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May 2013 Newsletter

May 22, 2013

Greetings!

A lot’s been going on at Synergy lately. We’re working on two projects slated to open in the next several months in the charming, newly revitalized center city area of Rapid City, S.D., about 20 miles from Mount Rushmore.
Eight months in the making ¿Que Pasa? Mexican Kitchen & Tequila Bar is a hip, urban cantina with an outstanding collection of tequilas and a menu that’s contemporary yet approachable. The selection features fun twists on classics like sizzling fajitas, burritos, carnitas and shareables such as ceviche, comal-grilled quesadillas and chile-rubbed chicken wings.
Ciao! will open later this year, a family-friendly fast-casual restaurant featuring grilled panini sandwiches, salads, tossed-to-order pastas, and oven-baked specialties like lasagna and spaghetti pie.
Both concepts will be operated by local restaurateur Bob Fuchs, who also owns the Firehouse Brewing Co and Wobbly Bobby British Pub. We’ll be filling you in on the details as the opening dates move closer.

 

To your success,

Dean Small and Danny Bendas

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Thoroughly Modern Menus

By Joan Lang

Dining out, traveling, and talking trends as much as we do, we see a lot of interesting menus. As a group, restaurant menus have been moving away from the traditional appetizer-entrée-dessert progression for a number of years now, but lately we’ve been noticing that some menus have become absolute shapeshifters—modular to the point of being practically without course structure. And that means that customers can have their say as never before in how their own meals are constructed.

Take Range, Bryan Voltaggio’s new mega-restaurant in Washington, DC. Not only are the facilities enormous (14,000-sq.ft., with nine kitchens including a bakeshop, 300 seats, a private dining room and an adjoining cigar bar) but the menu is the very definition of wide-ranging. With well over a dozen sections, items are grouped by technique (“Roasted”), equipment (“Wood Oven”), station (“Cold Kitchen”) and category (“Pasta”). Price is the only relative indication of size. Diners can have raw-bar specialties and pizza, they can order any of seven a la carte breads and among 18 kinds of salumi and charcuterie. They can easily eat vegetarian. And while it remains to be seen if the menu stays this way past its opening frenzy, there’s no doubt that adventurous food lovers can have a field day here.

There’s also the Little Goat, Stephanie Izard’s “diner” in Chicago that serves breakfast all day (heralded by the category Cereal Killers), a “Snack Corner” merchandising the likes of upscale chicken fingers and nachos, and an a la carte Bread Menu that runs the gamut from bagels to broccoli cheese bread and also includes daily soups and a build-your-own house sandwich. You can’t help but get the feeling that you’ve stepped right into Izard’s appetite.

Here are a few other attention-getting menu formats:

• Animal, a trendsetting restaurant in Los Angeles, lists a variety of different items, one after another, that begin with a $3 toast and end with a $29 rabbit entrée, with lots of offal (oxtail, crispy pig tail, veal brains) in between. Order this, two of thats, and one of those to share, and you have a fabulous and adventurous meal. Chef-owners Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo also own a restaurant called Son of a Gun, with categories like “raw,” “seasonal” and “meat” that almost seem quaint by comparison

• Sable, Heather Terhune’s new restaurant in Chicago, touts all-day dining on “social plates”— various kinds of shareables like flatbreads, hors d’oeuvres, Farm & Garden (vegetables, salads and vegetarian items), and mix-and-match fish and meat entrees like fried chicken and tuna tartare tostadas. There’s also breakfast, and a weekend brunch (where cocktails are listed under “Thirsty”)

• The Kitchen, with locations in Denver and Boulder, celebrates the “community” of food in bistro and bar format, respectively, with cozy banquette seating, late-afternoon community hours, dining at the bar and a seriously casual attitude toward well-crafted food. The menu in Denver, for instance, features raw bar, oysters, caviar, starters, and mains, while there are two different venues in Boulder: Next Door, a family-friendly community pub; and Upstairs, a slightly more traditional “community bar.” The commitment is to food quality and fun—for the staff as well as customers

Need help making your menu more amazing? Contact Synergy Restaurant Consultants.


