Hello chefs, This is Chef's PSA Podcast.
I'm your host Andre Natara. On today's episode, we're going
to talk menus and creativity. Stay tuned.
So before we get into it, brief update For those of you that are
looking for the book series that I have on Chef's PSA.
Those books have officially been translated into Spanish, so for
those of you that needed them in Spanish, they're now available.
Now that I've finished doing that, my next project is I'm
going to start translating the books into Italian, and I'm also
going to create another ebook for free.
I'll give it away on the three-part series that I did on
Food Cost. A lot of people really enjoyed
that podcast series. A lot of people told me they
learned more about money and finances than they ever had in
their life. So if that's something that
you're interested in, go back and listen to that three-part
series on food cost. And I'll create an accompanying
guide based off what was said in that three-part series.
So I just put up a poll on Instagram and it was what was
today's podcast going to be about?
It was going to be about interviewing best practices or
the journey that one has to take to become a chef.
Or was it going to be about menus and creativity?
Menus and creativity one, polls are closed.
So that's what we're going to talk about on today's podcast is
creating menus, what my process is when I create menus and how
the creative process ties into. I did a video on Instagram the
other day, which was part of a class that I had done during the
pandemic. It was called how to lead like
an executive chef or how to manage like an executive chef.
And we went, you know, we treated it like master class and
we went through every single aspect of running a hotel and
menu engineering was a part of that.
So I did a small little clip of that and I put it up on social
media and it talked about the 7030 rule or the 8020 rule.
And I was actually surprised by how much good feedback I
received on that. I didn't realize that that was
such a foreign concept to people.
So I talked about, you know, creating a menu that 80% of it
or 70% of it are items that are going to do the majority of the
heavy lifting on the menu. It's everything that's going to
sell what I like to call the fastball down the middle and
then 20 or 30% depending on how you break that down is going to
be your area to play and create. So I do want to talk about that.
I also want to talk about the creative process and how that
ties in to building your own menu.
Now before we get into all of this, I will say not every
restaurant is the same and not every kitchen is the same and
it's not a one-size-fits-all. What works for one restaurant
doesn't necessarily work for another restaurant.
And and you have to use a little bit of intelligence to figure
out like, hey, this what you said applies to what I'm doing,
but this definitely doesn't. So I'm going to trust that you
all are going to take what is useful and specific to your
restaurant and discard what is not and maybe just help a friend
out who might need it. But not everyone's going to need
everything I say. So first thing when you're
creating a menu, I think the first thing that you have to
discover is what your brand identity is for the restaurant
that you're creating a menu for. And there's a lot of different
ways to do this. Some people have a brand
statement or a mission statement.
They have a vision board, but regardless of what that is, you
need to establish parameters of what falls into the box of your
restaurant and its menu and what doesn't.
Because where I see a lot of chefs go wrong is that they
create really delicious food or not delicious food.
And they put it on the menu where it doesn't make any sense.
And the example I'll give is you have an Italian restaurant and
you're putting tacos on it like it.
That just doesn't make sense for you to have on your Italian
restaurant. Or vice versa, you have a
Mexican restaurant and then you go put pasta carbonara on it.
That doesn't make sense. So the first thing that you need
to do is you need to identify what the guardrails are for your
restaurant. Because a restaurant has to have
an identity. It can't be something
one-size-fits-all for everybody. A lot of restaurants are
starting to fall into that category because they don't
identify who they are, what their identity is, what is the
brand that they're trying to go for.
And so they end up putting whatever's trendy on the menu,
and it just becomes this messy menu of a whole bunch of things
that really don't make sense. To give you a good example of
what I mean, there was a period in time where everyone had a
cheese border charcuterie board, Brussels sprouts, and we just
called it New American Kitchen. So I get it.
You just want to throw whatever's trendy, whatever was
in Bon Appetit for the week. And we're just going to say it's
New American and it's going to stick.
And yes, that food is delicious, but it didn't really have an
identity, and those restaurant concepts sometimes can be
shortlived. So really good exercise that I
did to identify what is the brand as we got in a room and we
put all the stakeholders in the room.
