CHAPTER
9

Composing Your Menu

In This Chapter

• Creating a menu that tells a story
• How to create a well-balanced menu
• How to cost-test your menu
• Streamlining and “blueprinting” your menu
• Designing and creating the physical menu

In this chapter, we focus on putting together your restaurant’s menu. We’ll show you how to create a menu that speaks about your restaurant. The menu is part art and part commerce. The lists of delicious-sounding dishes, and their prices, reflect the recipes and plates you have created, tested, and standardized so you can make a profit and your restaurant will be successful.

In addition, we’ll discuss how to test the costs of the items on your menu. And finally, we’ll talk about how to create the physical menu, and its components and design.

Your Menu’s Story

Your menu is so much more than a board of fare, a list of items and prices. It’s more than just a message about what kind of restaurant guests can expect. Your menu tells a story. It’s a guide to the experience that’s about to happen. It’s a map for dining in your restaurant.

The menu also reflects your hard decisions about your restaurant’s concept, and your work with your kitchen team to refine, test, and blueprint the menu. It’s the food your place is based on, which has to taste good and make a profit.

Your menu says a lot about you. It brands you, markets you, and reflects your image.

Think about how we glance at menus in restaurant windows, quickly assessing the restaurant and deciding whether we will go inside. Potential customers quickly view all sorts of menus—the 100-item small-print menus taped to the window of the quick Chinese takeout, a gilded twig-framed menu on handcrafted paper with tonight’s menu in a fine handwritten script, the sun-faded menu offering “Mama’s famous meatballs,” or a sidewalk blackboard offering a three-course “prix-fixe” lunch for $14.99.

Setting Your Working Menu

You’ve already determined your food concept, now stick with it. You must stay with your style. Stay relevant to your point of view about good cooking and dining. If you’ve got an Asian restaurant, don’t put a burger on the menu just because it’s popular.

Entrées are typically more true to the concept. Starters can be more experimental.

SMART MOVE

Decide whether your restaurant and concept are best served with composed plates (starch and vegetables) or à la carte (a main ingredient, garnished). In the à la carte scenario, sides can be suggested by the server.

The small-plates trend has taught contemporary diners that each dish doesn’t need a starch and vegetable. On the opposite end, large, shared, family-style plates are popular. If your concept is shared plates, think about the guest experience. Soup, for instance, is not an item people share—unless they’re quite intimate.

Balance

Less is more in restaurants today. The quantity of items on your menu should be limited, with each bringing a distinctive flavor profile.

As you build your working menu, you’ll create a list of dishes that balance several factors. It begins with balancing how the cooking methods are spread out over time and space. You need to have dishes prepared in advance but also some that are ready to be cooked at the last minute. You’ll balance cooked and raw ingredients. You may balance traditions and trends. On the plate you’ll balance color, texture, and taste. An important consideration is the balance of the work and execution in the kitchen. If everything on your menu was sautéed, for instance, it would cause back-ups in the kitchen.

Kitchen Cooking Stations:

• Cold dishes
• Fried foods
• Sauté
• Oven
• Stove
• Grill

Some kitchens have a microwave station. We don’t use them in our kitchens.

If everything was cooked at one station, food would be coming out too slowly. Guests would be hungry and cranky. Balance the cooking methods on your menu. Make sure your kitchen can keep up with the busiest of times. You want to spread your menu among cooking stations and you need to spread them out over time. Some dishes can be slow-cooked, others served cold, others grilled à la minute.

DEFINITION

The French term â la minute is used frequently in American professional kitchens. It means food that’s cooked to order. Examples might be a grilled steak, a sautéed chicken breast, or deep-fried calamari.

One, Two, Three

Begin by breaking your working menu into smaller parts. Think of it as three acts, with a beginning, middle, and end. An Italian meal begins with sparkling wine with appetizers, followed by pasta, and then the main dish.

Whether you think of it as appetizers, entrées, and desserts, or the English’s less romantic starters, mains, and puddings, divide your menu into three acts.

What are your three main acts? How are they broken down within your contemporary take on the type of cuisine you’re serving? Your first act could be broken down into appetizers, soups, and salads.

Food Choices

Today’s dining customer wants choices. You can build in freedom within your menu to give choices to, for instance, vegans, vegetarians, gluten-free, and people with food allergies. You want to allow your guests freedom to customize their meal without stepping out of your genre. That’s one of the reasons the small plate trend is so popular. (Plus, it introduces a lower range of prices.)

