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business basics
Your Menu is a Blank Slate –
MAKE IT WORK FOR YOU EDITOR’S NOTE: COVID has changed most everything for restaurants and their customers. The format and content of menus, for example, have been altered. As a December 2021 SmartBrief story about 2022 trends reports, “Supply chain challenges brought on by the pandemic are forcing many chefs and restaurant operators to change menus on the fly and get creative with whatever ingredients they are able to get. The new year will likely bring sweeping changes to menus to accommodate rising food costs and focus on local ingredients that are more reliably available.” Both Technomic and the National Restaurant Association also cite streamlined menus as a top 2022 industry trend. To find out more about how restaurants can optimize menus this year, we turned to Izzy Kharasch, president of Hospitality Works, Inc., a Chicago area restaurant and bar consulting firm. Here he shares some tips with el Restaurante readers.
| BY IZZY KHARASCH | Your menu is the single most effective marketing piece your restaurant has to offer. A menu that is done well can increase the check average by more than 20 percent! This means that you can develop a great menu and increase your current sales by 20 percent without having to bring in one more guest. I am always amazed at restaurants that have an 8½ x11 sheet of white paper, filled with spelling and grammar errors, that they call a menu. The same owners are then surprised when only a few items sell, and the overall check average is far below expectations. Low check averages mean more turnover of staff, and in today’s world that is a real problem.
WHO ARE YOU? Restaurants in the planning stages, and even those that have been open for years, have a common problem:
They lose their focus on who they are. Each owner is trying to please everyone and, by doing so, is creating a menu that is too large with too many items and not enough focus on the concept. In a recent consultation with a Mexican restaurant owner, we developed a menu based on the demographics of a medium-sized midwestern city. This meant that we considered the demographics of the potential customers in the area, their income, age, family size, etc. We created a very focused and well-rounded menu. In the appetizer section we cut down the offerings from twelve to eight. We kept the top eight sellers and then did some new plating to give the items a new look. Under soup/salad there was only one soup and one salad. To give the menu a more healthy-option spin we added 4 salads and another soup. Once the menu was complete the owner came back and wanted JAN/FEB/MAR 2022
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