Wake Up and Smell the Breakfast


By Joan Lang

The recent news that McDonald’s may start serving breakfast all night is just one hint at how much the eggs-and-bacon daypart is heating up. There are lots of other players on the front, indicating the industry’s ongoing search for new sources of revenue.

Breakfast really perked up during the recession, when consumers sought all kinds of ways to eat out more affordably—
from morning meetings and catering to brunch with friends—and it has stuck around even as the economy improves.

The NPD Group reveals that breakfast and brunch sales have boomed post-recession, accounting for an estimated $59 billion in total industry revenues. Morning meal sales skew toward older, more affluent diners, but brunch has become an important social outing for younger diners in major cities.

And the segment is set to grow still more: Mintel predicts breakfast sales to increase 2.8% in 2013, and a whopping 22.1% between now and 2017.

Quick-serve operators now represent 83% of all breakfast availability, according to Datassential’s “Egg Menuing – Breakfast and Beyond” report for the American Egg Board, stealing share primarily from the midscale segment. In part, this is based on the convenience (read: egg sandwiches) and price point of QSR breakfast. But there are a lot of individual winners.

One is The Egg & I, a 70-unit breakfast-and-lunch chain based in Centennial, OH, which has been on a serious growth trend in the past few years, and counts some 90% of its sales from the breakfast/brunch daypart.

For customers, the appeal is a wide-ranging menu of under-$10 items, ranging from prosaic pancakes to specialties like frittatas, Benedicts and Southwestern-style egg dishes. There are also numerous healthy options emphasizing ingredients like egg whites, turkey sausage and steel-cut oatmeal.

For franchisees, the appeal is equally economical: Operating just seven hours a day (7 ½ on weekends), The Egg & I can be staffed by a single shift, and units tend to be in such secondary markets as South Portland, ME, and Panama City, FL. The advantageous food costs of eggs and pancake batter go without saying.

Which is not to say that the quality and creativity of menu offerings isn’t totally stepped up. Among other things, with more boutique hotels opening and partnering with big-name local chefs for their restaurants (and often room service), more of those chefs are lending those names to the morning meal.

Ace Hotels, for instance, with high-profile properties in such cities as Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Portland, OR, have become favored local breakfast destinations—for both business and pleasure—in their respective cities. In New York, the morning crowd can choose between The Breslin, with an Englishey menu designed by April Bloomfield (who also operates the popular seafood restaurant John Dory on-property) and cult-favorite Stumptown Coffee Roasters, where they can order coffee and a pastry and take it to the hip lobby for something a little less elaborate. So you can just forget about the old trope of the locals only going to a hotel for the Sunday breakfast buffet.

Meanwhile, it seems like brunch has never been hotter. At 2 Sparrows in Chicago, Charlie Trotter alums Gregory Ellis and Steven Fladung have made their names with an 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. morning meal that includes the seasonally driven likes of duck confit hash and a “belly sandwich” consisting of blackened pork belly, sunny egg, and spicy aioli on a biscuit. And at Brenda’s French Soul Food in San Francisco, late Sunday risers can partake of such eye-opening fare as beignets, Hangtown Fry, and Grillades & Grits.

Can you say “second Bloody Mary”?


Secret Weapon


By Karen A. Brennan, Marketing & Branding Strategy

A while ago I was in Los Angeles on a Discovery Tour and visited an haute hot dog concept called The Slaw Dogs. The line-up of builds was impressive. They had dozens of variations, from the Soy Bomb veggie dog to a Rueben Dog with spicy sausage and pastrami, but most impressive was when they brought out their “Secret Menu” of off-menu choices for two women who were undecided about what they wanted. How fun is that?

Weeks later I went to P.F. Chang’s with my sister and brother-in-law, who ordered an off-menu item—Chang’s Shrimp, which had been taken off the menu years before. Since being deleted, it is now a “secret” that those in the know can order. As my brother-in-law told me, “They make it for me.” He loves having the “inside scoop.” It has made him a huge P.F. Chang’s fan, and the fact that he could tell me about it absolutely made his day. And that’s the point: Secret menus make guests feel good because they get what they want and feel like they’re getting special treatment too.