Today’s restaurateur is wise to think of contemporary diners’ interests in health. Vegetarian options are required. Remember, too, that at the same time there’s an interest in health, there’s also a focus on flavor that can supersede it for most diners. Bacon has never been more popular. There was a time when bacon was practically considered a public enemy, filled with the killers: fat, salt, and nitrates.

Today, contemporary chefs get kudos for smoking their own bacon and curing their own hams, and there are plenty of nitrate-free cured meats out there. The foodie culture has encouraged these two sides of dining—health and indulgence—which is another factor in the balance on your menu.

Beverages

Your drinks program should be in the spirit of your restaurant concept. Mediterranean restaurants pour the wines of South America, Spain, and California by the glass. New American restaurants shake up cocktails with craft-distilled spirits and fresh juices. A vegetarian sushi house could feature retro sake bombs made with Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

If your concept was a New Southern restaurant, what classic drinks would you want your bartender to contemporize? A muddled mint julep? Plays on Southern Sweet Tea, Arnold Palmers, and Kentucky Bourbon on the rocks (extra-large ice-cubes)? It’s the same as for food. Take a genre, and make it contemporary, relevant, and more interesting.

Apply the same three-act metaphor to your drinks program. Imagine how the guest is going to experience your restaurant from the beginning of the evening on.

You’ll run your drinks menu through the same paces we’re going to talk about later on for streamlining and blueprinting your menu.

Refining Your Menu

The next stage is what we call “cook-throughs.” That’s when the chef and cooks get together in the kitchen and create the dishes. We want to make sure dishes can be executed repeatedly with the same results.

SMART MOVE

Most people order the same thing every time they go to a restaurant. Success in the restaurant business has been built upon an ossobucco and polenta dish that stayed popular for 20 years. That’s a blessing and a curse for a chef who will have to make it the exact same way for decades or face mutiny from his customers.

We created an inventory template we use to order and cost out every item used in every recipe in every plate. You’ll find more information on the components of this multipage spreadsheet in Chapter 16. It’s vital that you begin to build up your data and test your recipes before you open. Bring the laptop into the kitchen, and if you need administrative staff to enter the prices, hire someone to help.

You want your executive and sous chef involved in costing from the beginning, especially if they’re young Culinary Institute of America (CIA) grads. They probably have visions of sugar plums in Maine juniper red wine sauce dancing around their get-famous-quick impatient young minds. The main thing they need to learn is how important repetition and consistency are in keeping food costs in line. You can’t have your chefs changing things up; it will throw off your carefully crafted cost framework.

So often, restaurants can be derailed by enthusiasm. A chef is excited about a new kind of mushroom. You need to ask some questions: How are you going to pay for it? What costs are you cutting to cover those mushrooms, and how much of a profit will be made on that dish?

Refining Dishes for Plating

Cost, however, isn’t the only consideration here. As you analyze each dish, think again about how the dish balances ingredients, flavors, colors, and textures. Keep thinking of ways you can refine the production of the dishes and streamline the production.

Real-Time Testing

Your first set of willing guinea pigs are your stakeholders. Your second (and sometimes third) will be family and friends. A beginning restaurateur will find value in doing two family and friend dinners.

Tasting with Stakeholders

Investor dinners are usually for six or eight investors and their husbands or wives. For the restaurateur, it can be one of the more vulnerable nights, coming as it does so close to the anxiety-filled days of opening. The restaurateur must control the experience. Let your guests know that this evening is a celebration, not a panel on the food, service, and atmosphere. It’s not to get their opinion on the food. It’s not to take a poll or a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on the dishes. It’s really more about sharing an almost-finished product.

Of course, they’re going to give you their opinions anyway. Restaurant investors often want to show off how much they know about food and wine, and sometimes they’re bulls in a china shop, but you have to defer. Deal with meaningless criticism, such as “I don’t think you should serve potatoes with that,” by using misdirection. Bring attention to another unique aspect of the potatoes. “Did you notice how they were served in cones the way they are in Belgium?” This will divert investors into talking about their European travels.

In the days before opening, your staff gets raw. Everyone’s been working around the clock. Your chef’s frazzled. Your investors and their significant others probably don’t realize how sensitive everyone is at this point. So try to make them feel like they’re at an intimate dinner party—where you wouldn’t critique the food. Let everyone order what they want, but push the conversation away from the food.

POTENTIAL PITFALL

Don’t get defensive if your investors start criticizing the food. Prepare your chef to put on his Teflon suit, and let any comments roll right off. You don’t want your chef to quit before opening because his ego was bruised at an investors’ dinner.

The investors’ dinner is an opportunity to test your systems and equipment under the pressure of performance with a small audience. Your investors are probably not going to understand the real purpose of this event. Remember, movies have one director. A menu needs one, too.

