Food trends don’t always begin at restaurants and reach people. More often than not, they are embraced by restaurants after seeing their popularity among food lovers. Either way, it’s a great way to stay relevant and keep up with your customers. Granted, not every restaurant can pull off a Unicorn Frappuccino but you can always keep yourself updated with the happenings on social media. In Bangalore, for instance, there was a Millet Fair with thousands of people attending it and leaving with bags of various millets and other organic goodies. From food bloggers to fitness freaks, several people are now turning to healthier grains for their carb intake.

As a restaurant, making these food items available to people will open a window opportunities for you and make it convenient for your customers. You don’t even have to make it a permanent feature in your menu. Like the Unicorn Frappuccino, which basically is a special, running for only a few days.

Healthy grains

Agriculture minister of Karnataka, Krishna Byre Gowda has been going to great lengths to promote millets in the state. As mentioned earlier, millet is the latest fad and with the ministry, along with top chefs, have been organizing various events to spread awareness about it. Popular food bloggers too are experimenting with millets in their recipes, which has further made the grain gain momentum in the food circle in the country. Accordingly, restaurants are including them in their specials or healthy food sections so more people are aware of the options they have to make healthy choices. With fitness gurus also preaching the goodness of moving to healthier grains like millets, looks like this trend is here to stay.

Farmers’ markets/bazaar

This isn’t particularly a new concept but has been slow to catch on. However, with today’s consumer being aware of what they eat, it is a great way of bringing people into your restaurant’s premises. It is as simple as getting local cheese makers, organic farmers and others who have their own small businesses of local and organic produce and other goods to come set up up shop at your restaurant’s bazaar. Make it a monthly event and see how customers will look forward to attending it. A little shopping and a lot more eating makes for a great day.

Tasting menus

You don’t need to be a big fancy restaurant to have tasting menus. If pubs can have a tasting menu for their beers, maybe your restaurant can too. There was once a biryani restaurant in Bangalore in the early 2000s called Biryani Merchant that did a small tasting menu for customers which comprised three kinds of their biryani for a set price. After which one could order their favourite kind. That’s one way of going about it. If not, simply stick to a tasting menu for a fixed price where you give customers a variety of dishes in small (tasting) portions which may include chef’s specials or signature dishes. If your restaurant is popular for desserts or if you have a casual cafe style establishment, then you could do a tasting menu for dessert. Lots of options are out there for you work with.

Photogenic dishes

We recently wrote about how dishes at restaurant can be made photogenic so customers are excited to share pictures on Zomato, Instagram and other social media platforms. You can open any of these sites to see a plethora of gorgeous dishes which make them very popular with the younger folks. Even simple dishes like tikkas and risottos are made to look great so their pictures wind up on the internet. More photos means more visibility for your brand and by extension more customers. Not just the food, but drinks can be made photogenic too. Special cocktails with pretty garnishes in quirky looking glasses are definitely winners.

New cuisines

Hold on. We’re not suggesting you change your menu, but adding a couple of new dishes in your specials from another cuisine (if your style of restaurant/menu has room for it) may bring in curious customers. If you’re already serving multiple cuisines, bringing in a couple of special dishes will only be good for business. A fine way to incorporate such dishes with context would be to try including seasonal produce in them. Mangos, for instance, are in season. Mango special desserts from different cuisines for sure sounds like a must-try.

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All of these little tricks are definitely something you can try at your restaurant. But unless you spread the word via social media and advertising, no one’s going to know about them. If you can manage to get your customers’ foot in the door, you have this in the bag already.