Since childhood, Jasneet Sahni had this immense love for food, and especially going out to different places and eating. His passion and love for food paved the way for his transformation from being a foodie to a passionate chef, and ultimately, a restaurateur with Lanterns.
Lanterns is a welcoming and convenient paradise for authentic North Indian food. Lanterns is an old British style bar, which has recently gone through a renovation and it has revised its entire menu to match the fresh ambiance. The newly improved ambiance and fusion food take inspiration from a European lounge cafe, with artistic interiors and a plush vibe for events.
In Conversation With Jasneet Sahni Of Lanterns
In an exclusive interview with The Restaurant Times, Jasneet Sahni talks of his journey along with the story of his new restaurant brand Pikkle, customer engagement and marketing, and a lot more.
Importance Of Customer Relation Management For Restaurants
In the restaurant industry maintaining the right customer relation is just as important as having a good ambiance and serving good food.
According to Sahni, between managing the system and maintaining the quality, restaurant owners often tend to forget analyzing customer psychology and allocating time to understand the customer better, making Customer Relationship Management (CRM) critical.
A smart restaurant CRM helps owners/managers gain insights about their guests, which further helps them to provide customers with a tailored experience for each visitor.
CRM brings down the burden on the restaurant staff in maintaining a manual log of guests, along with their birthdays, contact details and preferences. Sahni says that the process is simplified as all these information can be stored in an easily accessible database. Apart from this, CRM also helps in maintaining a track of the most popular dish, and it also tells which dish works the best on which day.
Emerging Trend Of Video Marketing
‘Marketing or say advertising is one thing but knowing the exact process in which this will take place is the key to any booming business, says Sahni. According to him, smart advertising helps develop a good reputation and reach consumers who otherwise might never hear of you. It also helps in restaurant branding, such as the broadcasting of new menu items, discounts, and special events.
‘Video Marketing has been essential both at Lanterns and Pikkle. The advantage of video is in personality and uniqueness, unlike texts, where writing is necessary to make customers feel the personality of the writer. At Lanterns and Pikkle, videos are used as creatives on Facebook. ‘
Live videos on Facebook are one of the top things you can be doing right now aside from running highly targeted Facebook ads to your restaurant’s surrounding zip codes’, says Sahni.
Menu Engineering
The restaurant menu is an entrance into a world of succulence. At its most basic, the list will show you what types of food are available and how much you can expect to pay for each one. But smart restaurant owners know that the menu offers so much more, as long as you do it right.
According to Sahni, a restaurant’s menu is one of the most basic advertising tools that can be used to explain to a guest about the experience they are about to have. The driving force behind a well-designed menu is not the designer or printer; it is always the restaurant owner or head chef. As the creative mastermind behind menu development, their insight, vision, and guidance are what make it a complete depiction of the brand experience.
‘Lanterns simplifies the method of ordering for customers, it brings an end to skimming through pages, and instead, offers its customers two sides where one side is the Asian cuisine, and the other side has the Indian cuisine. It is essential to show the client what the restaurant wants to sell rather than what the customers want to eat. This simplifies everything for the restaurant owner, leading to the Specialty dish getting sold and also shortening the process of deciding what to order for the customers,’ says Sahni.
Importance Of Staff Training
For restaurants with a bar, the sale of alcohol is of prime importance. But serving alcohol also comes with great responsibility. According to Sahni, any customer who orders wine, first needs to taste the wine, and then only the new bottle is opened. This is the primary International Standard of presentation, which is missing in our country.
Holding regular tastings with your team is a great way to increase their wine knowledge while allowing them to understand what’s actually on your menu.
It is essential to cover the profile of the wine, as well as what it pairs with on your list.
‘A common part of training the staff is organized staff tasting. Familiarizing the product with your team members increases profitability. And this practice will have long-term value for the culture of your bar. The investment you’re making with tastings benefits your employees’ ability to confidently and accurately sell the product to your guests’, says Sahni.
Sahni concludes by saying that he doesn’t want to rush with his brand, instead, he wants everything to move gradually. Expansion is definitely on the cards but not anytime in the next six months, as he wants to give Pikkle time to expand and grow.