The Physical Menu

Whether your menu is a chalkboard, iPad, or traditional card, is a decision ruled by your concept. For the beginner, we recommend designing a menu that can be easily printed on card stock at either your local printer or on your own printer. (Though, quite frankly, for the hassle and time of dealing with a fussy printer, you’re better off spending the money to have it printed professionally.) Do scope out the closest printer to your restaurant. There will be times when you’re happy it’s around the corner. Plus, doing business locally makes you part of the community, sharing in the collective spirit of the neighborhood. There’s a good chance you’ll be adjusting your menu in the upcoming month, so don’t go nuts thinking you’re getting a good deal on a bulk printing.

Words

Words on menus are important, and studies by linguists have useful lessons for restaurateurs. A linguistics professor who studied 6,500 menus (that’s 650,000 dishes) discovered that the longer the words in the menu, the higher the price of the dishes. He determined that each additional letter added 18 cents to the cost of the meal.

Professor Dan Jurafsky, in The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (W.W. Norton), also found that the types of words reflect prices, too. Extra descriptions like “tasty,” “delicious,” and “world famous” are used in restaurants with lower prices. Less expensive restaurants often offer many choices. Think of diner menus, booklets of laminated pages and color photos, offering Gourmet Burgers, Value Favorites, Greek Delights, and Our Famous Cream Cheese Cakes.

Some words, however, add value, such as references to provenance, or the place where the food was grown or raised. Spices and exotic names add value, too.

Menus need to be consistent in the point of view and in the language. They also must be accurate.

Accuracy

Accurately describe the food you offer. If it says the meat is roasted, the meat should be roasted. If the menu says a salad has pomegranate seeds in it, be sure not to substitute dried blueberries. If the menu says it’s organic, be sure it is. Deliver the meal you promised. Promise a meal you can deliver.

A menu should be consistent in its style, or the way words are treated. Don’t spell the same word more than one way on your menu.

Ethnic and Foreign Words

Be consistent in your use of ethnic and foreign words. Don’t slip in and out of an ethnic style (Reggiano Parmigiano vs. Parmesan, for example).

If you’re using foreign words to get across the feel of your restaurant and the expressions aren’t familiar, you can provide a pronunciation guide and definitions. But don’t underestimate the knowledge of your customers; it can be a turn-off in many markets. If you have a contemporary Mexican small plate concept, there’s no need to give the pronunciation of tacos.

But if you use the word antojitos, you could provide the pronunciation and definition on the menu. “Antojitos (ahn-toh-hee-tohs) is a word used in Mexico for street food, little snacks, nibbles, or appetizers.” Reading that definition makes people want to snack, doesn’t it?

DEFINITION

Antojitos means little snacks, cravings, or nibbles in Spanish. It’s a term used in Mexico for street food. Small plate restaurants use the term in the appetizer section of the menu.

Language Style

The formality or relaxed quality of your language reinforces your concept. A contemporary New American menu might have a section called “Snacks” or “Nibbles” or “From the Fields.”

As for naming dishes, you should keep it simple. The name should tell the diner what the dish is. Some restaurants turn locals into regulars by naming dishes after them. Once again, it all ties back to how the name relates to expressing your restaurant concept. Start looking at menu names. One dish was called “Angel Kisses” on a bistro menu. It sounded like a dessert, but it was gnocchi in a garlickly sage-butter sauce. Garlic and kisses don’t mix for many customers.

More important than names are descriptions of the food listed on the menu. These descriptions should capture the flavor profile, rather than list all the ingredients, which can be tedious rather than evocative. Listing an unexpected ingredient piques the diner’s interest. You can make note of common allergens such as peanuts if they’re used as a garnish. People with allergies often ask about ingredients.

What a Menu Should and Shouldn’t Do:

• It shouldn’t provoke laughter (knowing irony, yes; mockery, no).
• It shouldn’t be full of typos.
• It shouldn’t be pompous—make it real.
• It should make the guest crave eating and drinking the restaurant’s fare.

It’s a cool idea to have the forager or fisherman come to your restaurant’s back door. To have a backyard farmer offer you rabbits. To have your hunter friend bring quail and pheasant. But before you put it on your menu, realize that most health departments will not consider these approved food sources. If they find these products in your kitchen, they’ll remove and destroy them, and you could be fined.

Some restaurants get away with this under the radar, but don’t try it.

Furthermore, foraging for restaurant staples isn’t a good route either. Some people discover foraging, and in their newfound enthusiasm decide to launch a business. They have no idea how tedious and time-consuming it’s going to be, being outside digging, hunched over patches of wild dandelion and chicory.

