The “menu engineers” who optimize restaurant revenue
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
Of course, that's probably out the window after all this settles down. Those types of restaurants are probably highly likely to fold.
By the way, here's a funny parody of "every trendy restaurant menu": https://www.eater.com/2014/7/24/6181765/heres-what-every-tre...
So we get to the front of the line and the hostess seats us. The waitress walks up to us and quickly realized we don't know any French. So in broken English she asks "rare or well done?". After getting all of our preferences she quickly comes back with wine and steaks with a side of this delicious green sauce.
We were all throughly impressed by the steak/sauce and quickness of service. My dad made a joke that the only thing that could make this better would be another round of steak. And low and behold a second round appears and we all laugh at the irony. All in all a great expirence, though I still don't know what that place was called nor what that sauce was, but it sure was tasty and a unique & fun expirence.
These restaurants also make it easy to split the bill as everybody has the same thing!
Do you mean virgin sauce (sauce vierge)?
It's olive oil / butter, mustard, parsley / thyme, capers, olives, often anchovies, and some other aromatic herbs.
But here is someone who claims to have found the recipe: http://www.nogarlicnoonions.com/lentrecote-restaurant-famous...
* One chicken liver
* One shallot
* One sprig fresh thyme, tarragon, parsley
* 10 cl of liquid cream
* One tablespoon of Dijon mustard
* 20 g butter
* 3 cups of water
With a half a page menu I simply know the cook/chef specialized in that, and the ingredients have a better chance of being fresh and higher quality. One great sauce is 10 times better than a full menu of random choices.
That is something you can barely ever find anywhere. It is also one of the reasons I try to avoid famous places and instead search out to the hidden parts of the city.
[2] Like 3 tables and with a giant bookshelf of interesting books.
What's funny is NYC street carts, where the entire surface of the cart is covered in "menu," including hot dogs, sandwiches, burgers, gyros, salads, Philly cheese-steaks, literally anything you can imagine.
But they all _actually_ have only 3 menu items: Chicken over Rice, Lamb over Rice, and Falafel over Rice.
Before this I didn't like salmon sashimi, and one of the dishes was like beetroot cured (i think?) salmon tartare and it was delishish and finally put me onto sashimi
The restaurant might have a 7 course tasting menu with fixed items on it for example, but if you say you're allergic to shellfish, they'll often not just remove the shellfish from your dishes, but re-engineer or fully replace the dishes that contain shellfish so that what you're getting isn't any _less_ than what someone eating shellfish would be having.
Nowadays it is more likely there would be vegetarian or vegan options even if there is still a “single” menu.
Plenty of places will have some set menus and also let people order à la carte
There is a possibly apocryphal story that Marco Pierre White was once asked for a plate of Chips, so he hand cooked them and charged the diner something like £100 for his time.
Don't worry about what can go wrong and live a little. It is an amazing experience for many.
Shared tables, food keeps being brought out in family sized bowls, serve yourself as much or as little as you like, pay when you leave. Some of the best veggies and probably the best biscuits I’ve ever had.
It was a great little egalitarian place, suits, white collar, manual labors, and ex-cons would be sitting around the table enjoying a meal.
On the other hand, if everything they make is good then you’re fine and if their food is hit and miss then who’s to say you’d have a better chance of getting something good through analysis of the menu
But to answer said question...
- You make a good recommendation, you get a good tip, that simple. Helping your table explore the menu + what they're into translates to happy customers and better $$$ for you later
- A lot of the high end items are loss leaders[1], part of the decoy effect[2], or are there just to round out the menu, e.g. how a seafood joint will have a steak or burger option for the spouse or kid or kosher person who doesn't do seafood.
- Front of house staff get told to push things depending on what's in stock or what is in season. Like, we have another shipment of meat arriving on Monday, so let's sell off as many braised spare ribs as possible to make space. A lot of our daily or weekly specials were based on what had to be tossed out in a week.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoy_effect
And it is not just the paradox of choice.
