Customer Reviews

How to Open and Run a Successful Restaurant

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

As a would-be restauranteur with plenty of general business experience and only limited kitchen-time, there were many, many areas where I felt deficient when gauging the scope of my business plans. But "How to Open & Run a Successful Restaurant" not only hit each of those topics, but managed to offer alternatives, incite, history and trivia as well. Thomas offers not only information as regards opening a restaurant, but also outlines the types of personalities often associated with the business and the pitfalls that await the snobby, the paranoid, and the burnt-out. Great tips for decorating inexpensively as well as a few suggestions regarding high-profit menu items punctuate what is, at its most basic, a thorough look at the middle-class restaurant, from foyer to kitchen, from management to staff, and from profit to poor-house.

Mostly trivial chit-chat on which liquors to purchase assorted with obvious stuff, like an item list including mustard! This book is not only parochially American (and this might perhaps justify the very heavy stress on beverage sales) but also essentially irrelevant to anybody who would like to start a gourmet restaurant, being instead perhaps useful to somebody who'd like to open a greasy spoon for heavy drinkers. If there were a money-back guarantee I sure would have used it, having made the mistake to purchase it.

Wow, I bought the book thinking it would be a helpful how-to-guide, it was more like a BAD novel of someone who had spent too much time in the deep under belly of New York. Don't waste your money or time on this one it's not one bit helpful. Amazon[.com] sells better books for a successful restaurant, I know I found one and this one was not it!

While an occasionally entertaining read , it is essentially useless for anyone looking for a "how to" book. There are a few helpful hints in the book, but overall is a waste of time. I found myself hurrying to finish it to get a book that might be useful. At least it was cheap!

I found this book got right to the core of starting a restaurant in a logical and easy to understand way. It contains a useful practical approaches to tasks that must be dealt with in a restaurant start-up. It also suggests ways to cope with if not avoid many typical problems, and presents numerous strategies for increasing chances of success. Very good and useful.

I agree with the other review, just mundane chit chat. I wonder if the author has ever been in the back office of a real restaurant.