So anyone that has a vested interest in the restaurant and
we said what is the restaurant and we create 2 columns.
It is this, it is, you know, we listed out 1010 things that we
felt identified the restaurant and said OK, if it falls in the
category of these 10 things, it could go on the menu.
But if it doesn't, then it shouldn't even be discussed.
So again, we're going to use the Italian restaurant as the
example. If you said your restaurant,
again the identifying words, it's Italian local seasonal from
Sicily focused on seafood. Let's just say we're using those
five. If someone came and said OKI
have this great, also buco dish from a different part of Italy,
well then that shouldn't go on the menu.
It's not seafood, it's not Sicilian, it wasn't local.
So even though it is Italian, it doesn't fall into the parameters
of what that menu is. So you have to clearly identify
what the guardrails are for your restaurant.
And I'm not saying you can't ever color outside the lines,
but you need to have some sort of predictability for your
customer coming in that they could look at your website and
it says Italian coastal Sicilian seafood restaurant.
They say, I kind of get it, I I think I know what I'm going to
walk into. They're not going to go to your
Italian coastal Sicilian restaurant and expect you to
have ahi tuna tacos on it, right?
Some common sense needs to be involved in this menu creation.
So first thing you have to do is identify what the guardrails are
for the restaurant. And then there's the
conversation of what level are you trying to go for, right?
Are you just going for the local neighborhood restaurant or are
you going for something extremely high end?
Are you pushing for Michelin 3 star?
Are you pushing for just, you know you want to be busy and you
want to feed the neighborhood? Again, very different ends of
the spectrum. If you're going for the three
star versus neighborhood, you would have put something that's
you'd expect that a three star Michelin restaurant on the
neighborhood restaurant and you wouldn't put something from the
neighborhood restaurant on the extremely high end menu, at
least not without adding a lot of finesse and Polish to it.
It has to fit the concept so your customers again can come in
and know what to expect. You have to approach this from a
business mindset first, right? So establishing what the
guardrails are is establishing what the business mindset is for
the restaurant. We're going to talk about
creativity here in a SEC, but let's kind of establish the
framework, The bones business first, right?
As we talked about, it's the lifeblood of any restaurant to
make sure there's money coming through.
Now every restaurant is going to be different.
Like I said, some restaurants apply the 444 rules.
So like 4 starters, 4 main courses for desserts.
Yeah, that's that's a smaller type restaurant.
Some people are going to go into a tasting menu.
Only some people might have a large menu with like 50 items on
it. You know, every single
restaurant is going to approach it differently.
But when you're creating a menu, a good way to look at it is the
amount of inventory and the amount of means and plus that
you need to create the menu. There's a lot of factors that
you have to consider. So you have to consider how much
inventory do you need to execute this menu?
How many cooks do you have on the line to execute the food
that you're trying to put out? I'm going to get off the
subject, but at one point in my career I was the chef of a
restaurant where we were doing a tasting menu and it was, it was
complex and we were punching above our weight.
What I mean by that is we were we were looking at like what El
Bulli was doing is like we got to be as good as El Bulli.
Yeah, this is when bubble food was all the rage and what we
were trying to do with like 5 cooks was just not feasible.
It was it was not realistic to do that level of food with only
five people tasting menu only and all the other things that we
had to deal with, right. And what ended up happening is,
you know we spread ourselves too thin And then what we were
trying to execute, we just executed it sloppy just because
we didn't have enough people to execute it well.
Where you see that where a lot of chefs are pushing to really
achieve the most that they can with whatever goal they have in
their specific market. And they spread themselves too
thin and they spread their team too thin and it ends up not
working out very well because there's only so many hours in a
day and there's only so much a human being can do.
Now that doesn't mean that you shouldn't push yourselves to
excellence. Sometimes I would go into
meetings with people like we'd have menu meetings and I was
ambitious. So I'd say I want to do this,
this, this, this, this, and I'd get pushed back from some of my
sous chefs and be like, that's too hard, It's too ambitious,
this, that and the other. And I would get frustrated and I
would say I don't need to be surrounded by a bunch of people
telling me what we can't do. I need to be surrounded by
people telling me what we can do, what can we achieve.