Simply, if a restaurant offers 20 different dishes, it means each dish gets 20x less attention than if you had only one choice. Less fresh ingredients, less time perfecting the recipe and preparation. Serving only one dish makes things simpler and the restaurant is going to spend more energy making sure it is worth it.
About choice. When I go to a restaurant, I just want to eat something good. But I don't know what's good, it's not my specialty. But the chef is a specialist, he knows what's good, so I want to rely on his judgment as much as possible. Like everyone, I have personal tastes, but a good chef can easily make me change my mind about things I don't like.
Usually, what I think is the best is a 3 choice menu:
The specialty, the one that gets the most love and ideally the one everone should take.
The alternative, a completely different dish for those with different personal tastes.
And another, simpler dish for the picky eater. For example, it can be vegan if none of the other two are, free of allergens, kosher,... The idea is to not let that person down if part of a group.
"Tonight, dinner will be rib eye steak. It will be cooked medium rare. If that doesn't sound good to you, please feel free to leave now."
One of my favourite places has a decently sized menu (would say 40 items on there including starters/sides/deserts) while they aren't "the best" at anything, it's really good and I love the atmosphere.
I like the flexibility and that I can invite anyone there since the selection is varied and quality is reliable. I can't call my vegan sister to a smokehouse even if their ribs are the best I tried, can't take my wife to a fish restaurant but my friends could be in the mood for fish, I have no clue what my in-laws will want to eat when I have to take them somewhere, etc.
Good chinese restaurants are the literal opposite of that philosophy: multi-page menus with hundreds of choices.
I don't want to pick between a meat I want but cooked in a way I don't care for vs a meat I don't want as much but cooked in a way I prefer. And that's why the chinese restaurants with large menus excel: they pretty much have every possible permutation and then some.
If anything, the "matrix menu" where you have X proteins in Y sauces for X*Y stir-fry combos is usually a "restaurant smell" indicating that they don't really care about the end product (satay salmon, anyone?).
What are you defining as "good"? Luxury restaurants?
Because I've been to hole in the wall restaurants in the middle of nowhere, and they'll have 20+ things on the menu and the food is generally delicious. I've been to higher end restaurants that have 8 pages or more. I've never seen anything with a tiny menu, except street stalls that only sell one or two items.
I'm definitely a person who prefers larger menus. Small menus make me worry more about what to order because it's usually 1 or 2 things I want, with 1 or 2 things I don't want in the same order. I also generally don't return because there isn't much else to try unless the few items are all appealing, which is rare. Longer menus at good restaurants keep me coming back to try new things.
And yes, higher-end restaurants do tend to have longer menus, because in China these cater mostly to large groups and entertaining businessmen, and a key part of Chinese banquets is to order way too much food -- so much so that there's now an official CCP campaign to stamp out the practice.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/china-food-waste-o...
Specialized restaurants can certainly be better at specific dishes, but at the same time, the lack of options can be detrimental. For example, my kids won't enjoy a meal all that much in a place that specializes in spicy hot pots. Or maybe one person in the party will think the food is too heavy or spicy, etc.
Big marinating dishes of beef pork and chicken
So the bigger menus were likely to address dad, mom, teen, and kiddo.
If a restaurant is just going to make four or five dishes, it starts getting perilously close to places like Chipotle.
If it's uncultured to know what you want to eat then call me a savage.
There's too much awful food in the world to force yourself to try all of it.
Not sure what you're on about here?
You're comparing bistros and restaurants with highly focused, individual dishes that they're perfected... with slop from a junk-food place like Chipotle?
Eating at a really really good restaurant is about trusting the chef to know what he's doing.
If he says there's one soup, just trust him. If it's bad, don't go back.
The uber expensive small menu bistro will get undercut by fast-food-plus. Sushi is another good example.
For years I would look and she was almost always right.
Arabic and Hebrew, on the other hand, are primarily RTL, and this does carry over to UI conventions. Menus might be laid out differently there.
