5 Olde Tavern

Archive for November, 2011

Watching a season of Iron Chef does not make one a successful restaurant owner. Owning a restaurant is hard work, yet many people make the decision to open their own restaurants with their hearts instead of their heads. They fall in love with the idea of being their own boss and serving creative dishes to happy paying customers. For many, the reality is very different.

A restaurant usually requires the owner to work six to seven days a week, often starting early and finishing late. There are suppliers to deal with, casual staff to manage, fickle customers to keep happy, ever changing laws and regulations to keep across, and the day to day operational requirements of keeping the lights on.

Lots of people seem to think that a restaurant business plan is a complicated document that they need to spend literally months working on, honing and perfecting in order to “do it right” but that’s not the case at all.

Restaurants have been around forever- literally thousands of years. And lenders and investors know how restaurants work- they probably ate in one in the last 24 hours. So you don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining that a restaurant is a business that makes money by selling food to customers (you won’t believe how often I see people doing that!) or anything else so silly.

These days the all-natural living phenomenon has become more popular than ever and is becoming much more mainstream all the time. The times when folks who use healthy products were thought to be hippies or weirdos are finally over. That’s something we can all be grateful for.

Nowadays a lot more people are understanding that all sorts of natural products are much better than the things you find on most store shelves. Any local grocery store offers fruits, nuts and vegetables for sale, and your own grandmother would undoubtedly tell you to use the same stuff on your body. And there are a lot of excellent reasons for that.

Do you know what? I love pumpkin spice, butter toffee, mocha mint and all the other varieties of coffee flavors. I think for me, it is just this time of year. Living here in upstate, New York and those of you who believe upstate is the North end of New York City, would be wrong. Upstate, is actually anything above New York City.

We are close to Syracuse, home of the fighting Orange and this time of year means football, cooler temperatures and all the leaves on the trees changing to beautiful orange, red, yellow, and green colors, and watching the rolling hillside explode with vibrant colors.