Getting a Restaurant Ready for Ramadan in Qatar

For most of the year your sales spread across the day. In Ramadan they compress into two spikes: iftar, which arrives all at once at sunset, and suhoor, which runs late into the night. The hours between are close to dead.

This matters more than the total volume. A shop that sells the same amount over four hours instead of twelve needs different prep, different staffing and a kitchen that can push three times its normal rate for a short burst. Planning for the month total rather than the shape of it is the mistake that turns a good Ramadan into a chaotic one.

A kitchen that handles forty items comfortably at normal pace will not handle forty items when every order arrives in the same twenty minutes. The shops that cope best go into Ramadan with a deliberately shorter menu.

• Keep the items that sold well last Ramadan specifically, not last month
• Drop anything with long à la minute cooking time — it becomes the bottleneck
• Favour dishes that can be part-prepped in the afternoon and finished fast
• Consider a fixed iftar set — it flattens prep, speeds service and is easier to cost
• Check margins before you print: a set menu priced on instinct can lose money at volume

Your par levels are set for a normal week. In Ramadan the usage rate changes but the supplier's lead time does not — and suppliers themselves run reduced hours, so the gap between ordering and receiving usually gets longer, not shorter.

1. 1Recalculate par levels using last Ramadan's usage, not this month's
2. 2Confirm each supplier's Ramadan delivery days and cut-off times in writing
3. 3Order long-life and dry goods early, before everyone else does
4. 4Keep fresh items on a shorter cycle — over-ordering perishables is the classic Ramadan waste
5. 5Set a mid-month review point to correct anything you got wrong in week one

Working hours are reduced for fasting employees under Qatar labour law during Ramadan. Build the rota around that constraint from the start rather than discovering it in week one, and confirm the current rules — they are worth checking each year rather than assuming.

Practically, the shape of the day means two distinct crews rather than one long shift: a team that preps through the afternoon and runs iftar, and a smaller team that carries suhoor into the night. Trying to stretch one crew across both is how you get mistakes at 2am.

Everyone orders at once and everyone wants to eat at the same minute. That is not a cooking problem, it is a sequencing problem, and the shops that handle it well solve it before the day starts.

• Take pre-orders during the afternoon so the kitchen has a queue before the rush lands
• Set tables and lay out drinks and dates in advance — no one should be doing that at sunset
• Route kitchen tickets by station so the grill and the cold section are not reading the same list
• Agree in advance who runs the pass and who talks to customers; ambiguity costs minutes
• Expect delivery apps to spike at the same moment — decide beforehand whether you cap them

One detail worth checking before the month starts: whether your kitchen tickets print in the language your kitchen actually reads. Under normal pace a mis-read ticket costs a minute. During iftar it costs the table.

The most valuable thing you can do for next Ramadan takes twenty minutes at the end of this one: note what sold, what you threw away, where the service broke, and which staffing pattern worked. Next year that note is worth more than any checklist.

If your POS keeps hourly sales, item-level history and a wastage log with reasons, most of that note writes itself — you are reading a report rather than trying to remember a month that went by in a blur.