Many soba restaurants use vertical text written right to left because it gives a sense of old times. Higher end traditional-style restaurants do this too.
Family restaurants and anything with western food is pretty much always written left to right.
It's also very common to see street signs (notably "construction ahead" and "beware of __" signs) using vertical right to left text.
Well books are generally vertical and right to left. Generally periodicals as well, but the internet has made more things left to right.
(I don't know if I agree with the comment you're responding to, by the way.)
It's irrelevant for computers because text on computers is basically always left to right though.
This isn't true in Japanese which is what limteary was asking about.
The primary exception is where the context of the writing itself implies a direction, e.g. text on the passenger side of a bus, or on a directional sign pointing to the left, may be written right-to-left so that the text "flows" in the same direction as its container. This would never be used for a longer text, though.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typewriter
[1] http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/websitesinmongolbi...
I’m sure they are thinking about margins, but more generally, I think the issue is probably one of volume. If you have 25% as many people, maybe you remove unpopular items from the menu so that you aren’t ordering ingredients for them. For example, I have no idea whether oysters are high margin or not, but I suspect that people aren’t ordering them much for take out, so it doesn’t make sense to have them on the menu.
Obviously there are exceptions: Burger joints don’t need to do this with hamburger patties. Or you may buy a limited quantity of something you’re 100% sure is going to sell.
Most of your favorite restaurants in places like San Francisco, Portland, and New York City engineer their menu by removing least popular menu items once a month or once a season and replace them with what they think their customers currently demand at a price to insure that the restaurant is running at the point of highest efficiency. There are other considerations such a cost of product but most restaurants increase overall demand by using analytics from the point of sale system and the most profitable dishes are not always the most popular. Engineering a kitchen -- and dining room for that matter -- to be efficient without cooks tripping over each other is another whole discussion nonetheless even this ties into what can be added to the menu.
The two biggest mistakes an independent restaurant can make is hard coding a menu and putting the word in Bistro or Basserie in the restaurant name -- the restaurant can't evolve after that. Have any of you been to La Folie on Polk and Green in Russian Hill? That restaurant first opened as a casual French Bistro but the demand was for their caviar by the ounce and Tournedos Rossini which oddly enough was not only their most popular menu item but also not on the menu. So in the mid nineties the average customer was spending $150 - $300 instead of $40 per person.
This article from Atul Gawande would lead me to believe that they(Cheesecake Factory) have probably tried it: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/13/big-med
They even have revenue forecasting models that take into account: weather, time of year, holidays etc and that article is from 2012.
PS I highly recommend that article for both the medicine to restaurant comparisons and the parallels one can draw to complicated systems in general like IT.
- A smaller menu lets the chefs focus on learning to make those dishes at the expected level of quality. These items also usually require more skill and knowledge to just be passable.
- It's not so much that fancy places have small menus, as it is that non-fancy restaurants can have bigger menus. Their kitchens can have an assembly-line style that optimizes simplicity and time, letting them hire cheap cooks. When every dish is "throw each part in the oven/fryer/pot, wait 10 minutes, put on plate," adding 50 dishes doesn't put as much strain on the cooks.
It's about efficiency.
So not to need physical menus, due to Covid.
Had wine and charcuterie: food and separate drink menu on two different QR codes.
It's not perfect, many times the checkout system is haphazard, doesn't make use of Apple Pay or anything built into the phone. Requires user to input their table number into the checkout process.
Or its just a surrogate for normal waiter / server experience and they come up to you eventually (which is fine).
People all seem willing to tolerate the experience, and all the older luddites and technophobes are still in their prepper bunkers or just not in the city.
Interesting how much the last decade of technology and proliferation has prepared us for this. QR codes, mobile phones, highly available high speed internet. Just going back 10 years in many major cities, even San Francisco and New York, this would have been much much worse to adjust to.
We've been working with one company that has integrated their web-app with our existing POS, but there's a lot of bugs with some wonky workarounds that we aren't comfortable with. They've been developing new features for us for months at no cost due to their pandemic program, however it's just not up to our CEO's expectations.