If we want to be the best, we need to be able to push and
saying we can't do it. We're not going to have any
success behind it. A lot of times, like I needed
some people to push back on me, but other times I needed to push
them a little bit because sometimes, sometimes as the
chef, you have to know where that line is.
You have to know that you've pushed your team too far and
they're on the edge of breaking and and it's just not healthy or
you haven't pushed far enough, right.
And you know, take a take a good look around your kitchen.
Are people busy? Are they screwing off on their
phone half the day? Well, then you could probably
push harder, right? I mean, use some common sense
and some discretion when you're designing your menus.
Now when we're talking about what's going to go on the menu.
So again we we to discuss the guardrails that someone needs to
have on the menu. So everything that goes on the
menu has to pass the test of does it fall on the brand and in
in the guardrails of what we're trying to achieve.
Once that's been taken care of, then we need to say okay, the
8020 rule, what I was talking about earlier is like 80% of
your dishes should be familiar because that's going to carry
the bulk of your sales. So 80% of the dishes on the menu
should be easy for someone to understand.
It shouldn't be so complex that they don't know what they're
looking at like. The expression goes chefs
cooking for other chefs or chefs cooking to impress themselves.
If 80% or 100% of your menu is chefs cooking for chefs or chefs
cooking to impress themselves and it's not in the right
neighborhood, most likely you're going to fail.
The the reality is, is you are not going to be able to serve
that super intricate food in every type of setting, right?
There has to be a little bit of common sense in determining
what's going to go on your menu. So like I said, 80% of the
people that are coming in, they're going to have simple
pallets. They're going to order the
things that are familiar to them.
You know, empires can be built off chicken parm or a hamburger
or really good pasta or really good tacos, like the basics do
well for a reason. And to not have the basic things
on the menu that are going to sell is actually going to hurt
your restaurant because you don't want someone to come into
your restaurant and say I need a translator for what this is.
I don't understand any of it, right?
Early on in my career, I remember someone had come up to
me and they wanted to put this weird shit on the menu that I
really wasn't jiving with. And I remember thinking, you
know, I'm a pretty serious chef. There's no way I'm going to put
that on the menu. And I remember having a little
back and forth with my boss. And they, they caved in because
when I was a young chef, I just wanted to do amazing food.
And I could care less sometimes about would it sell or would it
not. And in retrospect, that was
stupid. They should have fired me
because now when I go and consult with people and
occasionally I come across with chefs that'll say I don't want
to do it, that's not my food. I was like, well, the food that
you're trying to do is not this restaurant.
You're going to end up closing this person's business because
you want to do your food. There has to be a good balance
on the menu. Now let's talk about the 30 to
20% that you have to play with. That's where I would start to
introduce things that are maybe on the fringe.
So new techniques, obscure ingredients, things that maybe I
like or my team wants to experiment with.
So a lot of chefs that work with me be like I want to experiment
with this particular ingredient. I'll say great, we'll put on the
menu, but it's going to be in that 30% range.
That's not going to be something that I would anticipate that
will sell. And and usually I was right,
like we'd put something obscure on the menu and then you'd look
at your menu abstracts and it's like the chicken parm sold 100
and that one sold zero or that one sold two.
Because the reality is like if you're putting it on the menu
and no one else is liking it, it doesn't matter.
You're you're not cooking for yourself and you're not cooking
at home. In many cases you're cooking for
the audience that's coming in. But I think there is a certain
level of experimentation because you will be proved wrong on
occasion. You'll put something on the menu
thinking that it's for the chefs and next thing you know,
everyone's getting it. But that 30% should be where you
experiment with new techniques and new ingredients.
It should be learning, but that should be a rotational thing,
right? So those are coming off.
Another portion of the menu is the portion for me, like in
restaurants that I would run, there was a portion that would
never change. So we had our signature items
and let's just say it's, you know, these five items, they've
never come off the menu. We may adjust a little here or a
little there, but the fact of the matter is those don't change
because those are our greatest hits and everyone comes in to
get that. It's the example of, like, when
you go to a concert, like you want to hear all their new
stuff, but they play like the same five hits.
