There are a number of ways you can really make an impact to your customers when they visit your restaurant. This blog post will list a few things you can easily (and cheaply) afford to do to help get those extra people through the door, and then get them to come back again some time soon!

• Promotional Clothing

I have put this first as i think this is one of the most important aspects of making your establishment workforce look like they are an organised bunch of people. Your customers like to see organisation and they like to see things carried out with professionalism and so you and your staff look like you know what you are doing! Wearing matching aprons and clothing with your restaurant logo stitched on the front makes you look like a proper operation and it starts off the trust relationship you need to have with your customers, in order to make them come back and spend more money.

• Manners and Cleanliness

I have put these two together as i think all staff who work in your restaurant need to be clean, polite and welcoming to your customers, so they feel welcomed enough to recommend a repeat visit with some friends some time in the future. People also associate untidiness with germs and bacteria - and if they are in that frame of mind by the time they sit down even if the food is amazing they are still going to dislike it!

And last but by no means least..

• Well cooked, tasty, fresh food!

You could have the cleanest restaurant in the world, with the most helpful, welcoming staff in the world - but if your food tastes awful then no one is going to come and pay you money again to eat food there.

Most of the stuff i have written hedre is common sense, although you would be suprised at how many people overlook the simplest things that could cause a potentially fab restaurant to flop.

Today it was down to Northampton for a four hour restaurant hunting mission, we had never been there before and what a shock we had when we realised how big the place was.

We spent an hour or so speaking to the locals and it seems alot of them love eating out, I would probably say about 75% of people we spoke to regularly visit restaurants in Northampton and surrounding towns.

Gourmet Ingredient now has over eighty restaurants listed in the Northamptonshire section. This consists of Brackley, Corby, Daventry, Kettering, Northampton, Peterborough, Rushden, Towcester and Wellingborough.

Article taken from Visit Lincolnshire.

“Welcome to a county proud to produce around one-fifth of Britain’s food thanks to the fertile farmland and rich rural landscape of Lincolnshire.  Taste the difference by tucking into the freshest of food.

Get closer to the flavour with a few of the county’s distinctly different tastes, including Lincoln Red beef, stuffed chine, plumbread, Lincolnshire sausages, Lincolnshire Poacher Cheese, fresh Ostrich and a superb selection of vegetables, all combining to offer a mouthwatering choice”

We have listed over one hundred restaurants in Lincoln, Boston, Grantham, Grimsby, Louth, Skegness & Scunthorpe & Stamford today, again, there are still alot more to find.

We are slowly working our way around the country, obviously starting with restaurants in Mansfield as thats where we are from, working our way into Nottingham, Derbyshire and so on….

There are hundreds of restaurants in Leicester and surrounding areas, these are mainly made up of indian restaurants, english restaurants and chinese restaurants. Leicester has a fantastic reputation for its Indian and Italian cuisines. Its definately worth the trip.

We have listed ninety six restaurants but still have many more to find. Check them out for yourself….

After driving around Derbyshire for a whole day, we managed to find one hundred and eighty or more restaurants, took the details for them and added them to the website. There are probably many many more restaurants in Derbyshire but there’s a nice selection for people to look through.

Derbyshire is a lovely place, certainly where food in concerned.

We located about twenty restaurants in Matlock, all of which looked lovely, if only we had the time to eat in them all.

We found just under thirty restaurants in Derby, it took quite a while to get around them all and I think we need to go back as theres alot more that we missed. Derbyshire is full of small villages, ones that people would not know about unless they knew the area or found them on the internet so we took note of various restaurants there too.

Last but not least, was a town not so far from us. Chesterfield. We found over fifty restaurants in Chesterfield, they were scattered all over the place but again, there was a nice choice.

Today we have added 101 restaurants to the site, all of which are based in Nottinghamshire.

So we now have a base to start from.

restaurants in mansfield

restaurants in nottingham

restaurants in worksop

restaurants in newark

restaurants in retford

After being in business for just under two years, we decided to apply our online marketing and internet knowledge to the restaurant industry.

We have spent the past six months carrying out research and developing the Gourmet Ingredient to make it the easiest and most comprehensive website to help people find restaurants.

Over the next few weeks we intend to list over 2500 restaurants across the UK and grow the site from there.

We have taken a very different approach to our competitors and intend to make Gourmet Ingredient the UK’s number one restaurant website. Keep checking the blog for regular development updates.