Indoor TV for steakhouses: how to sell drinks, cocktails and dessert on all-you-can-eat night without the server pitching every five minutes

Why steakhouses lose money on add-ons

Anyone who runs the floor knows the math: fixed price per guest, unpredictable consumption. That is how the subject came up on the Café & Tech episode about steakhouses:

"meat is very expensive these days. Even with the buffet price… some barely eat, some eat for two or three. So the margin ends up not being that big"

Add the unwritten rule of the format: the buffet cannot run out. Running out of meat on buffet night is a reputation problem, so the house produces extra — and what is left over stays left over.

"if your buffet runs out, if your meat runs out, that looks bad for the business… You produce all that perishable food… So what makes up for it? the add-on products… the drink, the beer, the soda, the juice, the cocktail."

That is where the day's result lives. Not in selling more buffet — the buffet is already sold the moment the table sits down — but in how many add-ons leave the kitchen per table. Brazil's restaurant association Abrasel reported in August 2026 that drinks are "one of the highest-turnover items on menus and a relevant driver of footfall". The argument needs no percentage: anyone running a steakhouse knows what a round of draft beer does to the final bill.

Servers have no free hands to offer

The second half of the problem is operational, and no amount of training fixes it alone. On buffet night the room is packed and the team is serving:

"buffet night is usually mayhem… servers carrying meat, one guest calling, another walking past… they will not be able to give that premium service of constantly offering the add-ons"

Then add weekend temps. Most houses bring in extra staff on busy nights — people who serve well, but who do not know the cocktail list, cannot describe the new dish and never heard about the promotion that started that day. That is exactly the gap we covered in using indoor TV to train your team: when the cut, the dish and the day's offer are playing on the dining-room screen, the staff learns by looking — including last-minute promotions that rarely reach everyone in time.

And there is a matter of etiquette that owners feel and guests never say: nobody wants to be pitched to all night. Offering is intrusive when people are mid-conversation. The screen offers without interrupting — and when the server finally reaches the table, the order is already formed.

What to show, and in what order, during service

A steakhouse has an advantage almost no other segment has: guests stay. These are not the few minutes of a counter queue — dwell time "can reach hours", as the episode put it. That changes what belongs on the screen. This is not about grabbing attention in five seconds; it is about accompanying a long meal. (If your question is how long the loop should be, it is answered in how long an indoor TV loop should last — here it is enough to note that the steakhouse window is one of the longest in retail.)

An order that works, with no stopwatch:

• Arrival: draft beer, house cocktail, juice, wine list. This is when the table decides what to drink, and that decision weighs most on the final bill.
• Mid-meal: the cut currently coming off the skewer — what it is, which part of the animal it comes from — and right after it, the à la carte portion of the same cut. Curiosity sets up the offer.
• Pairing: the wine that goes with red meat. On the episode: "there is a lot of good wine that pairs… with red meat", and most guests do not know that — nor do many servers.
• The end: dessert and coffee. It is the table's last possible order, and the most forgotten one.
• Between offers: content that holds attention without selling — a fact about the cut, the day's news, useful information (hours, payment methods, birthday booking policy).

One execution rule beats any clock: one offer per slide. A steakhouse screen runs without sound, competing with conversation and with skewers going by. A slide with three offers has none.

How to tell whether the screen is selling

Pick three add-ons — draft beer, house cocktail and dessert, for instance — and track how many are served per table, not total revenue, which rises and falls with footfall. Run a few weeks, change one variable at a time (the slide, the order or the time of day) and compare. We promise no percentage increase: when that kind of number shows up in a video or a market deck, it comes without a study behind it — treat it as a reference, never as a statistic. Per-table counting is the only number the house controls and can read.

The cocktail with a house name and the cut with a foreign one

There is a sale a steakhouse loses in silence, and it has nothing to do with price: guests do not order what they do not understand.

It applies to the cocktail list. The house names its own drink — and the name, which was meant to be a differentiator, becomes a barrier: "sometimes the guy does not order because you made your menu too fancy". The fix fits on one slide: say what is inside. It is the same problem we detailed in digital menu boards for coffee shops, where the coffee gets a gourmet name and nobody asks what it is — except that here it applies to the cocktail list, which carries a bigger margin.

It also applies to the cut. The episode brought up chorizo: a guest would not order it because he associated the name with something else, until he asked and found out it was a beef cut. Multiply that by baby beef, ancho, flank and whatever else is on the skewer. A short slide explaining the cut, followed by the portion of that same cut, answers the doubt and makes the offer right after — "you show what the cut is… and right after it, the portion".

The screen that sells the next visit

This is the most original point of the episode, and the one that barely appears in any material about screens in restaurants. On buffet night the table already decided what it came to eat. So the screen is not only there to sell today:

"the opportunity you often have with the TV is not even to sell that dish that day, because… on buffet night your place will be… packed… What is it for? For when they come back."

