Gain more sales and customer satisfaction kudos.
Cafes and restaurants can really lift their game when presenting meals in menus and when discussing the menu with guests.
Offering food pairing suggestions elevates your business against your competition. Shows your knowledge and care for your customer experience.
I recently noticed this very thing at Dan Murphy’s, where their Facebook Community (I presume) offered their favourite pairings with food and spirits written on a tag next to the product. Clever.
There is no reason you cannot take a leaf out of Dan Murphy’s service mastery and apply to your own business.
Restaurant operators can drive up ticket prices by including beverage pairings on a menu and equipping their staff to discuss drink flavors in relationship to dishes.
Adding coffee or tea suggestions to the menu also becomes an opportunity for the service staff to naturally upsell consumers, he says. Servers should taste the pairings and be prepared to describe them in their own words to customers. Such authenticity and uniqueness of pairings can build trust with a customer as well as curiosity for both a beverage and a dish.
How will you elevate your customer experience?
One of the things we’ve found is that by putting the tea pairings on the menu, it encourages people to try something new that they might not have heard of before.
In pairing tea with food, it helps to consider similarities between tea and wine, she says. Like wine, teas have different varietals and tannins. A black tea equates to red wine, green teas are more similar to white wines and oolong teas relate to high-quality rosé wines.
