Greetings!
This month, we take another look at the growing small-plates trend, courtesy of our associate Patricia Liu. Certainly, there are plenty of examples of restaurants that serve only small plates, but you don’t have to overhaul your menu completely to offer them. Simpler strategies, like increasing the proportion of appetizers to entrees, can help you meet increasing customer demand for small plate options, and there are a number of benefits, as our Culinary Project Manager points out. In addition, there’s an article about the reasoning behind the industry’s reliance on limited-time menu programs (LTOs) and some shame-on-you’s in the service department.
To your success,
Dean and Danny
Get in on the Small Plates Trend
By Patricia Liu, Culinary Project Manager
The tapas or small plates restaurant concept is not new, but the popularity of such establishments is prompting restaurants to adopt the menu model in their own ways to great success. Even mainstream restaurants, such as The Cheesecake Factory with its Small Plates and Snacks section, are getting on this trend by providing many more appetizer selections.
There are numerous advantages to adding more small plates selections to your menu:
• It provides additional dining options. With more variable serving size offerings, it is now possible to capture not only the customers who want to have a traditional dinner but also those who want to sample a variety of different things or those coming in as a large group to mainly socialize and drink.
• Appetizers are usually more profitable, so having more small plates provides additional profit opportunities.
• Increased small plate offerings lowers average price per plate, which has two main upsides. One is the restaurant is viewed as a more cost-effective dining option. Also, the restaurant’s cost category would be downgraded in reviews and write-ups, which can entice more cost-conscious diners to try the restaurant. On a side note, people often tend to order more small plates because of the perceived low cost, even though in the end, the costs add up.
• By categorizing the menu by plate size, it also gives more freedom to menu creation – you no longer need to provide a certain number of salads, soups, appetizers, and entrees, etc.; it is more by plate size.
• The small plates model of creates a more social atmosphere, which can result in higher beverage and alcohol sales.
There are different variations of the small plates concept. Some restaurants, especially wine bars and gastropubs, offer only small plates. Others are adopting the model by offering many more appetizers than entrees. Another variation: In addition to having appetizers and entrees, having mid-size offerings (i.e., between appetizer and entrée-size), or having bite-sized items similar to pintxos in Spanish restaurants. With so many different flavors of this concept, there is sure to be a model that fits your establishment.
Whichever variation you decide to implement, you will need to consider kitchen, operational, and equipment impacts, very similar to how you analyze any changes to a menu. For example, with more offerings, how will the load on your different stations shift? Will you need to purchase more plates, share plates, or utensils? How will your expediting and ticketing systems change?
Small plates options can be an exciting modification to your menu that can be relatively low cost and effort to implement. So, give it a try!
To find out how Synergy can help you adopt the small plates trend, contact us for a free consultation.
The Word on Service: Try Harder
By Joan Lang
A recent post in Eater brought up an extremely interesting point about service: As restaurant concepts become more casual, many people think that service has suffered. There’s even a movement afoot in many quarters to replace servers altogether, with iPads and other high-tech devices. But while this is a fun novelty at the moment—and very appropriate for tech-savvy Gen Y’ers and early adopters of any age, for whom texting has replaced telephoning and even the slower email—restaurants have always been a high-touch business. There’s a reason it’s also called the hospitality industry, after all.
Even in fast food or quick-casual outlets, where there’s no table service per se, attitude and the technical aspects of customer service are paramount. And that takes proper hiring, training and empowering. A shift in paradigm from formality to a more laidback style is no excuse for ineptitude, rudeness, or misguided notions of what “casual” means.
A few examples, by way of illustration.
• The owner of a new French bistro had hired a sommelier with a following from a previous job, but the gentlemen in question was too busy chatting up friends at the bar to attend to the tables. For some people, working in restaurants is fun, and very social, but there have to be lines drawn. Having a job in the hot new place doesn’t mean all your friends should come in and visit you. Never mind that the wine guy looked like an unmade bed, with his rumpled suit and uncombed-looking hair. He dropped off the wine list, then skedaddled back to hold sway at the bar, even though I was clearly waiting for a friend and could have used something to sip. No amount of pointed eye contact or finger-raising could get him back, and when I tried to order from a server, she said she’d send the wine steward over. End result: The house lost a glass sale—and neither of us ever went back.
The Moral: Staff has to be on the floor, not hanging out having fun. And it’s fine to have a following, but not at the expense of other customers’ experiences. People who deal with the public need to have a certain temperamental willingness to serve the public, and shouldn’t be hired otherwise. The server, meanwhile, should have been trained to take the order, even if there is a wine specialist.
