Restaurant Management: The Career Of A Restaurant Manager

Being a Restaurant Manager is a challenging occupation where one may utilize their food and beverage knowledge along with personal and customer service skills to find a rewarding career that fulfills their self-actualization needs.

We all have our preconceived notions of what a restaurant manager should be, whether it is from a positive or negative experience we’ve had. The restaurant manager can also be referred to as the dining room or front of the house manager, and is the primary person responsible for guest service in the front of the house.

There is more to the work context of the manager that many may be unaware of, that I am going to highlight. Because there are many different types of environments for a manager such as independent

They have access to forecasting records in order to predict how business will look like. In the industry we refer to ‘covers’ for how many people are expected to visit in any given day.

The manager will also manage inventories in the restaurant. The key areas the manager watches are food and alcoholic beverages. You may have guessed the two reasons why supplies are monitored. One is in order to know how much of a product will need to be reordered for the next week. The other is to monitor and prevent employee theft.

The next and most crucial task of all is resolving customer complaints and problems. There is always a cost of doing business and the manager makes a cost analysis of how much of something he can give away in order to solve a problem. We call this “service recovery” and it is a write off in order to make sure guests leave completely satisfied. Dealing with difficult customers is the manager’s ultimate responsibility and “some customers are difficult to deal with because of their attitudes or special needs; they should be handled with intelligence, tact, and good judgment.”

Just as its important to have qualified people on your team the importance of Leadership and having a vision matter. “A leader is a person you will follow to a place you would not go by yourself; a manager tells you where to go.” (Brown) A key concept as a manager is that you “must empower employees by clearly communicating the organization’s mission, accepting the responsibility for leading the group, and earning employees’ trust.” (Payne-Palacio)

In order to be an effective manager one needs to be in control of their time and stress management. Of course the job is spent standing and walking most of the day, which requires a lot of stamina. The fact remains that “restaurant Managers often work long hours, including evenings and weekends, to reflect the restaurant's hours of operations. A passion for food, wine, and the hospitality industry is instrumental in job satisfaction.” (Ferguson)

And yet, the prospects for the restaurant industry look great and make it an interesting field to consider. Looking ahead 10 years, the NRA “expects the restaurant and foodservice industry to provide 16.3 million jobs by 2027, an increase of 1.6 million positions from the projected 14.7 million industry jobs in 2017.” (NRA) This also means that “supervisory and manager opportunities are also expected to expand during the next decade” and they are projecting a 12% increase