By Toby Patrick, Contributor
Opening a restaurant goes beyond a nice aesthetic, good location, and great food. In today's competitive market, you also need to be authentic with your atmosphere and giving a culturally enriching experience.
Hiring international staff can help you achieve that authentic atmosphere and experience you’re looking to give guests.
How International Staff Enrich Your Restaurant’s Atmosphere
For example, let’s say you are opening an Italian restaurant in a city center. A keyway to make it stand out is a combination of great authentic food, warm, inviting décor, and Italian chefs and waiters. You are not only a more trustworthy option for the customer, as your chefs will be using traditional Italian ingredients and methods, but you are also transporting your customers to Italy itself.
You are showing your guests that you are as authentic as it gets. But it’s so much more than appearing authentic; hiring internationally allows you to fully respect the culture's cuisine and can, in turn, provide some helpful insights on dishes, how to serve and delivering a true representation of their culture.
Cultural Diversity
Hiring a diverse staff can bring a range of cultural backgrounds to your restaurant. With a more inclusive and wider representation of staff members, you will attract and enhance the customer experience and diversify your audience.
It can also foster a sense of global awareness within the restaurant, and who knows, it might provide a range of great combinations on the menu.
Authentic Experiences
An international staff can also creative for an authentic dining experience. A practical example includes the pizza chain restaurant Rudy's; they usually have their kitchen out in the open for you to watch the pizzas being made, and as someone who has been to several Rudy's locations, the chefs and staff are mostly Italian and speak to each other in Italian.
This has always been my number one location when it comes to dining and choosing Italian cuisine, because it’s simple, tasty, quick, and as authentic as it gets in terms of atmosphere and taste. You could get it every day of the week, and it’s the same every single time; just extremely consistent and delicious.
This is just one of many examples that have become successful due to their authenticity and accurate representation.
Language Skills
Multilingual staff can draw a larger array of guests because your staff can cater to their needs in multiple ways, primarily in communication, which can streamline and make their ordering experience easier and nicer.
This is especially useful when international tourists come to visit your restaurant. If you have a staff member that can speak the guests’ primary language, it’ll make the entire ordering and dining experience better for the guest without slowing down the usual table churn.
This is also true if your restaurant is near a densely populate immigration area. Find staff that can speak the neighborhood’s language(s) will widen your market while giving a great dining experience.
Key Considerations
Multi-Cultural Hiring
It’s important to hire an authentic team without purposely ignoring certain applicants. You want to ensure that you are a multicultural restaurant and are not purposefully refusing to hire people from certain cultures.
Therefore, ensure that you hire without bias while considering cultural diversity. This is completely dependent on the type of restaurant you have. For example: you might hire chefs from your restaurant’s specific culture; however, the rest of your staff shouldn’t always be recruited using the same process.
Visa Laws and Regulations
If you are hiring chefs and staff from abroad or if you are planning on expanding your restaurant internationally and wish to send some of your team to get it off the ground, then you need to ensure that your company has a sponsor license or that your employees have a work visa.
Either can be attained with the help of immigration lawyers, who are highly educated about the array of visa types and law changes that are currently in place.
Cultural Differences
It’s very important that a multicultural workforce can be extremely enriching and positive; however, there is also potential for there to be some differences in communication style that could potentially cause issues in terms of language barriers, miscommunication and, in the most unfortunate cases, conflict.
It’s always best to ensure that you have a strong management team that can navigate through these potential issues, and a lot of these concerns can be worked through; it’s just best to be prepared for the worst in these situations. Developed strategies to promote cross-cultural understanding to minimize the rest.
Onboarding and Training
Develop a comprehensive onboarding that will address cultural differences and promote inclusivity, as you want to ensure that new employees are welcomed with open arms and aren’t being treated unfairly and so forth.
Provide training on company policies, procedures and customer service standards.