It's like, well, that's what makes them the money.
That's what everyone really wants is the five hits.
So you see it a lot in the music industry.
You can learn something from the music industry as a chef, right?
The greatest hits, The Rolling Stones, Satisfaction, Wu Tang
Clan, Playing Cream, great songs, by the way.
But the point is, you might want to listen to the new the Fringe,
but they're going to play the classics.
The same thing has to hold true in your restaurant.
You want to make sure that the classics don't move, maybe
adjust them a little bit. So again, you have that 30%, you
have the classics, and then there's something that I like to
call the sucker shit. And I think having sucker shit
on your menu now is more important than ever as we move
into the age of social media and Instagram.
So what is sucker shit? Sucker shit is the kind of thing
that influencers come in and they take their phone out
because it comes to the table. It's the Salt Bay action, it's
the gold plated tomahawk. It's the obscure thing that's
shaped into a cake. It's truffle oil on French fries
like that. That is kind of like the crack
for influencers. Like, Oh my God, I had they have
truffle fries. Like most people know.
Like, I personally hate truffle oil, but I'm not opposed to
putting truffle fries on the menu because I know it's going
to sell, right? So that that's that fastball
down the middle, but it's the it's the sucker shit.
So I'll, I'll tell you a funny story.
When I would be designing menus with my chefs every now and
again, we talk about like we need some sucker shit on the
menu stuff that the influencers are all going to pull out their
phone for dinner. And so right before the pandemic
happened, I was working with my pastry chef and I said I want to
come up with the most obscene ice cream sundae and I want to
make house made ice cream. And I want you to make your
homemade magic shell. And I want to use the most
expensive cherries and have on glaze and 10X vanilla bean ice
cream. And I said I just want you to
make it so over the top and garnish it with gold leaf and go
to the table and pour it tableside and serve it on a
silver platter and make you know a whole bunch of pomp and
circumstance around the dish. We're going to sell it for $50
Sunday for four, for $50.00, and I want every single table that
comes in that's a party of four or more to get it so they can
all take their phones out and record it.
And I want to be on everyone's Instagram when we're doing this.
And it was, it was that, I mean, it was, you know, sucker shit,
but it was delicious too. Like, I'm not going to lie,
sometimes sucker shit is delicious.
And so we put it on the menu and we put it on for like 60 bucks.
People would buy it all the time and everyone wanted to take
pictures with it. And it worked, right?
The the tableside ports, the souffle coming that everyone's
going to take their phone out. Or the giradon being wheeled to
the table depending on what type of restaurant you are, where
they're slicing the meat or they're, you know, slicing the
rib eye at the table. It's the it's the chocolate
pinata that is kind of the stuff that you know is going to bring
attention to your restaurant. So what I would tell my chefs is
you want that to get them in and then you show them the cool
stuff that you're working on, but that's the stuff that makes
your restaurant go viral on social media.
We had a dish that we did and it was, I'm sure everyone's done
it, but this is what we were doing.
We were doing tater tots with aerated Greer cheese and black
truffles, and we would sell it for a certain price and we kept
raising the price, but no one ever complained.
No matter how much we raise the price, people would still buy it
and my chef de cuisine at the time would come up to me, like,
I want to take this off the menu.
It's not as intricate, you know, we want to, we want to push.
I said look, push on all this other stuff, but keep that on
the menu. I know it's not like the most
Swannier thing, but trust me, it's the one thing that everyone
comes in and takes photos of it. Every single table gets it and
it's a cash cow. Don't take it off the menu.
I think to this day they still have it on the menu, I think.
But it it's one of those things that you have to have a good mix
of that sucker shit on the menu that everyone wants to come in
and take photos of and like I said then you get them with the
other stuff. This doesn't apply to all
restaurants, but it applies to a lot where you do tasting menus,
you have the opportunity to have supplements on there.
I think having that on especially from a incremental
revenue standpoint is a good thing.
