WHAT IS A WOW FACTOR?

Restaurants should always strive to provide a wow experience. It is honestly the fastest way to become a successful restaurant. Let's take a deep dive on what it takes to provide a WOW experience.

Local Eats are the Best Eats!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Well, good afternoon. It is June the 28th, 2026, and straight from the Highley Caffeinet studio, this is the Mad Food Critic Podcast. Today I want to address a question that I was asked yesterday. And I get asked this a lot. And the question is simply: how do you determine that a restaurant has a wow experience or has given a wow experience? Because that's how my rating of if someone asks me on a scale of one to ten, I'm like, well, I don't really do a scale of one to ten or ten to one or anything like that. Look, either are a good restaurant or they are they have a wow factor. So someone asked me, Well, how do you determine that a restaurant has that wow factor? That they consistently day in, day out, give a wow experience. And I said, Well, it's simple. My my answer to this is simple, but we're going to get into the actual answer behind the scenes. It has to be a flawless experience from the parking lot to the register. Now, what does that mean? Well, it means exactly what I said. I want to be impressed from the time I pull into the parking lot all the way until the final transaction of paying for the meal is done. And if you can deliver that, then you've just delivered a wow experience. Now understand that this is not talking about the food itself. That's an important component of the wow factor, but you have to understand that it goes way beyond that because I'm looking for an experience. If I just wanted great food, I would have just cooked at home. So, do you see where I'm going? So let's let's break this down. And I'm not saying that these things automatically mean it's a bad restaurant. I'm just saying that when I see some of these red flags, my eyebrows go up. So the first part of it is, like I told you from the parking lot, as I'm driving down the road looking for a place to eat, if the place does not look appetizing. What I mean by that, you're driving down the road and the place looks clean, looks orderly, looks kept, looks well taken care of, brightly lit, great signage, good-looking restaurant. I think I'm gonna try this out. I pull into the parking lot of said restaurant, and you see trash over in the side shrubs, or you see trash in the parking lot, or the parking lot hasn't been swept, or it's just the landscaping is unkept. And these are things that can be a turnoff. So it could have looked great from the road, and then I pull into the parking lot, and I'm just like, I don't know. But I will still usually give the place a chance, even against my better judgment. The next thing is you've heard me talk about this on TikTok, is you walk in the door and there's no one to greet you, no one to show you where your table is. That is the big first impression. And at no point, and I get a lot of flack on this comment, I don't care. At no point ever in the entire operating hours of your restaurant should that front door be left unattended ever. Because that's your first impression. Find someone if the hostess or host or whoever you have up front has to go to the restroom, has to take a break, has to go get whatever. Someone, whether it be a server or whatever, someone needs to stand in that spot until that host or hostess returns. This is a training issue. This is where you train front of the house to the back of the house. Flawlessly. Because if I come in and I'm not greeted and I have to wait for someone to come back to the front, I don't know what they've been doing, I don't know what the reason is. Nobody does. You might like, well, we have this, I don't care. I came into your restaurant for an experience and to get fed, and there was no one here to greet me. That's what I see. That's the impression I have. So then I finally get seated and I get to my table. And for the love of all that is good, please tell me that that table does not have a wobbly leg. This is one of the worst impressions you can possibly get. And this falls on not only the restaurant owner, but it falls on servers, it falls on bus people. Because here's the thing: that table could have been stable when you first opened. Table could have been stable. How about that? It could have been stable when you opened, it could have been stable at the start of your shift. Something could have happened, somebody moves the table, whatever the case may be, and now the table wobbles. You've got to keep a constant check on your tables in your section all day long. If that table begins to wobble, that's when you either take matters in your own hands and figure out how to fix it, or get the owner or the management and say, I've got a wobbly table in my section, we have to fix it right now. And it should be in your training program that it is addressed immediately. So then the server brings the menu. Again, I've touched on this one. Do not bring me a QR code. I want a menu that I'm capable of reading. I don't want to pull out my phone and go through 17 different uh pages that I have to agree to. I want a menu that I can read. If your menu is 17 pages long, listen up. I'm gonna ask you one question. Really? You serve breakfast, burgers, pizza, seafood, sushi, Mexican, Italian, Chinese steaks, and have a signature cheese steak? No, you don't. You don't own a restaurant, you own the United Nations of Food. You can't be the expert on all items, and you can't be all things to all people. And probably one of the biggest overused phrases on a menu is this is our signature dish. Really? If you didn't spend hours in the kitchen developing that recipe, then it's not, I'm sorry, by my definition, that is not your signature dish. If this is something that you got uh from your food service distributor and they told you, hey, this not everybody serves this. This is you should put this on your menu. That does not make it a signature dish. I'm sorry if that hurts your feelings. And every single menu item has a picture. Now, don't get me wrong, pictures can be helpful, especially on your social media pages, which is really where you should showcase them. But if your menu looks like a family photo album, I'm getting nervous because I've learned one thing the prettier the picture, the more likely my voodoo show up like it lost a fight. So we've gotten through the menu issue, and I'm not sure what I want to try. So I asked my server, hey, entree number four, how is that? And I hear, oh, I've never tried that. You worked here for three years, Linda. Help me out because I'm asking because I trust you, not because I think you're secretly doing restaurant views on the weekends. Your server should know every single item on the menu, period. By heart. Look, you've got to train your people in the back to prepare those dishes. So when you're doing that, that's when you pull your new servers in. Hey, if you if you haven't tried this yet, you need to, and you need to explain the dish to them, and you