Evaluation of the findings and its effectiveness in managing foodservice operations
Discuss about the Principal Parts Of The Hospitality Industry.
Hospitality industry is defined as one of the categories of service industry that includes the aspect of fooding, lodging and even event planning (Walker and Walker 2016). There are five principal parts of the hospitality industry out of which food and beverage sector holds prime importance. The type of hospitality enterprise discussed in the study is a small Indian restaurant named XYZ located at Brisbane, Australia which falls under the food and beverage industry sector.
The type of cuisine offered at the restaurant is Indian as both the owner cum chief chief of the restaurant XYZ is from Indian origin and hails primarily from India making the preparation of the food authentic and tasty (Counihan and Van Esterik, 2012).
The factors that led to the selection of the genre of Indian food items is discussed below.
- Brisbane has a huge number of Indian population and the dearth of good and authentic Indian restaurants in the area make the presence of the restaurant inevitable (Lawrence, Lyons and Wallington 2013).
- The chief chef cum owner of the restaurant being Indian makes authentic Indian food with some of the ingredients sourced from the country making the taste of the food as natural as possible.
- The Australian population strives to taste newer dishes with different flavours and their affinity towards spicy food is also addressed in the Indian food items (Friel, Barosh and Lawrence 2014).
- The need for the place to have a different variety of restaurant other than the generalised Italian and Chinese flavours.
Front House Operations of the restaurant includes the parts and corners of the restaurant that is accessible by the regular customers as well as the staffs of the restaurant. The parts of the restaurant considered under the Front House include restroom, dining room, reception and the drinking bar where there is free entry of the people coming to the restaurant and enjoying the meal (Sachs et al. 2014).
The need of cost control in the front house operations of the restaurant is immense as one of the most important factors in the restaurant business is ambiance and hygiene (Läikkö-Roto and Nevas 2014). The owner of the restaurant should employ a good amount of resource and money in providing the best and hygienic conditions for the customers who are coming to the restaurant. However, like every business, the need to cut down cost so that the profit margin can be maintained is also one of the major factors. As per the interview, the cost control of XYZ restaurant in the front house is done by making sure that less employees are associated with the servings and cleaning of the place (Flamholtz 2012). One of the major ways in which the front desk can control the cost of the place is by making the waiters and executives wear clothes from their own closet. If the restaurant offers clothing items to the staffs then the cost of the place will increase manifold. Other major way to control cost is to make the arrangements of home delivery and takeaway more than the dining in which will reduce the cost of cutlery and decorations. Also smaller number of staffs can be appointed as the customers would not be in direct contact with the ambiance of the place. Moreover, the option of self-service can also be employed to minimise the cost of recruitment. However, at some places the cost should be kept constant or even increased as per the requirement of the restaurant. The places like hygiene and cleanliness of the places where customers operate, better cutleries, good management and recruitment of trained waiters should be made compulsory so that the customer experience is positive. The restrooms should be provided with adequate features and should be made available to all the guests. The cost of recruitment process can also increase with the better training and experienced personnel recruitment. Thus, front office costs should be reduced where necessary and kept constant or even increased when and where required.
Type of Hospitality Enterprise
Back House is the place of the restaurant where the cooking takes place and other staffs work. This place is not accessible by the customers and is generally marked by a closed door where entry is restricted for the guests (Whyte 2017). The back house operation involves a lot of costs and should be accountable in the overall cost of operation in the restaurant. The costs involved in the back house involve the cost of keeping the inventory and giving adequate monetary benefits to the staffs of the restaurant. Even the hygiene and the cleanliness of the place should be considered as one of the pivotal costs at the back end sector (Artto, Ahola and Vartiainen 2016).