What belongs in that category:

• The new dish, with a full sheet: what is in it, how it is made, whether it contains gluten or lactose. Guests will not order it today — they are already on the buffet — but they come back to try it.
• Two-for-one draft night: Thursday, say. Someone in the house on Saturday sees it and plans the following week.
• The day the playground is free. The example came from personal experience on the episode: "every Wednesday the playground was free. do you think I would pay R$ 25 on another day…? I would go… on Wednesday." For families with kids, that argument decides the day of the visit.
• Sunday's special, announced on Saturday — pulling the slow day with the busy day's traffic.

This becomes a playlist by day of the week, not a stray slide: Saturday calling Sunday, Wednesday announcing Thursday's draft deal. The mechanics of building those grids — and of making each time slot start on its own — are in scheduling indoor TV by time of day.

Buffet room, à la carte room and kids area

A steakhouse rarely has a single audience, and that is where one screen becomes two.

The hybrid room is the delicate case. When buffet and à la carte share the same space and the same screen, advertising a single portion in front of guests who already paid the fixed price helps nobody. If the rooms are separate, each screen speaks to its own audience: portions and dishes on one side, drinks, cocktails and dessert on the other.

The kids area needs its own playlist. From the episode: "that side is a children's audience, you are not going to be showing drinks there… maybe a dessert… the kids plate". Treat it as good communication practice — we are not claiming a legal requirement: alcohol ads on a screen facing children do not reach that audience and bother the next table. Dessert, ice cream, the kids plate and the playground promotion pay off far better there.

Since each display point runs its own playlist, this is configuration, not construction. The full logic of splitting content by screen is in indoor TV by store zone.

Flash promotions for what cannot be left over

Perishables are the other side of the buffet math. When an item is close to expiring in the walk-in — or when a slow day leaves food behind — the screen is the fastest channel the house has to move it. The flow described on the episode is exactly that: "take a photo of the finished product, type the promotion… on every TV".

Two rules make the difference:

1. A real plate, never a fake one. "Make your dish for real" — plated the way it goes to the guest. Stock photography creates the disappointment of a dish that does not look like the picture, and that guest does not come back.
2. Shoot when the dish already exists: on the first order of the day, and the cocktail as it leaves the bar. There is no need to produce a plate just for the photo.

The technique — light, angle, how far you can improve without deceiving — is in product photos for indoor TV with your phone, and the automatic generation of a short video from those photos is in indoor TV with artificial intelligence: you write the offer and within minutes the slide is on the screens. When building the example, use a clearly fictional price ("from R$ X to R$ Y, today only") and put the real figure only in the version that goes live.

For the content between offers — the day's news, trivia, evergreen material that can stay up all year — see indoor TV with automatic news.

Birthdays in the dining room

A steakhouse is a birthday place, and the screen plays that moment well: the guest of honour's photo appears on every TV as the cake arrives. It is an experience that gets talked about at the table and filmed for social media. But it involves a photo of an identifiable person shown in a public space, and the consent has to come from the birthday guest themselves (or a parent or legal guardian, if it is a child) — not from whoever sent the photo, contrary to what the episode suggests ("have them sign a little note saying the relative provided the photo and authorises it"). The full treatment of that subject, with the statutes and the tribute formats that expose nobody, is in birthday photo on the restaurant TV: the tribute and the consent it requires.

Setting up with a single screen

No project, no construction work. The minimum path for a steakhouse that wants to start next week:

1. Use the TV already in the dining room. A regular smart TV with internet runs the JMV Indoor app, horizontally or vertically. If it is old and has no app, an HDMI device — Fire TV, Roku, Chromecast or an Android TV box — solves it without replacing the set, as we detailed in an indoor TV app on any smart TV. A professional signage panel is expensive furniture, not a technical requirement; the comparison with actual figures is in LED wall or smart TV for the storefront.
2. Run a network cable to the TV. This is the most practical advice from the episode for steakhouses: at peak, "everybody there likes to ask for the Wi-Fi", and the dining-room Wi-Fi chokes exactly when the screen needs to run. A cable alongside the power line solves it. Requirements and symptoms are in indoor TV freezing: network requirements.
3. Choose the spot by where eyes rest: the wall most tables can see, the weekend waiting area, the cashier zone. A screen where nobody looks sells nothing.
4. Build the first playlist from what already exists: a photo of the draft beer, the house cocktail, two desserts and the cut of the day. Half a dozen slides already change the room.
5. Program the week: two-for-one draft night, playground day, Sunday's special.
6. Review weekly. An expired promotion still on screen is worse than a screen turned off — guests will ask for what is up there, and they are right.

Plans, free trial and how to start

JMV Indoor is 100% cloud digital signage: playlists and scheduling are managed from the web panel or your phone, and billing is monthly per display point — the dining-room screen is one point, the kids-area screen is another.

Prices change. Always check the current plan table at jmvindoor.com before signing up.

The trial is free for 30 days, with one point and no credit card — enough time to photograph the cocktails and desserts, build the week's grid and count how many add-ons leave the kitchen per table before and after.

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