Building A Menu
What I think about when I think about developing food
Sorry for the delay in posting, we’ve been busy reintegrating into life, and hanging with our dogs.
I want to share a little bit about the process that I’ve learned and honed over the years to bring a concept to life from an idea. The overall process is influenced by Human Centered Design, albeit with a bit less pomp and circumstance, and, in this solopreneur stage, with no true stage gates. Meaning, I could ostensibly be changing and evolving the menu items long after they are “completed” developing, and even after the restaurant launches. In fact, I guarantee this will happen.
I like to try to put together a menu brief (i.e. a guiding document for development), formal or informal, to help me organize development. I’ve worked with some very, very creative chefs, who struggle to think strategically about food development. So, we go to taste the food, and there is some ingredient that would bring the dish together, but since they didn’t plan ahead, it's not in house. And now, we’ll have to try the whole dish again the next day. Or we taste the dish and it's wildly delicious, but also too expensive for the concept.
You Better Ask Yourself Why
When starting to develop food, it makes sense to take a broader look at the menu items and first ask yourself a number of questions (and many more):
Why am I putting these on my menu?
Are they the core features of the menu, i.e., the nexus of the restaurant?
Are they menu items that will help add to the overall appeal of the restaurant?
Are they items that are going to be relatively inexpensive to produce and be sold for a higher margin to make up for some other items in the product mix that cost more?
These are some of the questions to ask yourself when you're developing a new menu. I generally like to start with the overall objective of the product or food development. So in this case, we are developing an opening menu. For me, the objective is to create a compelling mix of menu items that will make the concept enticing and exciting for diners. This should be completed while being mindful of the modern operational needs of restaurants, never taking away from guest experience or the glitz and glamour that we all love in our restaurants.
This concept will mostly revolve around some proteins that deliver “Daily Luxury.”. Again, due to my own bogus personal reasons, I'm still keeping that under wraps, but that will be my nexus on which to initially focus.
When I’m writing my brief, I often like to start by writing out menu categories, then going into menu items for each category. Once that is completed, I will go back and write down the components that I need for each of those menu items so that I can then develop the requisite components and then hopefully develop the menu items. At this stage, it's still very early in the process, and I don't like it when creativity gets bogged down by strict structure. So I will do my best to avoid that scenario. When I'm developing recipes, I like to strike a balance between the most interesting, more complex, or most delicious techniques, which is often not the same as the first two, and first develop a product that I'm incredibly in love with.
If I think that the first version of a “finalized” dish is operationally feasible or close enough to it, I'll leave it as is. But if I find after some thought and noodling that that may be hard to replicate for the team, I may then go back and redevelop it. Especially in the early stages,the goal is to find something that's overwhelmingly delicious and then some work can be done on the back end to figure out how to ensure that is made consistently.
The Case for Consistency and Some Early Lessons
I've worked with a number of consulting clients who have taken a while to understand that sometimes making things simpler or easier to execute is actually the more prudent move as a manager. If you make a preparation so difficult that only the absolute most diligent, perfect employee can handle it, that means you're actually creating an opportunity for the overwhelmed, overworked, immature or undersupported employee to not execute effectively, leading to a worse overall product. I think often of Thomas Keller who's probably one of the best known American chefs, and one thing that maybe civilians don't realize when they're reading his cookbook or eating at his restaurant, is that he's actually incredibly process driven, incredibly operationally driven to the point that he has his way of doing things. And he expects his team to follow that 100%. If they do, they will achieve great success.
I don't think it's different at all from being so prescriptive and intentional about how you plan things to ensure the best success for your team. I've always felt a little strange sharing things like this because I don't want to seem like I'm not wildly excited about the people that choose to work with me. Nor do I think that anyone that I've worked with for a long time lacks passion or commitment. It's more just that from the lens I view things from, my job as an owner and operator is to create really great systems for my team to slot into.
I build these systems so that they are super successful and they know what to expect every day from a job. When I was a young manager, I was promoted too young in a sort of trial by fire that happened when I stepped up off the clock to help my then executive chef pack out for a James Beard dinner. The corporate chef showed up at the same time that I did and we both discovered that none of the prep for this event was done because my then boss (the chef de cuisine) was overwhelmed and didn't feel comfortable asking for help. And instead of the corporate chef treating it like a coaching and teaching moment, he just fired the guy on the spot and then promoted me to junior sous chef.