Cost control is of prime importance in the back end sector operations too as without regulated cost at the back end, it is naturally impossible to maintain the overall cost of the restaurant and the operations. The cost control that can happen in the back end sector of the restaurant include the cost of recruitment of more associate chefs including the manual labour required for the individual work. The costs that should be kept constant or increased should include the cost of inventory and other factors that require constant addition on a daily basis (Kasim and Ismail 2012). The other costs that should be increased is the recruitment of more chefs catering to different forms of Indian food items and different cuisines included in the Indian food types namely North Indian, Mughlai, Bengali and even South Indian (Jain and Bagler 2015). Each genre of the food item should have an individual chef that can specialise in the items and can satisfy the taste and preference of the different people residing from different parts of India or abroad and even the natives of Australia. This will help the restaurant to have specific food items and authentic tastes so that all the natives of different parts of India should have the taste that they miss in the foreign land. The back end operation cost can also be controlled by appointing freshers and trainees in place of trained employees in places that can afford to serve the place. In addition, the suppliers can be convinced to provide the raw materials at a cheaper rate to make the whole process economy friendly. With the increase in cost reductions, it is possible to invest in other places that needs immediate attention. Also, the spices and other ingredients can be imported from India where and when necessary so that the ingredients used to prepare the food also has a tinge of native taste making the whole food experience one of the most cherished things in the fooding.
Cuisine Offered at the Restaurant and the Factors for the Selection
Financial control of business operations is surely one of the most important means of addressing the increasing cost of the restaurant sector and can be done due to the basic needs of increase in profitability of the restaurant (Frazer, 2012). Moreover, the need to control finances is also important to keep a check on the amount of expenditure occurring in the sector. Expenditures related to the workings of the restaurant and the assignment of the workers and their activities are also related to the workings of the place. The ways in which the finances can be kept on check is by constantly keeping a check on the amount of money at the account of the restaurants and also on the sales of the restaurant done on a weekly basis. The tips and grants received by the restaurant should also be kept on track to maintain the overall financial cost of the restaurant. The payments and advances done by the customers also should be kept into account to maintain the overall finances of the restaurant and to maintain the profit of the place without any hassles. The business plans should be kept in mind while making the business decisions and also the managers opinions on investment and returns should be measured for making the restaurant business profitable in the longer sense. The daily targets of the restaurant should be met along with the adherence to minimal cost so that the whole profit of the organization is levelled or increased according to the needs.
References
Artto, K., Ahola, T. and Vartiainen, V., 2016. From the front end of projects to the back end of operations: Managing projects for value creation throughout the system lifecycle. International Journal of Project Management, 34(2), pp.258-270.
Counihan, C. and Van Esterik, P. eds., 2012. Food and culture: A reader. Routledge.
Flamholtz, E.G., 2012. Human resource accounting: Advances in concepts, methods and applications. Springer Science & Business Media.
Frazer, L., 2012. The effect of internal control on the operating activities of small restaurants. Journal of Business & Economics Research (Online), 10(6), p.361.
Friel, S., Barosh, L.J. and Lawrence, M., 2014. Towards healthy and sustainable food consumption: an Australian case study. Public health nutrition, 17(5), pp.1156-1166.
Jain, A. and Bagler, G., 2015. Culinary evolution models for Indian cuisines. arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.00155.
Kasim, A. and Ismail, A., 2012. Environmentally friendly practices among restaurants: drivers and barriers to change. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 20(4), pp.551-570.
Läikkö-Roto, T. and Nevas, M., 2014. Restaurant business operators’ knowledge of food hygiene and their attitudes toward official food control affect the hygiene in their restaurants. Food control, 43, pp.65-73.
Lawrence, G., Lyons, K. and Wallington, T., 2013. Food security, nutrition and sustainability. Earthscan.
Sachs, C., Allen, P., Terman, A.R., Hayden, J. and Hatcher, C., 2014. Front and back of the house: Socio-spatial inequalities in food work. Agriculture and Human Values, 31(1), pp.3-17.
Walker, J.R. and Walker, J.T., 2016. Introduction to hospitality management. Prentice Hall.
Whyte, W.F., 2017. The social structure of the restaurant. In The Anthropology of Organisations (pp. 19-27). Routledge.
What is Front House Operations?