The Subtle Cues That Reveal A Restaurant Is Well-Run — Or A Disaster

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It's not too hard to tell if a restaurant is putting out good food — just taste it! — but knowing whether it's well-run is a whole other question. It takes an alchemic combination of great employees, confident leadership, effective training, and an excellent work environment to create an outstanding restaurant. But customers aren't invited to training sessions or pre-shift meetings, so how does a customer know if the restaurant they're at is well-run? Frankie Weinberg — professor of management at Loyola University New Orleans, co-owner of Pomelo and Good Catch restaurants in New Orleans, and author of "Mentorship"— broke down what to look for.

"I would say that to me the signs that a restaurant is exceptionally well-run come down to two primary elements: coordination and anticipation," Weinberg says. In the front-of-house, that means staff serving tables in the appropriate order, helping each other and seamlessly adjusting to the changing demands in the dining room as the evening progresses. There should also be coordination between the front-of-house and back-of-house teams — look for things like service timing and how changes and requests are handled.

Anticipation is truly a cornerstone of great hospitality. At a well-run restaurant, the front-of-house staff will always be a step ahead of you — refilling water, inquiring about a second beverage at the right moment, or quietly bringing extra napkins or replacing a fallen fork before you know you need it. "Anticipation comes also in asking smart questions," Weinberg notes. "When a server asks if you've dined at the restaurant before, it gives them useful information about how to get you more excited about your meal. As a first-time guest at a restaurant, I get particularly excited about my meal-to-come when I learn a bit about the chef or owner's motivation behind the restaurant and the dishes."

A restaurant will almost always have a manager on the dining room floor, and what that person is doing can tell you a lot about whether a restaurant is well-run or courting disaster. "Perhaps ironically, as I'm a management professor, the best-run restaurants are often those in which I see less of the management itself," says Weinberg. "I don't mean that management isn't available or that they are failing to lead, but rather that they are less visibly fussing over and correcting operational items." If things are going smoothly, the manager will be chatting with a regular or making the rounds to greet customers. The manager, says Weinberg, will know "that their team can appropriately handle the goings-on of the shift"

On the other hand, a restaurant that is struggling to execute will likely have a manager who is spread too thin trying to put out fires. They may be frequently correcting operational errors — like rushing corrected dishes or micro-managing servers — or may be managing issues with dissatisfied guests. A frantic manager who appears under-supported likely is, and it's a major red flag that indicates things aren't going well.