Being a restaurant owner sounds like a perfect American dream, where an aspiring entrepreneurship begins. Pandemic may have hold off many people’s social life, and restaurants have been hit hard, however, people’s passion and love for food never fade away throughout the history of humanity. As restaurants are slowly recovering from social distancing, regaining its strength, it would be the perfect timing to start your own. Here is a checklist that we gathered containing everything you need to know regarding opening a restaurant: 

1. Location: Choosing a Right Spot 

Choosing a right spot is essential to jump start a restaurant, there are four factors to keep an eye out: 

a) Accessibility and visibility: craving for delicious food, is what we think motivates people the most to eat at restaurants. Apparently, people are lazy. Sometimes, traffic, or simply a U-turn, can be a deal breaker and stop them from going to a diner. When picking out locations, we better assume that people are reluctant to take any inconvenience, places close to public transportations such as subway station, with easy entry and exits, would be ideal. Furthermore, find a spot that is easy to see, visibility signify accessibility, they work perfectly well together to expose your restaurant and grab attention to attract customers. 

b) Population density: considering it a joint factor that goes along with our first tip, highly populated places are always ideal since the purpose of accessibility and visibility is to attract people into our restaurant.

c) Parking: Huh, parking, don’t we know how crucial it is for a restaurant to have a spacious parking lot. Of course, a parking lot that goes with the restaurant would be ideal, however, considering partnering with public parking lot can be a budget friendly option for small business starters.

2. Pick Out a Right Security System

People tend to neglect the benefits an appropriate security system brings, particularly for a restaurant, surveillance cameras can not only protect customers, but also protect restaurant owners. It seems like a tough choice to make, we compiled a checklist of features for security systems that are feasible for restaurants:

a) Clarity

It goes without saying, in term of resolution, it is always the higher, the better, especially for small businesses like restaurants. You may not have a concrete image in your head right now, however, the extensive details provided by high quality images would be life-saving in the time of a crisis. As a matter of fact, compare to other types of businesses, restaurants tend to run into chaotic situation quite often. For instance, if a customer finds a fly or a cockroach in their food, without detailed surveillance video to look back, you don’t have a say in this situation but to compensate and apologize to the customer, who may or may not brought the fly or cockroach on their own, and worry the extent of damage from such an incident to the publicity. Furthermore, the scariest part is, wait for inspections from food and drug administrate to scrutinize your property. However, with a high resolute security system, you will be able to find out, who, brought, the cockroach?! And with concrete evidences to prove it. 

All the features ensure you a complete, thorough, and clear view of almost every part of your restaurant. Equipped with this security system, restaurant operation watch, staff performance monitoring during days, theft and vandalism alarm at night would become easy tasks. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

b)  Recording and storage capacity

24 hours a day, 7 days a week, restaurants owners don’t really have the luxury of having holidays as the rest of us, which means that surveillance systems for restaurants need to operate on a 24/7 constant base as well. Meanwhile, the storage that required for a non-stop surveillance system with high resolute video recordings is enormous. Fortunately, our E Series network video recorders allow multiple cameras to record simultaneously, convert video and store data on the hard drive for retrieval with additional hard disk drive slot allowing up to 6TB extra storage. In terms of a storage emergency, they can automatically overwrite the chronologically earliest data with the latest when the HDD is full.

c) Smart search

This function allows you to select an interested area during retrieval and automatically play at slower speed in order to provide a clearer view of what happened. Again, is perfectly compatible towards restaurant security system requirements such like sorting out disputes, tracing back incidents and etc. The livelihood of restaurants depends on customer satisfactory, therefore, dispute with customers can be deadly. Finding out exactly what happened during the dispute, can help you to solve it in an appropriate way and improve your service.

Uniarch, for example, has launched E Series network video recorders equipped with smart search function. 

d) Installation and compatibility

Supposedly, compared to large enterprises, small business starters do have to keep budget in mind when deciding surveillance products. A self-installable monitoring system typically falls into a more affordable price range compared with a complicated one that requires professional installation. Besides, self-installation cut out labor cost, which should be another considerable save in expenses. 

Our 4MP Bullet&Turret Network Camera is most often recommended to restaurant new comers for its easy installation process, multifunctionality, decent performance and reliable quality. Wait for it, it’s budget friendly! All you need to do is plug and play, our product is able to automatically search and link network cameras to network video recorder. 

Now, let’s adventure, pray and love!