I was field promoted and the management training I'd received so far was that when you asked for help, you were told to try harder. And then when you failed, you were shamed for it. That exact scenario happened on my first Saturday night when I was going into service on the hardest station in the restaurant.
I told that same corporate chef, the culinary leader of the team, “I'm almost ready for service, but I don't have enough time to butcher more steaks”.
I wanted him to butcher more for me, or help me with other prep so that I could butcher them. Instead he told me, “We'll just see how far you get.”
At seven o'clock, the absolute worst part of the night, I, of course, ran out of steaks. He then yelled at me for not being ready, kicked me off my station to go butcher the steaks while he cooked my station and the kitchen. Not very well. The attempted point he was making, I suppose, was that I needed to be faster or better, or work for free for more hours? Maybe it was just his ego trying to show me he was the better cook, since I was failing.
And then, the next day he moved me to an easier station, effectively reinforcing my failures. Again, not a lot of management training there. In that role, at that restaurant, I was a young, overly ambitious, highly intellectual, and a tactically bit underskilled cook. What I mean was that during the actual act of service, I sometimes made mistakes, or was behind on putting my plates into the windows. And, I was managing other team members, some of whom were older or had been there much longer. One of the most salient pieces of advice I actually got came from a member of the team that I oversaw, who runs Stanley Supper Club in Stanley, Idaho.
His advice to me was, “Danny, the one thing that I've seen from the best managers is that they're consistent. So if they're always a hard ass, they're always a hard ass. Or if they're a softie and more of a motivator type, they're always a softie and the motivator. But you're a bit more unpredictable and that makes you harder to work with.”
I definitely have not 100% learned all the lessons I’m supposed to learn as a leader and a manager. In fact I doubt anyone ever does, but that was good feedback. And I try to create predictability for the teams that I work with so that when they show up at work, as much of what they can control is under their power, giving them the bandwidth for the things that they can't. We can’t control how many customers show up, if there's a weird weather event that no one foresaw. Maybe there's a power outage or some other event that will affect sales. The team can’t control or predict any of that, but if they have recipes and operations developed to be consistently achievable, that will remove one element of stress from their job. So we try to build systems that are consistently achievable and accessible.
My Briefs are Anything But
Getting back to the brief for menu development, at this stage, I have put together my high level objectives, I've outlined menu categories. Next I'll dig into detailing my subcomponents; the recipes that need to be made ahead of time for the dish. This could be braised meat that is cooked, cooled and then portioned, or it could be scallions that are sliced to order every day. I try to go through each menu item, then categorize and list every subcomponent that I will need to develop.
To me, this is an on paper (screen) version of mise en place. To be ready for service, a chef has to complete all of their preparation, organize their station, stock towels, etc. So if I'm going to develop a menu item, the first thing I need to do is develop all the dishes or the parts of it that I need for it. So if it's a sandwich, for instance, I might need to either figure out how to make the bread or where I'm going to buy the bread from and do some testing on that. If it's a soup, I need to understand what the base will be, how I'm producing the stock, if it will be prepared or finished to order.
Are there protein or other garnishes? I want to plan for a number of permutations, to make sure I’ve developed and tasted all of the things that go into the dish. When I'm ready to make the final menu item, I have all those pieces ready to go and I can assemble it and taste them in their best form and have ingredients left over to make some variations.
Then it's time to get in the kitchen. If I'm developing like I am right now, which is out of my home kitchen, I'm going to set up my testing facilities, so I'm in the process of getting a second fridge and freezer combo to throw in our basement. I think I'll need a deli slicer for the testing. So I'm going to figure out if I'm going to buy a used one that could be later utilized in the concept or buy a cheaper home model that I can just beat up then throw away when I'm done. Worst case scenario, I add to my collection of restaurant equipment that I keep in my basement. And then I will figure out some of my heat sources, so if I'm going to be using a pellet grill, am I buying one for testing, or trying to use some of the other smokers that I have at the house just to get started?
