To a Year of Wining, Dining & iPad Digital Menus3 min read
III Forks Jacksonville opened its doors in trendy, chic, Tapestry Park on November 17, 2009; it was the sixth III Forks location in the United States (the other five III Forks restaurants were located in Austin, Boca Raton, Dallas, Houston, and Palm Beach Gardens). The high-end, dinner-only steak house offered patrons a traditional paper wine list. Eight months later (July 2010), the local favorite steakhouse announced that it would be featuring its 350-bottle wine list on an iPad digital menus; it was the first restaurant in Jacksonville to do so. The interactive iPad digital menus featured pop-up windows that enabled patrons to obtain detailed information on each wine, including regional information and tasting notes. The proprietor, Curtis Osmond, told the Jacksonville Fine Dining Examiner that he planned to expand the new technology to feature the food offerings as well, even including embedded videos on the iPad digital menus so that guests could see the food being prepared.
For III Forks Jacksonville, implementing the new technology made perfect sense, from a practical standpoint as well. The iPad digital menus streamlines inventory management and control, saves time and money, conserves both physical and personnel resources, and improves customer service. The old paper wine list needed to be updated frequently; not only did that process itself take time, but the newly revised list had to be reprinted and the new list inserted into the holders, incurring additional time as well as paper and printing costs. With the iPad digital menus, editing the wine list when new labels and varieties of wine are added and old ones removed is fast and easy.
In the past, taking inventory of all of the bottles was a frequent time, labor, and cost-intensive ordeal; by contrast, the iPad digital menus tracks the restaurants wine inventory and updates the wine list in real time, completely eliminating the physical process. Before the new technology was implemented, servers would often have to spend time during peak hours looking for a special bottle of wine that a guest ordered, while the guest waited; the iPad digital menus eliminates this time drain as well by keeping servers apprised of the exact location of each bottle of wine – saving valuable server time, reducing wait time for patrons, and improving service.
Last month marked the restaurant’s one year anniversary with the new technology. So, how has III Forks Jacksonville fared – especially in the down economy, when restaurants around the country have felt the pinch of customers cutting back on eating out? Has the investment in the iPad digital menus technology paid off? On July 14th, the Jacksonville Fine Dining Examiner reported that III Forks had “recently acquired more than 300 new bottles of wine, expanding its already-impressive wine list to become one of the largest and most diverse offerings in Northeast Florida”! The Examiner said the entire catalogue of over 600 labels from around the world, including “a thorough collection of Bordeaux wines and one of the largest Italian selections in Jacksonville” would be featured on III Forks’ iPad digital menus.
It didn’t take a news release for customers to hear about the new additions; the new selections started selling as soon as they were entered into the iPad digital menus. III Forks’ sommelier, Jeremy Vass, told the Examiner that the restaurant had already sold a number of the new arrivals, including an $800 bottle of 2002 Lafite-Rothschild, 2 of the 4 new bottles of 1999 Valdicava, and a 1997 Barbaresco. Patrons were thrilled to see the newly acquired labels and vintages featured on the restaurant’s iPad digital menus.
Judging from the restaurant’s record-breaking growth over the past year and the incredible response to the new wine catalogue featured on its iPad digital menus, it sounds like III Forks Jacksonville is doing great!
Here’s to a year of wining, dining, and iPad digital menus! Congratulations, III Forks!
Disclaimer: This is an independent report sourced from one or more news articles and or press releases; none of the company’s, entities or technologies digressed in this report are affiliated with or a client of Aptito.
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