need to tell them, hey, this is why it's our signature dish. This is what people love about this. This is we source this dish, we source this ingredient from wherever. Have a story behind it, not some fancy menu name that doesn't impress me. So make sure that your servers know your menu. That's on you. That's a training issue, front of the house, back of the house. Then I might follow up and ask a question: what's your most popular dish? And so help me for all the love that is tasty. If I get the answer, oh, everything's good. No, no, it isn't. Because every restaurant has its stars, every restaurant has its front runners, and every restaurant has its underdogs. Tell me what makes people drive across town. Tell me what makes you popular. That's what I want to know. Because that might be what I want to order. So now we've gotten to the table, we've gotten through the menu, we've gotten through the whole charade. And then I say, Well, I'm going to run to the restroom and wash my hands before my dinner. And then suddenly realize I've made a terrible decision because, folks, the dining room is what customers see, the kitchen is what they don't. And if the restroom looks like it lost a wrestling match, I'm suddenly wonder wondering about the kitchen. But let me tell you something. My great-grandmother used to say this, and it is so true on so many levels. You can tell how clean a person's house is by how their yard looks. Same thing about the appearance of the outside of your restaurant. If it's clean and orderly, the restroom's clean and orderly, I'm thinking you got a pretty clean kitchen, and I'm excited about my meal. And this is all part of the experience. And we haven't taken a single bite of food. Here's another red flag. And this is these are all things that count against a restaurant getting a wow factor. Your menu has 67 items, but somehow you're out of 14 of them. At this point, just hand me a list of what you do have. We'll save everybody some time. Because let me tell you, that story of well, uh, the table behind you just got the last one, and you know, we're we're out of look. You run a restaurant. No, don't run your business off the back of a truck. What I mean by that, don't count on that truck showing up on time. Because it's rare. Have the ingredients that you need to run your services, lunch, breakfast, dinner, whatever the case may be. Be prepared. I've heard all my life, you can't sell from an empty wagon. So why would you even start a dinner service, a lunch service without having everything that you need? And if you're sticking to one food service distributor, I don't recommend that. You've got to have a backup. You've got to have somebody that can be there to deliver for you if something doesn't come in on a truck or if a truck doesn't deliver on time or deliver at all. You've got to have a backup. You've got to plan for the outages. Be prepared. Here's another one. Server doesn't write anything down. Now, some servers are amazing, they've got memories better than my smartphone. Then there are others that come back with someone else's appetizer, missing sides, a diet colo that nobody ordered. Confidence is great, but accuracy pays a whole lot better. Because let me tell you, you can bring out an antique typewriter at my table to take my order. At least I know you're gonna get it right. Even with spelling errors. But the whole memory trick thing, it's just too much going on at a restaurant. I don't recommend it. I get it, looks great in fine dining, but the times that it comes back that it's accurate is far less than just write it down. You make you give the customer, you give your patron a you want somebody to feel confident. I don't care if you feel confident to take an order at my table and remember it for 20 minutes after 16 other people have came and talked to you, where I feel confident is that you wrote my order down and repeated it back to me, and I know that everything is going to be right. Now it just falls on the kitchen, and that again comes into training. And if if you're not training your front of the house and your back of the house just as heavily one as the other, you're missing out. You're not going to deliver a flawless experience because, like I said, it's not about the bite of food that is amazing. The food is one component on a whole just mess of things that can either go right or go wrong. One of the things that I see happen in restaurants a lot is this, and this is strictly a training issue, and people argue with me on this. You got a table of four. One person's food comes out, and the server brings it out. So now you've got three people left at the table waiting for their food. Person one that got their food doesn't want to eat yet, just out of proper etiquette, because they want to wait till everybody's got their food. But now their food's at the table getting cold instead of under a heat lamp, growing older by the minute. Neither one is a good situation. Train your cooks to wear it. Look, I spent 10 years on a charbroller in a restaurant that seated 300 people. And I can tell you, I didn't, if I got a ticket with a grilled shrimp and a well-done ribeye steak, I didn't put them down on the grill at the same time because guess what? That grilled shrimp is only going to take a few minutes. That ribeye is going to take a minute, a lot of minutes. And if I put that grilled shrimp down, guess what? That grilled shrimp's gonna be ready while it just sits under the heat lamp waiting on the ribeye. You've got to train your staff from everything that involves inside your restaurant and out. You cannot, I will repeat this a thousand times, you cannot under-train your restaurant. Just when you think you've trained too much, train some more. Because if you want to give a flawless experience, if you want to give that wow experience, if you want to have a restaurant that is known for a wow factor, then these are the things that you've got to do, and you cannot skimp on any of them. And that includes the quality of food that you're buying. If you're one of these that price shop on every single item in your restaurant, you've already lost me. I promise you, you will never, never have a wow experience because your quality of your food is not going to match what I'm looking for. I don't care how good your service was, I don't care how fancy your restaurant is, I don't care anything about all that. It's all has to come together. Every single component. One red flag does not make a bad restaurant. I've eaten in places that look questionable and had incredible food. I've also eaten at beautiful restaurants that couldn't season mashed potatoes. So here's my challenge. What is your biggest restaurant flag? Leave it in the comments because I have a feeling this list is about to get a whole lot longer. I'm the Mad Food Critic, and until next time, keep supporting local restaurants because local eats are the best eats. Just keep your eyes open and ask the questions. I'll see you next week right here behind this big old mic in the highly cavitated studio. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. Bye bye.