Then I need to put together the list of ingredients that I'll need and try to be intentional about not buying too much at one time. That's a common theme among first time recipe developers or the first time people are going from scratch to trying to develop a whole menu or concept. The nascent chef can bite off more than they can chew, and try to boil the ocean. They order too many ingredients than they can utilize, so they rush to get it all done in a short period of time, and that can end up being a little bit more overwhelming. To begin, I will either try to just get one dish done in a short period of time, or I'll look at my components list for a grouping of menu items and figure out if any component is used for multiple dishes, and if so, does that have a longer shelf life?
Can I then develop that component, the other necessary components for those dishes and then taste those all together. Maybe there’s a sauce that is on two sandwiches but also serves as a salad dressing for one menu item, and it works for one of the dishes, but not the other two. If I am tasting all three at the same time, can we make a decision about how to tweak that a little bit to work better for all of them? Do we want to go in another direction in the outlier dish? Tasting dishes with shared components at the same time allows for more agile decision making. And keep in mind that at this stage, I'm not really looking at pricing or costing other than very basic back of the napkin math. If we know something's going to cost more than it we’ll be able to sell it for, it's probably not a good fit for the menu. Shy of that, I first find something that I'm in love with. If you never start from a place of loving a menu item, it's not going to be worth it to commercialize (go through the requisite steps to take it from the testing version to it being on the menu) the dish.
When I was a R & D chef at The Culinary Edge, and then as the cofounder and culinary leader of Square Pie Guys, I had to be intentional to not over operationalize too soon. For this new concept, I really am trying to strike a balance between a sexy, cheffy, interesting restaurant and menu while still keeping the sound economic fundamentals requisite to run a modern restaurant. But, as this project is more personal and doesn’t need to be immediately scalable, it will lean slightly more culinarily driven.
This has been a - not so quick - and dirty write up of my approach to developing a menu from scratch. There's plenty missing in it, and as I get deeper into it, I will add some more color in future weeks. But for now, I've just been dreaming of that experience for that tri-tip I spoke about a few weeks ago.
So. In the words of Arbys, for the next few weeks, I'm going to be all about the meat.
What’s Your Boy Been Up To
In other news, I spent this week heads down, working on a long form video for YouTube. It is not at the quality that I want it to be, but I learned an incredible amount along the way, and I'm going to push myself to keep producing videos. I’ve already learned an incredible amount, like, for instance, don’t forget to check the resolution setting on your camera before you record half a day's worth of content. Also, don't over explain every single thing, because you're just going to have to cut it out later.
Prepping and recording the video was phenomenally fun. It was gratifying, and not dissimilar from the process I just outlined. I had to come up with one menu item, then break it down to the components, source all the components and then essentially develop it on camera. It was nice to be back on my feet again. I enjoyed the editing process. Because I'm me, I'm already thinking of ways to streamline that, but that's part of what makes it so engaging. And I'm excited to use this video channel as a way to showcase some of the experiences I had and food that we ate while on our six months of travel. It would be a shame if the incredible amount of personal growth and professional learning I experience went unreflected upon. And if I'm being completely honest I would love to build enough excitement over the next few years to write at least once cookbook about the experiences. I’m imagining a collection of some of the more interesting or sublime recipes, broken up with reflective essays that are funny, personal and informative.
As far as restaurant updates go, there is some movement with our branding. We've gotten some initial concepts back, and we're dialing in on the concept set that we want to go forward with, including some really cool hand-drawn typography by the designer.
My initial reaction was, “Its so cool you wrote the name of the concept out. But, you're not going to write every letter though, are you?”
She said, “Yes, I would. I would give you a whole alphabet of handwritten typography.”
That is not something that I ever considered a designer would or could do, but I'm so glad to know it exists, because probably now I'm gonna insist on it because I'm annoying like that.
I’m meeting with some brokers to start looking at possible locations over the next few weeks. Meeting with some folks that may be working with me on the concept and a variety of structures for what that looks like.
And most importantly to consider, is this a concept that I'm bootstrapping? Or is this a concept that I'm raising capital for, bringing in equity partners.
Over the next few weeks, I can definitely explore some of the pitfalls of and benefits of both those options. That's it for this week.
Feel free to tell me how terrible my YouTube video is, and all the feedback you have, as well as any feedback on this post and thanks for reading. I will write again next week.
MG and I have decided that your self deprecation is poopoo. You are the bomb 💣
How do I sign up to taste test 🙂↕️