So let's say you have a tasting menu and you see this with a lot
of high end restaurants, they'll have you know the supplemental
caviar, the supplemental truffle, the supplemental A5 wag
you that's a good way to increase and add value to what
you're already doing. So for example, let's just use
that tater tots as an example that I had earlier.
I could say we have tater tots with aerated grier cheese on
top, but for X amount of dollars more, we could supplement black
truffles or you could supplement caviar, right.
That is adding value to what you're doing.
It's it's those Lux items, right.
So if you have a tasting menu, then you have this course or
that course orange for extra supplement, you could add in the
lobster, or you can add in the A5, right?
So for $25 more, $50 more, whatever the case may be, you
add in those more expensive items.
And then once you've written your menu, you should hopefully
go through some sort of process to vet it.
Make sure you do tastings, make sure everything's correct, and
you should be reevaluating your menus quickly so you're
adjusting them as needed. You know what's selling, what's
not. A good practice is to run the
menu analysis at the end of every month and evaluate what's
selling, evaluate what's not and adjust as needed, right?
The longer you delay, the more it's going to affect your bottom
line. Now the last thing I'm going to
talk about when it comes to creating menus, when you want to
introduce things but you're not sure how to introduce them.
This is something that I do. This is just this is just my pro
tip is if I wanted to introduce an obscure ingredient, I might
introduce it. For example, everyone loves
beets, but not everyone loves foie gras.
So maybe I will create a beet dish with foie gras versus a
foie gras dish with beets. So if the first thing on your
menu that you see is beets, a lot of people are going to be
likely to order it. But if the first thing that you
see on your menu is foie gras, they may be less likely to order
it. So when I needed to introduce
things like that, I would introduce them, You know, I'd
partner them up with someone that was really popular, right?
So if. You know, I I I would introduce
the obscure friend with a really popular one.
So like I said beats with frog bra and I know that's not that
obscure, but sometimes in some parts of the country it's very
obscure. And I think that's a good way to
look at that is to to introduce people to things that they might
not be comfortable with by having something that they are
comfortable with on the plate already.
I I do believe that creativity is a collaborative process.
So when I'm designing menus, I usually get as many stakeholders
in the room and we would write down ideas and we would just
throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
So if I had five people, I'd tell everyone come with five
ideas and let's just go through them.
And sometimes you what you'd end up with is a dish that's a
mishmash of several people's ideas.
So I might say let's do the beef this way and someone else may
say with this sauce and and this vegetable and then before you
know it maybe we have an amalgamation of a lot of
different ideas. So think about it like this,
this If you're changing your menu and you have a couple of
items that don't change, right? So you know your greatest hits,
and then you have, you know, the sucker shit that might not
change. And so you're experimenting
with, you know, 30 or 40% of the menu that's going to change for
the season or whatever. That might only be like six or
seven items. But if you have five people
coming up with 10 dishes apiece, that's fifty ideas, 50 menu
ideas that you only need 5 or 6, right?
And so then you're able to really push the creativity.
Now once we've determined what those items are, we'll go out
and we will cook them. And so the way that I would do
it is everyone would, would cook the dishes, we'd sit there and
then we'd pick the dish apart. Because sometimes on paper
things sound delicious and then you try them and they just don't
work. And it might be an idea that
just it's time hasn't come or you fully don't understand the
technique yet. Got to let the cake bake, as
they say. So when we get into the creative
process, we're all trying the dish.
And the creative part is super fun because that's where you get
to experiment. That's where it's okay to fail.
You know, the guardrails are a little bit looser on the
creative portion of the venue. And honestly, that's also
sometimes the place where you could get that attention that
you need for your restaurant. It's the local press, the write
up in the newspaper, whatever the case may be.
Sometimes that comes from that 30% because the the people that
are writing about food usually write about what's on the
fringe. They don't ever write about, you
know, the roasted chicken that much.
They they write about, you know, the octopus bubbles.
Anyway, you get my point. So playing with that 30% on the
fringe sometimes is what's going to get you the recognition that
you need. And then when my group of chefs
would get together and taste if if the dishes up there, we'd all
really pick it apart. And for me, in that creative
process and that menu ideation phase, it's the time to be the
most critical. So we would taste it and we'd
say we'd look at it this way. That's how I would look at it.