But secret menus are also good for restaurants. Having headed up marketing for several restaurant chains, I know how challenging menu development can be—especially when staying on-trend with new items means that you have to let go of old established items in order to keep the total size of the menu down to an executable level.

I read some research a long time ago that said the single biggest reason people stop going to their favorite restaurant is because the restaurant stopped serving their favorite item. I’ve been convinced of that over the years, as focus groups have repeatedly told me the same story of abandoning a restaurant because their favorite item had been 86’ed.

That’s why some restaurant chains, like the Bravo Brio Restaurant Group where I was chief marketing officer, keep POS keys, recipes and server training materials for deleted items. If a guest requests a discontinued item, like Bravo’s Shrimp Fra Diavolo, and they have the ingredients, they can still make it. It’s really a win-win. The guest gets what he wants because the restaurant has the infrastructure in place to do it, without taking up valuable menu real estate.

And it’s not just deleted menu items that find their way onto a secret menu. Often, secret menus include items that solve a guest problem—nutritional or otherwise. Someone told me if I was too late for breakfast at McDonald’s I could ask for a Mc10:35, a hybrid of an Egg McMuffin and a McDouble . (To test the theory, the other day I asked my local McDonald’s if they had heard of the Mc10:35 and the cashier said to me, “I wish!,” implying that even though their location didn’t serve it, it would be a great idea and would make her and a lot of her customers very happy.)

Secret Menus cater to the undecided, to the health-conscious, to picky eaters and to the splurge market:

• The Undecided—Build-your-own concepts like Neapolitan pizzeria 800 Degrees offer suggestions for great combinations. This can really help expedite the ordering process and lower the anxiety level for indecisive patrons

• The Health Conscious—Panera Bread, in deference to their low carb customers, has recently launched a Hidden Menu with power protein bowls for breakfast and protein options at lunch; Popyeyes offers its sandwiches “Naked” (without the batter); and In-N-Out Burger offers its burger “Protein Style,” wrapped in lettuce instead of a bun

• The Just Plain Picky Eaters—A picky eater friend of mine is executive vice president of a chain of restaurants in New Orleans. To accommodate her preference for no sauces, the chain instituted a special register key just for her that is now commonly used for anyone who prefers “no sauce” presentations. I happen to hate burritos, but I just found out that Chipotle will make my chosen ingredients into a quesadilla instead of a burrito if I just ask—that’s all the incentive I need to go back

• The Splurge Market— McDonald’s Pie McFlurry is what you get when you buy a Baked Apple Pie and a McFlurry and have them blended together for you. Wendy’s offers a Grand Slam with four burgers, and In-N-Out’s cult-favorite 4×4 includes four burgers and four slices of cheese, but legend has it that they once served a 100×100! (NOTE: A side benefit of keeping these items off-menu is that their calorie counts stay off-menu, too—some things are better left a secret!)

What all of these Hidden Menus, Secret Menus and Not-So-Secret menus suggest is that great operators are finding inventive ways to give customers exactly what they want while ensuring the consistency and execution their customers demand. For chains that can’t devote valuable menu space to items that only have limited appeal, but want customers seeking esoteric items to know that they are available, secret menus are a great option.

Secret menus allow operators to simplify the complicated ordering process of picky customers and to maintain consistency on even quirky orders. They also build deeper relationships and an insider feeling among customers that can spur them to share via social media. Shhhhhh….

In fact, in today’s intensely competitive battle for market share, secret menus really are a great Secret Weapon.


Tip of the Month

Foodable Network bills itself as the “premier WebTV network for restaurant and hospitality,” with videos on such topics as server body language, how to make a Pumpkin King cocktail and fast-casual French cafes (via FastCasual Trends TV). It’s led by Paul Barron, fastcasual.com founder and author of “The Chipotle Effect”; stay on top of new postings with the Foodable twitter feed.