How Restaurants Can Attract Families

There’s never been an easy time to run a restaurant. Even still, it feels like times are particularly challenging at the moment. With prices rising all the time, people are less inclined to eat out at restaurants. Throw in rising ingredient costs and plenty of competition from other businesses, and it’s easy to see why restaurants are feeling the pinch.

One smart way to increase revenue is to make the restaurant appealing to as many consumers as possible. Working to attract families, for instance, can be a game changer for restaurant businesses. Families aren’t only big spenders, but they’re also frequent spenders, with many families electing to visit restaurants to celebrate birthdays and other milestones.

As with all customers, you’ll need to work on making your establishment appealing to families. We’ll run through some handy tips for doing just that below.

Adults come in various sizes, but not to the extent where you need to have a range of seats available. That’s not the case with kids, however. Families will have people of all heights with them, from little babies who need a higher chair to kids who need booster cushions. Making those seating options available will increase the chances that a family chooses your restaurant — and more importantly, chooses to come back in the future.

You’ll likely have opened a restaurant because you want to show off all of your fantastic dishes. Alas, while your adult customers will appreciate your creations, it’s unlikely that the kids in the group will too. Most children don’t learn to love the magic of a well-prepared vegetable dish until they’re much older.

So, you can either force children to eat your food — and ensure they never return — or you can offer kid-friendly food. Putting together a special kids' menu that includes dishes that they’ll love (mac and cheese, simple pasta dishes) is paramount for keeping them and their parents happy.

Providing some simple activities for your child visitors to enjoy is a simple, inexpensive way to keep them happy while they’re at your restaurant. For example, you could provide dinner plate mats that have cute designs and give them some crayons to color them with. You might even offer some tabletop games that groups of children can enjoy while the adults are talking. 

To make your restaurant the leading family-friendly restaurant in town, consider adding a playground and video game console. It’s relatively easy to buy and install playground equipment that’ll help to keep children entertained for hours, which increases the chances that parents linger at the restaurant and order dessert/coffee. Adding an old-school console such as a Nintendo 64, or perhaps even a retro arcade game, can give your restaurant a unique feel and keep your child visitors happy, too. In fact, some old-school games will even help to put a smile on the faces of your adult visitors, too.

Some families make a habit of eating out at a restaurant on a regular basis, but for most, it’s simply something that they do on special occasions. You can make your restaurant more appealing to families by helping them celebrate birthdays, be it for one of their children, a parent, or an elder relative. Could you offer a free dessert to the birthday boy/girl, or have your team sing Happy Birthday?

Finally, remember that there’s little value in taking all the other tips on this page if you’re not also hiring family-friendly wait staff. It would be ideal if all your workers were family-friendly, but it’s not overly important if those who work in the kitchen don’t light up when they see younger customers. The main thing is that public-facing staff know how to interact with children. When you read reviews of the leading family-friendly restaurants, you’ll see that most of them compliment the friendliness of the staff. Remember that you’ll need to provide training to your staff to ensure that children have a great time — for instance, that they shouldn’t force a shy child to engage in conversation and so forth.

Did you know that Americans spend some $166 on dining out per month? Now think of how many families there are across the country, and you’ll soon realize that catering to families makes a whole lot of business sense. Make the changes that we’ve outlined above today, and it won’t be long before you notice that there’s an increase in the number of families who visit your establishment.