By Yuri Levitas, a restaurateur and co-owner of the Black Star Foods company
The future is coming at us, full speed. If the present economic situation becomes unstable, than, of course, the price becomes an issue along with the speed.
People are now choosing more simple food, but even then the speed of service plays the key role. Today, time is the most precious thing we have. Our consumers value their time. This does not mean that people are not willing to spend time at a restaurant across the street. It means that after arriving at the restaurant, the visitor does not want to wait thirty minutes for their order to be fulfilled, even if you are going to stay in this establishment an entire night.
Practice shows that an average person is only willing to wait for their food for five to ten minutes. And, by the way, today sometimes even fast food restaurants are not always able to offer fast enough service. Even food delivery services are speed oriented, and the fastest of them becomes a leader.
The future of restaurant business is also in healthy eating. Popular madness about how to eat to lose weight will go on for decades, as long as we are willing to hold on to contemporary canons of beauty. It is unlikely that people will cease to monitor their health. This issue, incidentally, also arises out of our need to speed things up, because often healthy food is served raw or its preparation takes very little time (for example: using a wok).
The future is in new technologies. Here we are back to the question of speed, because modern automatic systems shorten the cooking process and significantly reduce the time needed for a finished dish to be serviced to a customer. If we discuss some distant future, it is likely that restaurant owners will sooner or later be faced with a choice: To keep up the pace with time adopting new technologies or to lose part of their customers simply by not being able to compete with more dynamic business models.
I travel a lot, and have an opportunity to compare and draw some conclusions. The Russian restaurant market is not saturated, yet. In the near future restaurant owners will try to take some risk with new formats. We are expecting a reincarnation of hotdogs, the new noodle shop concepts, and another big change is brewing, which I won’t talk yet, because I am the author of this coming revolution of an entire restaurant industry.
On the one hand, large-scale renovation projects in our capital and other major cities should help by providing easy access to the central shopping streets (for example, Arbat, Kutuzovsky, etc.) that have a positive impact on sales.
But on the other hand, the high cost of parking or its complete elimination might turn the motorists away from traveling to these pedestrian areas with many retail outlets (especially downtown); this will result in an outflow of customers from retailers.
In urban regions, there is huge demand for the American-style hamburger trend, and consumers are waiting for the arrival of large chains such as Black Star Burger, whose name they already know and trust. In regional cities there is still demand for restaurants with price-quality ratio.