore, prior to signing a business contract with a prospective establishment, it is important to determine the traffic of people passing by the area during day and night time. Is the venue crowded with people during weekdays and weekends?

            The rent expense should also be considered since a lot of restaurant businesses close down because of this factor. Rent expense is a fixed operating expense. Therefore, regardless of whether the restaurant is earning a good profit or not, the business owner still needs to pay the rent expense. For this reason, it is important to carefully select a venue that offers the lowest cost of rent with a huge number of people passing by the area for leisure purposes.

            The food preparation area is composed of a ‘food bar’ and a ‘spice bar.’ The food bar is where the customers could select a wide variety of fresh food items such as vegetables, meat, noodles, etc. The spice bar offers a wide selection of sauce, oil, and spices. As soon as the customers have gotten their bowl of selected food items, the customers need to wait for another line before they reach the cooking station.

            When the restaurant is full of customers, time wasted on lining up from the two-food preparation table and the cooking station could result in wasted time and loss of business opportunity. Therefore, the restaurant manager should consider a strategic way to enhance the smooth flow of this process. Perhaps playing fast-tempo music could enable the customers to finish their meal the shortest time possible. (Milliman, 1982)

Number of Manpower and Seating Capacity

            The number of manpower will depend on the size of the restaurant. Normally, the kitchen staff should have at least 2 cooks, 2 – 3 dishwashers, 1 assigned to refill the food and sauce bar. The number of manpower assigned to clear the tables highly depends on the number of tables. Since each group of customers would finish their meal at a different time, a 1:5 (manpower: tables) ratio during peak hours is advisable. For off-peak hours, a 1:10 ratio is possible.

            Depending on the location and traffic of passers-by, the restaurant is normally busiest during dinner hours of 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. The opening time is normally from 11:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. seven days a week.