The International Eatery Proposal

The International Eatery

Our group has decided on a restaurant and bar with different cuisine from around the world. We feel like this will be a big success given the diversity of the city. The restaurant will be located on Grace Street in the old Ukrops building. We will purchase half of the building and build a second story for our bar. We want to have the bar and restaurant separate so the families can enjoy quiet time downstairs and when it gets later the bar crowd can feel free to be loud. We wanted to be in a central location to entice the students living on campus as well as students who commute. The location is very close to the Broad Street parking deck along with the good size lot in front of the old Ukrops building. We want to decorate the restaurant with flags from the different countries’ cuisine we will be serving and other pieces that symbolize those cultures. We have decided on German, French, Thai and Spanish food. We felt these four will give the customers a nice variety to choose from, yet not clash with each other. Since we will be doing family style serving there could be numerous countries dishes at one table. With Richmond being a very diverse city we believe this will appeal to many people. Also it is a bunch of different tastes under one roof, whereas normally you would have to go to different restaurants. We will have a wait staff of ten on a rotating schedule with three hosts, manager, assistant and four head chefs from the different countries. We are going to advertise for chefs from different countries so we can have authentic food and from each country have at least three signature dishes. Having a limited amount of dishes cuts down on the amount of supplies and ingredients we have to stock in our fridge. We would also like to keep fresh ingredients to appeal to healthy eaters, and the taste is better. A few of our advertising ideas include, having a new country featured every month to kick up the flow of traffic, posting signs around the VCU campus and advertise in numerous publications such as, yellow pages, Val-Pak, and the Richmond Times Dispatch. We will also advertise on the radio, featuring a daily add on Q94, one of the most popular stations in the area. We want to appeal to a medium to high class of people. Our dishes have to be on the high side since we will be purchasing expensive ingredients to keep the authentic taste alive. A lot of the VCU students live nearby Richmond so hopefully they will tell their parents, who will then tell their friends. Word of mouth advertising is very important we are competing with numerous restaurants in the Richmond area. Restaurants like Edo Squids and CousCous are amazing places but they focus on only one type of cuisine. When you go out with a group of people and can’t decide on where to go, The International Eatery will solve all their problems. We are trying to send an important message to the customers. Expand your horizons and explore the cuisine of a country you are not familiar with. Many people probably don’t even know what authentic cuisine from France would entail. French fries just don’t cut it. We are also sending the message that we embrace our city. Richmond is very up and coming and with so many diverse people we have tons of room to learn and explore new cultures, why not start with their food.