Now we're looking into switching to a completely new, modern POS that supposedly has a working order/pay from your device feature. Trouble is, the entire check has to be ordered (drinks, appetizers, entrees, desserts) all at once and paid for before it even gets sent to the kitchen. This is what the other company we've been working with has been trying to set up for us - guest sits down, scans the QR on their phone, orders at their own pace and checks out whenever they're ready - this is how our restaurant has been set up from day 1. We previously had iPads with a custom iOS app that the guests could order from. Our CEO believes this won't be an acceptable system moving forward as shared iPads aren't seen as sanitary as personal phones.
Having spent significant time in the Industry, in both Europe and the US, I honestly think this is exactly what will give Ghost Kitchens the edge over the traditional dine-in places.
(disclaimer: founder) Yes, this is literally what Zerocontact does. Contactless waitlist, menu, order, pay. Hybrid ordering so staff and guests can add items to one check. Fully supports courses. Add dessert at the end of th meal. Still, the customer has one check to pay (apple pay or google pay, or CC). We may even support your legacy POS or you can use ZC in standalone mode. It's a full order-management system for contactless on prem and off prem dining.
We're negotiating with Toast at the moment since the offer the whole deal, hardware included, other than the ability to leave the guests' tab open once their order is started from their own device.
I’m sure someone could create one that is usable, but I haven’t run into one yet.
Lose the name calling here please.
"a person opposed to new technology or ways of working."
and
"a person who fears, dislikes, or avoids new technology."
which is literally a copy and paste job from the definitions on google.
They are older than the people going out.
edit: ahhh if that one irreconcilable line dilutes my message for people here I don't really care enough about this conversation to placate whoever that got the attention of. I added to the discussion maybe others have a relatable experience. Moving on.
Also, my wife's phone was low on battery so we were on a clock. This sucked. They had batteries but no cables for an Android phone.
That business model probably did well for McDonalds when they first opened their doors. All of these restaurants have that identity too.
Wendy's - Square Burgers
Carl's Jr. Double Western Bacon
IHop - Stack of cakes
I mean it's very reasonable for most restaurants to take this time to go back to identity restaurants instead of catering to the picky people, which, let's be honest, are the ones that stopped eating out when Covid hit.
I've had wine and charcuterie: food and separate drink menu on two different QR codes.
It's not perfect, many times the checkout system is haphazard, doesn't make use of Apple Pay or anything built into the phone. Requires user to input their table number into the checkout process.
My first gut reaction to those stated prices was that the consultants hadn't adjusted their prices for inflation for at least a decade.
But then I looked at the (current menu) prices of the restaurants I went to in college and also my hometown (both in low-cost parts of the Midwest). It was only then that I realized NYC has made me accustomed to much higher prices.
Those numbers are substantially accurate in my college town and hometown. Meanwhile those numbers need to be adjusted upwards by 50-100% for NYC.
EDIT: My skimming of the article was poor; the quote refers to number of items per category not price per item per category. My anecdote remains true though.
Unfortunately, mobile phones are also notoriously dirty [2], so we still wash after handling those as well.
[1] “Slideshow: The Germiest things in restaurants: #2 Menus“ https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/food-poisoning/ss/slidesh...
[2] “ Nasty Bugs Lurking on Your Cell Phone” https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20111014/nasty-bugs...
Menu Mind Games (2009)
Investing heavily in them? What does that even mean? QR codes are free. I haven't seen one relating to restaurants menu items, in my life.
I think what killed them here is that android didn't bundle a qr code scanner by default and they never contained anything that the user actually wanted, they were just for marketers to get people on their site.
Cheesecake Factory
Bonefish
Maggianos (really, a pocket pull out?)
But, then again, so is the rest of the restaurant.
Imagine a system that maximises the health and happiness of patrons, the enjoyment and satisfaction of work by employees, and the sustainability of the business.
The people who build it will need more than menu design.
I do not suffer from alcoholism but I have met people dealing with it.