The Cruise Ship Days Are the Ones That Break the Phone

A Saint John restaurant does not have one trading pattern, it has two. There is the ordinary week, and there is the morning a ship is in and uptown fills with several thousand people who all want lunch inside the same ninety minutes. The phone is the first thing to fail.

This is written for the owner of a restaurant, a takeout counter or a pizzeria in Saint John, NB.

Uptown restaurants around the City Market and the Germain and Princess Street blocks live with that swing all season. Staffing for the peak is expensive and staffing for the average means turning trade away on the days that actually pay for the winter. An ordering page absorbs the difference without hiring anyone: orders queue themselves, in order, with the modifiers already chosen, while the kitchen keeps cooking.

The setup is a photograph. You send in your menu as it is printed and the page comes back built, with every size and every option read off it. Nothing is retyped by hand, which is the part that normally kills these projects before they start — an owner who has to key in four hundred modifier combinations after close simply never finishes.

Seasonality is also why the commission model stings here. A platform taking a percentage takes the most on precisely the days you were counting on, and takes it again next summer. EnAffaire for Restaurants is $49.99 CAD a month, flat. The ship days cost the same as the quiet Tuesday, which means the upside of a good season stays in the restaurant.

Menus move with the season too, and the page moves with them. Pull the winter menu, put up the summer one, change a price when the lobster price changes — you do it yourself, from your phone, without booking a call with anyone.

Checkout runs through RKP Atlantic’s own payment processing, so the ordering page and the card side are the same relationship — one number to call, not a queue of companies.

The Saint John City Market is a particular case, because its tenants trade from stalls with very little counter space and a crowd that moves in waves. There is nowhere to put a queue and no room to hold a phone to your ear. Order-ahead is not a convenience in that setting so much as a way of using the only floor space you have for serving rather than for people standing still.

What changes on day one is straightforward. Orders arrive as tickets with the options already chosen and the money already taken, in the sequence they were placed. On a slow Tuesday you will barely notice it. On the morning a ship is in, it is the difference between serving the crowd and apologising to it.

Getting the link in front of people in Saint John takes very little. It goes on your Google listing and your Facebook page, and on a card at the counter or in the window — which is where a visitor with an hour ashore and a phone already in their hand will actually look. Regulars pick it up quickly, because ordering ahead beats queueing on a ship day.

Online ordering from EnAffaire for Restaurants is $49.99 CAD per month plus applicable tax, with no setup fee and no commission on orders. You can send a photo of your own menu and see your ordering page built on the real storefront before deciding anything — no account, no card.