• In a highly rated destination restaurant that had converted its bar area into a less expensive “small plates” concept, we were asked to order all our small plates at one time. I know why they did this: for the benefit of the kitchen, used to coursing standard orders that come in all at once. But that doesn’t cut it. Small plates are all about nibbling and noshing, building up the check gradually—and everyone knows that small-plate sales can really add up. We succeeded in getting a plate of warm olives with our initial round of drinks while we considered the rest of our order, but the bartender made it clear that he was making an exception because it was still early, and the main dining room hadn’t filled up yet. End result: We hadn’t actually decided whether we were going to have our entire meal there, and we didn’t—and neither of us ever went back.
The Moral: Don’t offer a menu service that you can’t support with customer service. Lacking the ability to reconfigure the kitchen or its staff, management could have taken a lesson from the ages-old tapas bar, and created a menu of small plates that the bartenders could have served: meats and cheeses, prepared items, bowls of marinated olives or mixed nuts. Or only offer the bar menu on traditionally slow nights.
• During a teeming rainstorm, a waiter setting up his tables wouldn’t open up the door for us ten minutes earlier than the designated noon start of lunch service. He pointed to his watch, and kept on polishing silverware. Yes, the dining room needs to be set up and the silverware spotless before opening, but that’s just a guideline. Maybe he didn’t have the key. Go and get it from the guy in the back office, no matter what it says on the door. Needless to say, we went elsewhere—and none of us ever went back.
The Moral: This one’s all about lack of training and empowerment, if not common sense. There are rules for a reason, and there are plenty of reasons to break them. Staff members should understand what the policies and procedures are, and one of the policies should always be that judgment must trump procedures when it comes to keeping the customer happy. The people with their feet on the ground—the service staff—need to trained to the priorities and empowered with the flexibility to meet them.
If need some help with your training policies and procedures, contact Synergy for a free consultation.
How Do You Spell Sales? L-T-O.
By Joan Lang
Many chain restaurants have long favored LTOs (limited time offers) as a way to create news, keep customers engaged, offer seasonal favorites (such as fish during Lent), and test possible new menu items. Generally speaking, LTOs are a more rigorous and codified version of the daily specials offered in independent restaurants.
Lately, however, thanks to the sagging economy and the advent of new technologies, the industry has been upping the ante on this time-honored practice, accelerating both the pace and the number of menu specials. Popeyes, for instance—long known for its creative special-menu programs—is making LTOs a priority this year.
There are a number of reasons to mount limited time offerings:
- Bolster business during a typically slow season – Whether it’s summer in Florida or the weeks surrounding tax time, virtually every kind of restaurant will have traditional slow-traffic periods where there is both a need and the capacity to boost business (you don’t necessarily want to increase sales when a location is already bursting at the seams)
- Take advantage of seasonal availability and pricing – Items like fresh produce can be less expensive during the growing season, not to mention more appealing to patrons. That’s a double whammy reason for offering something like more entrée salads during the warmer months
- Offer a different price point – With either premium items or discounts such as a Two for $20 promotion, companies can manipulate average checks or change consumer perception of the concept’s affordability
- Keep employees on their game – From the menu R&D and marketing departments to the line cooks on location, everybody gets to stretch their creativity, learn new things and alleviate job boredom with LTOs
- Create a consumer rallying point – From traditional media to the website landing page and social media vehicles like Facebook and Twitter, LTOs are one of the best promotional devices that exist, creating news and a sense of excitement
- Test new items for the menu – A focused long view of LTOs can be part of a disciplined approach to the evolution of the menu. For instance, if management has identified the need to offer more boldly flavored ethnic items to address changing consumer preference, a program of LTOs can be used to identify the kinds of items that are best suited to the organization’s particular concept and operations
- Tracking technology is much more sophisticated – POS systems and tracking programs that pinpoint everything from sales velocity per hour to the point at which the novelty of a given LTO wears off make the process much more meaningful and quantifiable
- Respond more effectively to the local market – LTOs that are offered on a market-by-market basis allow a large chain to be more a part of the local marketplace, trends and preferences
Want more tips on how to create and manage LTOs? Contact Synergy Restaurant Consultants.
Tip of the Month
If you’d like to track what other chains are doing in the LTO and promotions area, or how trends are developing in various segments, check out Datassential. In addition to providing custom research, the company has a variety of resources in its archives, including the Menu Trends e-newsletter tracking such trends as upscale barbecue and food trucks.