“Culinary Confessions” is a series that opens the books on our eating habits and shares our shopping, cooking, dining and diet strategies with you.

We sample a LOT of different restaurants and food shops, so we interact regularly with businesses and staffs, as well as their websites and social media.

Prior to most visits to physical stores, we research opening hours, menus, customer reviews and more to gather as much information as possible to make a good decision on what and where we want to eat.

From all of our shopping and eating experiences, we’ve gathered a list of issues we often encounter with establishments and have formed some suggestions for how business leaders can better address those challenges we face as customers. As foodies, we want to have every opportunity to eat the great food you make!

Here are a few of our top recommendations.

1. Keep your hours of operation up to date on your website and social media. We often find that we skip a restaurant or dessert shop because we can’t tell when it’s open. We don’t want to drive somewhere to eat and find it’s not open. Sometimes we decide where to run other errands based specifically on where we want to eat that day. It’s crucial to have clear days and times you’re open on every site and social page you own.

2. List your phone number atop your website and in your social media profiles. If we have questions about your hours or other information, we want to know how to contact you. When other information is unclear and we can’t call or message a restaurant, we look elsewhere to eat.

3. Be responsive to messages on your Facebook page. It’s common these days that a Facebook page is truly the online front door for a food business because it’s more cost-effective than paying for a professional website. Therefore, we often want to message stores through Facebook pages. Sometimes a page has no message button on it. Other times, we message a day in advance and never get a response. This is another thing that leads to us eating elsewhere.

4. Post an accurate menu with prices. After being open, a restaurant is most likely to make us visit when we see a menu with options and prices we like. When we can’t tell what a dining establishment serves and how much items cost, it’s likely we’ll have doubt about whether we want to spend our money there and come visit.

5. Give us time to order in your business. We enjoy food so much that we’re very calculative about what we eat when we visit a shop. Oftentimes we find that cashiers at the counter and servers at the table rush us to order our food, and that causes us a lot of anxiety. Business owners, consider ways you can encourage your cashiers and servers to take their time in working with customers. As simple as it sounds, feeling comfortable to take a few moments with the menu makes a huge difference in how much we enjoy a food experience. When we reflect on our trips to businesses, the interactions with staff are a major factor in whether we return.

These are some of our most common experiences that we want to share with restaurants. For customers, do you have other tips for businesses? For business owners and food service professionals, do you have advice for customers as we interact with you? We’ve all got to eat, so we might as well work together to enjoy it!