Say we'd look for something balanced, what is the, what's
the salt level, what's the heat level, what's the acid level,
what's the fat level. And we'd want to make sure, you
know, kind of like an equalizer on a stereo, You adjust all the
knobs until until the dish just is delicious.
And so like, add a little bit more acid, add a little bit more
fat, add a little bit more heat, add a little bit more sugar, add
a little bit of this, add this gas streak, finish it with olive
oil, boom. Then you get it or you know,
brighten it up with freshness, maybe it needs more fresh herbs
or whatever the case may be. Then you add the texture.
And once we'd be really happy with how the plate tastes, then
we start with refining the presentation on it.
So the presentation was, was after the taste.
So do another podcast on taste versus presentation.
So presentation came after taste.
Once it tastes good, then we can work on the presentation to make
sure it looks good, right? And this was a good exercise for
us to really be critical and pick things apart to make sure
that that final product was excellent.
Now a lot of restaurants don't change their menu that
frequently. So, you know, pro tip when
you're changing your menu, make sure that everything's costed
weight measures. Make sure everyone has recipes
before you start. Before you roll the menu out,
make sure people have seen it. There's nothing worse than a
menu change when you walk into work and you have no idea
because you've never seen any of the dishes.
So chefs, make sure you're communicating that that's the
worst. Don't do that.
But I'll tell you, sometimes you do get in these creative ruts.
A lot of times people message me and say, what would you do when
you're in a creative rut? Like sometimes it happens.
When I was younger, I was the chef of a place that did a
tasting menu only restaurant and we had to change the menu every
day. My boss at that place happened
to be a big fan of, you know, Thomas Keller and The French
Laundry and Charlie Trotter and said they change their menu
every day. You need to change your menu
every day. And so he never allowed me to
repeat an ingredient twice, which is extremely difficult.
And it sounds good until like you're on day two or day three,
day five, day 20. It's like, shit.
You have to make 8 to 10 courses that are different that you've
never done before. I would do better at it now
because now I think I'd probably come up with a better system.
But back then I thought every single day I had to come up with
something original. You didn't have to do that.
Like you could have said, you know, you make a grit and you
say, here are my sauces, here are my my sides, here are my
beefs. And then you, you kind of like a
matrix and say, let's put this with this, with this today.
But anyway, those types of restaurants are much more create
creative, and they probably don't play in that 7030 role,
especially when you're talking about restaurants on the World's
50 Best. It's their job to play in the
creative in the abstract, right? But let's be honest, not
everyone's in that world. Like, you know, a couple of
people will get on my social and like, talk crap and be like, Oh
no creativity. I'm out.
And then you look at their page and it's like, dude, you're
serving like, filet with asparagus.
What are you talking about creativity anyway?
There's true creativity, right? And then there's like, I just
want to cook my food. I don't want to be told what to
do. So, like, everyone needs to calm
down and understand that there's a difference there.
And it's extremely difficult to work in these places that change
the menu and shout out to restaurants that do that.
Shout out to David Breeden from The French Laundry changes the
menu every day. And one of the best restaurants
in the world, those guys are ninjas.
Like you look at what they do and you look at if you change
the menu every day in 10 years, how many dishes is that?
4005 thousand? I don't know.
It's a lot. Shout out to those guys that
have to live that life. It's not for everybody.
It's extremely difficult. It's extremely creative and
very, very elite chefs. Anyway, that's going to wrap it
up. So hopefully now you can leave
with a better game plan and make sure you have a good mix of
items that are going to sell. Make sure you have some items
that are creative and that you can experiment with, but be
ready to take them off the menu rapidly.
Have a couple of things that are going to get people in to take
photos and get them in the doors and gain attention for your
restaurant. But most importantly, cook and
have fun. Anyway.
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hater and you don't want to be a liar and a hater.
So I appreciate the five stars. Go to chefspsa.com.
That's where you get all the books.
English and Spanish. Now working on Italian.
That'll be out soon. Go get the free ebooks as well.
Get yourself some merch. Thank you very much.
Hit the porno music.