Average spend per head of €25: why your restaurant needs volume
18 October 2026 · 3 min read
An average spend per head of €25 means every seat has to be filled four times. Here's how reviews keep that steady flow of guests coming.
With an average spend per head of €25, the numbers work very differently than for a dinner restaurant aiming for €50 to €100. The food isn't smaller and the work isn't any lighter. But guests simply see lunch as cheaper than dinner, and that perception shapes your entire business model.
Michiel Huysmans of Teds All Day Brunch puts it bluntly: if your spend is lower, you need more guests to hit your revenue target. At Teds, that means every seat at some locations is filled at least four times on a weekend day. Four times. If that doesn't happen on a Saturday, that revenue is gone. A dinner restaurant can still save a quiet evening with a few tables that order big. A brunch spot at €25 a head simply doesn't have that buffer.
And that's where many owners with one to five locations run into trouble. They focus on the bill: upselling, adding a pricier dish to the menu, offering an extra drink. It helps a little, but you can't shake the price perception of lunch and brunch. A guest expecting to pay €25 isn't going to pay €45 because you added a truffle toast. The real lever lies elsewhere, and it kicks in before the guest even walks through the door.
Volume starts with the search
If you need to turn every seat four times a day, you need a constant stream of new guests. A large share of them find you through Google. Someone searches "brunch near me" on a Sunday morning, sees three places in the local results and picks one within ten seconds. That choice depends on your ranking, your star rating and the number of recent reviews. With a low average spend per head, that visibility is no longer a side issue. Your entire revenue model depends on it.
Many owners assume good reviews will come naturally if the food is good. They won't. Happy guests walk out and forget about it. Unhappy guests do write. If you run on volume, you have lots of happy guests every day, and therefore lots of missed reviews. That's ranking you leave on the table every single week.
Count guests, not bills
Take a 40-seat brunch spot that turns its tables four times at the weekend. That's 160 guests a day, well over 300 in a single weekend. If you don't ask anyone for a review, maybe a handful will write one unprompted, often the ones who had to wait a long time. If you ask every guest at the right moment, shortly after they pay, via WhatsApp, SMS or email, your review count grows in line with your volume. With a low spend, each guest is worth less at the till, but just as much as a review.
Three leaks in the volume machine
In practice, we see the same three leaks again and again at venues under €30 per head. One: nobody asks for reviews systematically, so your visibility doesn't grow with your footfall. Two: negative experiences go straight onto Google for everyone to see, when you could have resolved them privately. Three: reviews go unanswered for weeks, because nobody has time on a packed Saturday to respond on Google, TripAdvisor and Facebook.
Why doing it by hand doesn't scale
A venue running four sittings a day doesn't have a manager who'll sit down in the evening to answer forty reviews. With multiple locations, it becomes completely impossible. That's why we let AI agents handle this work: asking for reviews at the right moment, catching criticism privately first, posting replies automatically and keeping your Google Business Profile active with posts. Your team stays on the floor where they belong.
With an average spend per head of around €25, you don't win with a pricier menu. You win by filling enough seats every day, and that starts with how you show up on Google. AfterTheTable builds the AI agents that keep your reviews and online visibility in order automatically, so your volume doesn't depend on whoever happens to have time after closing.
Topic:Costs & revenue
Video transcript
So you have a little bit more the evening side of hospitality, which basically works with, let's say, an average spend that they hope to achieve of between, let's say, €50 and €100. And for us, this average spend is lower, not due to the amount of food that you eat, but still due to the perception, let's say, also of the guest that lunch is cheaper than dinner. And so we strive for an average spend of, let's say, €25 per person.
Which then, if you look at the amount of chairs that we have, means that, yeah, at some locations, specifically at the weekend, every seat will be filled at least four times. Because of, luckily, the amount of guests that want to come and visit us, but also because of the amount of revenue we need to make it all worth our while. Because if your spend is lower, you just need more quantity to reach your revenue goals.
