Wednesday 10 January 2018

We are Looking for a Restaurant Manager - Is it you?




Restaurant/Brasserie Manager, Portsmouth

We are looking for an enthusiastic, passionate, hard-working and committed Restaurant Manager to help us launch, staff, publicise and run successfully and profitably a brand new brasserie restaurant that is part of the LSI Portsmouth building and is shortly to open in the heart of Portsmouth’s university quarter.

This is a fantastic opportunity for a Restaurant Manager with energy and ambition who has the drive and passion for delivering great food, outstanding customer service and helping us host evening cultural and social events. 

As Manager, you will look to maximize the financial performance of the brasserie as well as the quality of food and service and to manage individual team members’ training and development. The Manager will report directly to the Principal of LSI and also to its owners, who will have specific events and services they will be running in the brasserie. You will need to be not just a manager of a team, but also a flexible team player who will work closely with LSI’s Principal and other staff to ensure the vision for the restaurant, combined with its profitability, is achieved.
Bring us experience of managing people and driving business performance, together with a passion for great food and great service and a love of success and in return we’ll share a piece of our success with you. 

Your main responsibilities will include:
  • Day-to-day management of the restaurant and team, particularly the Head Chef and waiting staff
  • Providing excellent customer service
  • Doing regular stock-takes and ordering as necessary
  • Handling deliveries
  • Maintaining the condition of beer and wine and food stocks
  • Overseeing or liaising with the kitchen
  • Keeping up to date with licensing legislation, liaising with the Principal of LSI and relevant authorities and taking overall legal responsibility for the premises
  • Enforcing health and safety rules
  • Adhering to budgets, increasing profits and managing cash flow and finances
Essential
·      Experience of managing or co-managing a restaurant, bar or café
  • License to serve alcohol
  • Excellent presentation and front-of-house skills and interpersonal excellence
  • Excellent understanding of the catering industry and best practice within it
  • Ability to work up to 6 days a week when required and the flexibility to work unsociable hours
  • Complete working knowledge of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages
  • Knowledge of administrative and IT systems and procedures for running a restaurant/café/bar
  • Knowledge of suppliers within the Portsmouth area
  • Excellent team management skills, including leading by example and setting high standards
  • Good working knowledge of Health and Safety and Food Safety
  • Excellent communication, time management and organisational skills
  • Flexible and enthusiastic approach to the role
  • Passion for delivering exceptional customer service
·         Ability to work under pressure with a smile on the face

Desirable:
-       Previous experience of running or overseeing evening cultural and social events
-       Network of known and trusted local suppliers of food and drink in Portsmouth
-       Good contacts in the local community of Portsmouth
-       Cultural awareness and sensitivity when dealing with international students

Starting salary - £24,000 plus generous Profit-Related Bonus.

Applicants should send a CV and covering email explaining why you are interested and suitable for the role to the Principal of LSI Portsmouth, Andrew Edwards: Andrew@lsi-portsmouth.co.uk by Wednesday 24th January. The role will commence as soon as possible and the first task will be to recruit a Head Chef.

Thursday 4 January 2018

Look who visited us over the holidays ho ho




So here we are in 2018 - A very Happy New Year to you unless you are a spambot ;-)
One of the 'pleasures' of managing a blog in today's competitive market is keeping all the rubbish off the site.  
Everyone is vying for your attention (even us) and some will resort to any means to get their views.


The only reason for posting them below is for amusement, LSI Portsmouth is a language school that teaches English.  The comments below are so obviously fake and not relevant to the post they have commented on that they raise a smile (if you are in the mood).
One of the key interesting points is that these comments all came over the Christmas holidays and almost without exception were posted on two blogs.  'Where are they now? Hiwa from Kurdistan' was a blog about a former student of ours, who went on to Portsmouth University and had an Art exhibition.
Another popular post to spam is 
'Where ever I lay my hat, that's my home' which was about a new student house that LSI set up.  The final smile comes with the last one shown below - which was purely a picture wishing everyone a happy new year.

If you have a slightly warped sense of humour, have a look below and have a smile.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx


For anyone interested, here are a variety of terms and their definitions of what happens.

Splog or Spam Blog is a blog that is created purely for linking to other websites. Some common features of spam blogs are; Rubbish, junk, meaningless or repetitive content. Articles on similar topics are often repeated using a few targeted keywords throughout the content, generally very noticeably not naturally.

Spamdexing, from “spam” and “indexing,” is the practice of search engine spamming. Search Engines are how people find blogs.  It is a form of SEO spamming. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, having your website optimized, or attractive, to the major search engines for optimal indexing.

A splog (spam blog) is a fake blog created purely to promote affiliated Web sites, which when following the links below (if they are published) are always completely fake and have the sole purpose of skewing search results and artificially boosting traffic.