Zori is a restaurant in Iași with a concept of its own - “fain dining”: careful, refined cooking without the stiffness of classic fine dining. The food was already why people came. We worked with the team so that every guest gets the same good evening, whatever the day, the table or whoever is serving them.
5 stages, the same process as in clinics
6 deliverables for the team
1 starting question: what is the guest actually experiencing?
In a restaurant, guests don’t just judge the plate. They judge everything: how easy it was to book, how they were welcomed, whether they understood the menu, how long they waited, how the wine was recommended, how a small problem was handled and how they left.
We started from the same question we use in clinics: what is the guest actually experiencing? - and followed the answer across the whole evening, not just at the table.
The concept was clear in the kitchen. The goal was for guests to feel it from the first minute to the last.
Audit and guest types
We assessed every moment of the evening - booking, welcome, seating, the menu, recommendations, the pace of service, the bill, the goodbye and what happens online afterwards - through observation, mystery-guest visits and interviews with the team and management.
The couple celebrating, the group of friends, the business guest, the tourist looking for “the good place in town” - each arrives with different expectations and different worries. We described them from interviews and observation, so the team can recognise them in the first few minutes.
The journey and the standards
We mapped the guest journey from the first search to the review and marked the key moments: the first minute at the door, presenting the menu, the recommendation, the moment something goes wrong, the bill and the goodbye. For each one, we also looked for the “wow” opportunity.
We turned the insights into concrete standards for the floor and the bar: how we welcome, how we present the menu and the concept, how we recommend without “selling”, how we manage waiting and how we fix a problem. Plus message templates for bookings and replies to reviews.
Training alongside the team
We worked with the floor and bar team on communication, on how to make a recommendation and on service recovery, with exercises built on real situations from the restaurant. The standards also went into onboarding for new colleagues, so the experience doesn’t depend on who is on shift.
The voice of guests and the team
We collected guest feedback in rounds - short surveys and interviews we ran ourselves, as a third party - and read reviews against the moments of the journey. In parallel, a team experience study showed what helps and what gets in the way during service.
The cycle starts again
The data from each round confirms or corrects the direction. The team now knows what to watch, how to read feedback and how to adjust the standards when the menu, the season or the people change.
More than it seems. In both, people choose with their emotions, come back when they feel expected and recommend when something stayed with them. That’s why the process and deliverables were identical to those in our clinic projects - only the moments and the vocabulary changed.
No pitch and no standard deck. You tell us what your customers experience today, and we tell you honestly where we see the biggest opportunities - and whether Fler is the right fit.
