Afternoon teas are a great way to grow restaurant sales
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Green Pastures Garden Centre in Norfolk won two golds in GTN’s Greatest Catering Awards – Greatest Afternoon Tea Experience and Greatest Garden Centre Catering Team (less than 150 covers). Owner James Debbage reveals how his team did it.
How important are your afternoon teas to your catering offering?
We see it as a brilliant opportunity to grow our restaurant sales and have put a lot of effort into developing it. Although we’ve only been open a year we’re already filling up all our seats at lunchtime on a regular basis. We’ve decided to develop afternoon trade when the restaurant would normally be quieter to bring extra income and footfall for the site. Having a very individual afternoon tea gives us a very unique marketing opportunity to exploit.
Do you make teas a special event?
The way we present our afternoon tea creates a real ‘wow factor’ and makes a perfect treat. We’ve produced specific afternoon tea gift vouchers and it has proved popular. Now we have an alcohol license we are looking at offering a range of alcoholic upgrades – for instance, local sparkling wine served in an ice bucket.
What’s on the menu?
We provide a very wide selection of sandwiches and cakes with every afternoon tea. We feel the wide variety is one of the things that makes it unique. Cakes are a good variety of miniatures rather than a small variety of larger ones.
Do people meet up for your afternoon teas?
We have several large groups meeting every so often – a few of these are now opting to meet for afternoon tea instead of lunch.
What makes your overall food and drinks offering so special?
We see our restaurant as one big team effort of everyone in the business and not just the guys who work in the kitchen and front of house. Some of our farm shop and garden centre staff also help out in the restaurant, and we also involve restaurant staff in working in other departments too. The garden centre staff spend a lot of time during their quieter months growing fresh and unusual ingredients for the restaurant and we’re also involving some restaurant team members in this operation too so they get to grow it as well as prepare it. Having a farm shop and a small farm also makes an incredible difference as all our activities are ‘joined up’ and involves lots of different stages of the food story. We are tremendously lucky in having a passionate and motivated team who always give 100%.
How key is catering to your overall business?
It’s huge. The restaurant is nearly 50% of our overall business and when you add farm shop sales to that it makes food and drink sales a very large slice.
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