Focus Your Menu On What Matters

Focus Your Menu On What Matters

"Favorite animal: steak "
Fran Lebowitz*

"Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water."
W.C. Fields*

*from the Portable Curmudgeon

Goodness knows, consumers have their quirks and passions. Yet, restaurateurs are insecure, masochistic types, assuming that every guest operates on whim. This is true, of course. To combat it, we use various kinds of voodoo to ward off (or pacify) the capricious forces which are at work. Very often, the menu carries the brunt of the task. The poor menu becomes a veritable cauldron of adjectives, clichés or descriptive flourishes, where every item is equal to every other item, and no item is ever cut for fear of angering the gods and losing a guest. Knock it off! You have a weapon. Whimsy is best fought with focus. The guest seeks succor and nurturing. They want to be led by the nose (with their permission). They want somebody to care for them. Make life less stressful, complicated and confusing.

Your menu serves to reassure the guest that they have made a wise decision in dining with you, to satisfy their expectations, to reinforce for them what makes you unique or famous and to return appropriate profit to your coffers. It is the guide to your concept, the stress reliever and the confusion remover for people battered by hype, advertising nonsense and mortal threats by the minute.

Hamlet wondered, "To be, or not to be." For a restaurant menu, it is often, "To emphasize, or not to emphasize?" If you accept that the guest spends three to five minutes reading your menu and even less absorbing its contents, then emphasis is everything. Prioritize, my friends! In an article in Restaurants USA (Aug. 2000), Bill Paul, President of The Menu Advantage, put it succinctly: "That [prioritization] is sometimes difficult for restaurateurs to do. You rarely hear them prioritize what they want to sell. Instead, they say everything is good."

Hookay... how do you decide who gets center stage and who gets placed in the orchestra pit? Consider these steps.

Calculate the gross profit dollars of every item you have or are considering for your menu.

Collect your menu mix on a regular basis. Before you say, "Uh, duh," believe me, this is not that common out there in restaurant land.

Calculate the average gross profit dollars from each key section: i.e. appetizers, entrees and desserts. As a general rule you'll be looking to feature items above that average.

Create or review your story. What do you stand for? What is your brand promise?

Look for where your above average gross profit items also portray your story or fulfill your promise most compellingly.

So that's it, in a menu shell. You can have art, science and commerce singing in three-part harmony. Start with a focus.

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Mark your calendar! On May 15th Don Moore, President of Chi-Co and I will be doing a tag team presentation to the Association of Independent Certified Public Accountants in Chicago at their annual National Restaurants Conference. It will be held at the Renaissance Chicago Hotel. The topic: What Makes a Restaurant Chain Last?

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