The secret to getting through a busy night behind a restaurant bar comes down to knowing a few hacks to keep you on top of things. And Mark Jackson, Bar Manager at Liverpool’s Maray restaurant has learnt a few things in his time.
When you’re running a busy restaurant bar, being organised and efficient is the key to a smooth service. Mark has plenty of hacks to keep on top of things behind the bar.
Having an extensive craft cocktail menu can be an excellent way to boost bar sales, flex your bar team’s skills and contribute to your distinct offering for guests. But it’s no secret that making cocktails can slow down service speed. Mark tells us how batching helps speed up the process, “At Maray we batch everything we possibly can”, he says, “say a cocktail has five elements, you can put three or four of them in one bottle, so it’s one pour”.
And increased service speed isn’t the only benefit of batching cocktail elements ahead of time. Another benefit can be a more uniform recipe and improve consistency of your mix. Many cocktails are made of up of small volumes of multiple elements and measuring these out behind a busy bar can mean you end up with less precision and affect the taste of your cocktails, so batching actually helps with consistency. And batching also allows you to increase your menu variety, if you are able to save time via batching, you can offer a more varied menu to your guests.
Find out more of Mark’s top bar hacks for speedy service, keeping organised and doing your products justice in the video.
