#2 Read More (Field Analysis Blog, Bundle 2)

     This blog post was one of the more difficult posts for me to tackle. The topic is to read more, but since many of you may know I am doing my unit two bundle on my uncle's restaurant. So my read more for this blog post is going to be a little unique. I read a few of the reviews for my uncle's restaurant at Yelp.com. I decided to give everyone a summary of the good, the bad, and the ugly reviews. I also borrowed a text book from my girlfriend who is in the hospitality and tourism management major at Umass. The text book has a lot of information on the food and beverage industry. I also read through a couple of recipes for food that is made at my uncle's restaurant.
      On Yelp.com there were about 25 reviews of my uncle's restaurant. The overall rating of the restaurant was three and a half out of five stars. Most people generally said that service was really friendly and attentive. The food was decent and moderately priced. A lot of people also commented on how generous the wine pours are. Many people also consider this place "convenient" and "good, comfortable, standby place". There were not many horrible reviews, but there were a few, just as you would expect with any place. You can't always make everyone happy!
        In my girlfriend's textbook I read through a few things about the food and beverage industry. There is a lot more put into owning and running a restaurant than I originally thought. There are so many components that you have to have when running a restaurant, you have to do advertising, safety for food and people, a place, a liquor license, and much, much more. Not only those basic things but you have to figure out a layout to your restaurant, hire reputable people to run the business when you aren't around, and make sure you hire professional and trustworthy staff. Something I didn't realize is how much thought you have to put in to the menu and how the prices of food and liquor fluctuates. How you have to refill things such as napkins and send them out to a storage place, there is so many things that I didn't realize my uncle does. He makes it look a lot easier than it sounds, that's for sure!
       The last thing I did was look through a few recipes online for some of the things he has in the restaurant. I looked up recipes for baked lasagna and shrimp scampi. Both are meals that I thought would be very complicated to make and take a long time but don't. I talked to my uncle and he says the lasagna is prepared at night a day in advance so it can just be popped into the oven and cooked, the shrimp scampi he told me, was quite easy. All you do is sautee everything in a pan with some sauce and add some shrimp and boom, you have your shrimp scampi. I once again, thought this would have been the more complicated part of owning a restaurant but clearly I was wrong. Through reading more about my uncle's restaurant and about the food and beverage industry I have learned so much more than I thought I would have learned. I thought I knew it all, but clearly I didn't!

Works Cited

Chelo. "Lasagna." Allrecipes.com - Recipes, Menus, Meal Ideas, Food, and Cooking Tips.   

Allrecipes.com. Web. 29 June 2011. <http://allrecipes.com/recipe/lasagna/detail.aspx>.

"Crossroads Cafe - Acton, MA." Rev. of Crossroads Cafe, by Yelp.com. Yelp.com. Web. 29

June 2011. <http://www.yelp.com/biz/crossroads-cafe-acton>.

Walker, John R. "Food & Beverage." Introduction to Hospitality. Upper Saddle River, NJ:

Prentice Hall, 2001. Print.

Watkins, Lori. "Shrimp Scampi Recipe." Allrecipes.com - Recipes, Menus, Meal Ideas, Food,

and Cooking Tips. Web. 29 June 2011. <http://allrecipes.com/recipe/shrimp-scampi-

3/detail.aspx>.