One new forager got a newspaper to write about how he was providing foraged greens and mushrooms to local restaurants. The next thing you know, the local health inspector made surprise visits to those restaurants. Foraging is not considered an approved source of food. (Note: some local health codes make exceptions for home kitchens; others strictly forbid it.)

SMART MOVE

Noma in Copenhagen was named the best restaurant in the world for creative menus of foraged indigenous species. Chef René Redzepi’s rediscovery of forgotten foods has been celebrated by chefs and it points to the desire to return to local food systems in the age of industrialized food and globalization. In the United States, food safety laws don’t allow foraged food, but chefs turn to locally farmed foods for freshness and variety.

Menu Design

Your menu, the physical object that people will hold and read, reinforces your concept through the design of your logo and interior, the colors and textures, and the motifs.

Check out sites like Pinterest to see what kind of menus are out there. Google your restaurant genre to see how you can update traditional menu designs. Notice what you like and what you don’t like. It’s a good idea to work with a graphic designer to design your logo and menu.

The menu tells the customer how to order. It’s a guide to ordering. It lets the customer know, for instance, if the menu is a contemporary take on the Southern “meat and three” meals—meat with a choice of three vegetables. The menu shows how to choose the components of the meal.

Think about how certain types of menus typify certain restaurant variations—for example, the laminated booklets in diners with lurid color photos of the food. If you’re doing a contemporary take on a 1950s diner, a laminated menu with retro graphics would be appropriate.

When you think of a formal restaurant, such as a traditional French restaurant, you tend to think about a big booklet, too—one that announces its importance by its very size. The cover is leather and the interior pages are on good-quality paper, often in cream or white.

Booklets can still be used to show a serious foodie intention, but today they’re often smaller. You should think carefully about the size, how your customers will hold it and use it and the information it must convey

POTENTIAL PITFALL

Design your menu so that it fits on the table. Imagine a table for two with two people each holding your menu. Is there room for them to lay it down on the table? Overlooking a point like this leads to uncomfortable guests who can’t even see each other over their big menus. Always think about proportion.

Readability

Most designers choose design over legibility. Is the font big enough? Will your guests be able to read it in the evening when the lights have been dimmed? Who are your customers? People tend to have more trouble seeing in the dark as they get older.

Of course, Jody completely bucked this advice with his Mexican restaurant and tequila bar. The place was so dark and so loud that people brought flashlights to see the menu. The Zagat restaurant review even had a line about how you needed to text your dinner companions.

How many pages should your menu be? Beginners should start with a focused menu that fits on one page. The drink menu can be on the back, and the dessert and lunch menus can be separate.

Menu Component Checklist:

• ❏ Logo
• ❏ Categories
• ❏ Dish names
• ❏ Prices
• ❏ Descriptions
• ❏ Drinks
• ❏ Chef-Owner Name: Only include if there’s a chef-owner or if the chef is a partner in the business
• ❏ Health Warning: Local health departments often require certain warnings, such as the potential harm of eating raw eggs or shellfish for at-risk guests. Check with your health department to get the exact language.
• ❏ Policies: Include polices such as “20 percent gratuity is added to parties of six or more.” Policies can be personalized to make them friendlier.
• ❏ Allergies: Include allergy notices such as “Please inform us of any allergies; we are happy to accommodate your allergies.”
• ❏ Philosophy: Some restaurants like to include their philosophy, such as “We feature pasture-raised meats.”

Nutrition Claims and Calorie Counts

Calorie counts are required in some parts of the country. For instance, since 2008, New York City chain restaurants with more than 20 outlets are required to list calorie counts on their menus. This public health measure is designed to bring attention to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, and their relation to shockingly large calorie counts on today’s menus. When the Hard Rock Café started listing calorie counts, people were surprised to learn that the “healthy” salads they were ordering—with shrimp, nuts, cheese, and a creamy dressing—contained 920 calories, almost half the recommended 2,000 daily.

Portions have increased since the 1970s. Today a typical hamburger has 97 more calories than back then. Fries have 68 more, according to the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.

If your concept is health-driven, you may want to spotlight how few calories, how many healthy vitamins, and how much fiber your dishes have. Remember, today there are apps that calculate calories, and super-healthy food-obsessed people are likely to use them.

The Least You Need to Know

• A menu uses all of its parts—design, words, and descriptions—to tell the customer the story of your restaurant.
• Think of balance when you create your menu, select your dishes and their cooking methods, and plate the dishes.
• Test each recipe to ensure it can be replicated again and again.
• The investors’ dinner is your first trial run. The focus is on service and hospitality—it’s not a forum on the food. It’s a celebration.