I was a fine dining chef for 17 years. If you were in San Francisco during the 90s, I might have cooked for you. A simple way to increase demand is to remove or change the least popular menu item every week or every month. This technique has been so successful for me I wouldn't waste much time doing anything else. Once I made a Napoleon pastry for a desert special while at La Folie on Polk st. which sadly closed recently. I had extra pastry cream and made Paris-Brest because we never threw out food. One waitress sold Napoleon on every table and the other waitress sold nothing but Paris-Brest. The dishes were fundamentally the same so I made both anytime I did one or the other as a special because waitstaff for reasons not explained in the article will sell nothing but one and others the other. I made cheese dishes to sell before the desert and fruit soups in the summer. This is the mid 90s and we were tracking data. The chef pulled me aside and showed me the sales from the previous month because I sold 1.2 deserts per customer.

Nonetheless, for the last six years I cooked I was a private chef on a mega yacht. People ask me if the guests told me what they want to eat. I say never because I never asked what people want to eat. I cooked what I want to eat and then make enough for the guests and crew. It is the best menu strategy. In fine dining, the customers make decisions all day long and in the case of being a private yacht chef, the guests are making million and billion dollar decisions. The last thing they want to do is have to decide what to eat for dinner. The family I cooked for rarely ate off the boat. And when they did it was because I said something like, "I hear there is a very good restaurant in St. Barts named ....," which was code for "I want the night off."

I believe the reason one waitress would sell every last Paris-Brest and the other would sell every last Napoleon was because they told the guests in the restaurant what they wanted to eat for desert. They made the decision for the guests.