Monthly Archives: May 2020

May 29, 2020 · 3:29 pm

That Tonnato Sauce

This Foodie Friday, I want to write about one of my favorite summer dishes, vitello tonnato. When I first had it at some fancy lunch many years ago, I thought it was something thought up by a clever chef. As it turns out, it isn’t a new dish at all. One can find it in the 130-year-old Italian cookbook Science In The Kitchen and the Art Of Eating by Pellegrino Artusi (it’s on page 271 of my edition).

The dish is veal, generally a shoulder or rump portion, that’s been boiled and thinly sliced. It’s topped by a sauce that’s basically a tuna and caper-infused mayonnaise. Trust me – it tastes a lot better than it sounds. The veal is really just a canvas for the sauce in my book.

I was pleasantly surprised when one of my friends emailed my a recipe for a vegetable plate of crudites that was served with a sauce that wasn’t called tonnato sauce but absolutely was the same as what one would put on the veal down to the capers and anchovies in the sauce. The chef described it as a “garlicky aioli bolstered with oil-packed tuna.” Uh, yes, please.

It got me thinking about special sauces since the tonnato sauce is clearly special to me. Every business needs a special sauce if it’s not going to be a commodity. If you’ve not done a competitive set analysis, that’s a great place to start to see how you’re different. Then ask yourself why you exist. What’s the problem you’re solving and why is your solution unique/better? Check your assumptions against what your customers and employees think. 

Is your sauce really yours? Can it be duplicated or is it unique and defensible? Back in the day, we used to call something that you marketed around a USP – Unique Selling Proposition but I think your secret sauce is more than that. It gets to the heart of what your business is, including the culture. It’s what makes you you!

You can put tonnato on sliced pork tenderloin, vegetables, and of course veal. I suspect it’s great on grilled foods – veggies and proteins. As I’m thinking about it, it’s not far from a Caesar Salad dressing but with tuna. You see? Once you have a secret sauce, you can’t really tell how far it will take you!

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May 22, 2020 · 2:37 pm

Not Delivering At All

If it’s Friday, the topic is food here on the screed. This week, it’s the food delivery services I suspect many of you have been using to support your favorite restaurants during the time we’re supposed to stay at home. Food delivery is not a new phenomenon. I know a lot of folks, myself included, who used it before all of this when they had nothing planned or bought for dinner and couldn’t bear the thought of pulling themselves together to go out.

What’s different with these services is that they’re third parties. One of my first jobs back in the day was as a food delivery guy (before I graduated to cook) for a local pizza place. Who hasn’t ordered Chinese food and had it delivered? But I worked for the pizza place and the kid making the Chinese food delivery was generally the owner’s son from the place I frequented. These services – Grubhub, Seamless, and others – are a relatively new business. For restaurants that didn’t do a large enough takeout business to hire a delivery person, they opened up new revenue streams. Of course, they come with a cost.

First, there is a human cost. These services pay very low wages and don’t make tipping mandatory (don’t be that guy – tip well, ok?). Then they charge exorbitant, often hidden fees to the restaurants. You might have read about one restaurant owner’s experience. In March, she got 93 orders through Grubhub, totaling to $6,626 in revenue. From that, GrubHub took $1,208 in commission, a $592 delivery fee, and $230 in processing fees, totaling to over 30% of the revenue. In an industry where margins are often low double digits, that’s not sustainable.

We could continue the discussion beginning with why restaurants don’t hire their own delivery people but the point I want to make today which might just apply to your business is about using third parties, especially third parties who end up owning the customer relationship. What is to stop Grubhub from promoting another restaurant to someone who is looking at your menu? Do a search on Yelp for a specific restaurant and you’ll usually see a couple of other promoted alternatives first in the listings. I don’t know what data the restaurant sees when an order comes in via one of these services but at a minimum someone else is privy to a portion of your customer base, their preferences, addresses, etc.

You might have heard of third-party cookies. Third-party cookies are created by domains other than the one you are visiting directly, hence the name third-party. They are used for cross-site tracking, retargeting, and ad-serving. They’re what makes it possible for you to see an Amazon ad for a product you just searched Amazon for on another, unrelated website. They’re going away, in part because of privacy concerns and, I believe, in part because marketers are waking up to the fact that having someone else own data that you help to generate so that they can sell it back to you as well as to your competition is silly.

Industries outsource all the time. Generally, this is because they don’t want to deal with solving a particular problem themselves for whatever reason and it becomes easier to let someone else deal with it. That’s often shortsighted, particularly when it ends up with someone else owning the customer relationship. After all, in business, that’s probably the most important relationship you have, right?

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May 15, 2020 · 4:06 pm

Top Shelf

It’s Foodie Friday, and if we weren’t in the midst of a pandemic, I’d be heading to my favorite local watering hole late this afternoon to celebrate the end of another work week. Since that’s not possible at the moment with all the bars and restaurants closed, I’ll do my celebrating here. I’m not going to lie either – I generally don’t pour myself an end of day beverage only on Fridays. From what I can glean from many of my friends’ posts on social media, I’m not drinking alone either.

One of the local establishments – a high-end cocktail lounge – has been selling their house-made mixers and syrups to have some income during this time. Of course, we bought some, mostly to support them but also because if ever there was a time to upgrade the cocktail game, this would be it. The other day, we made a beverage using one of the syrups and it was delicious, so much better than our usual drink. It got me thinking about what we did differently and, as I thought about it, there was a business point as well.

First, we used a really good vodka as well as the syrup. There was a top-shelf liqueur called for and we didn’t try to get a less-expensive brand. The lemon juice was fresh too. Unlike many times, we actually measured the ingredients and put them in a shaker with lots of ice to get a proper chill. I don’t know about you, but most of the time, I’m not measuring my drink proportions. Yes, I know that a typical highball (liquor plus mixer) is supposed to be a 3 to 2 mixer to booze ratio. Once in awhile, I’m sure my concoctions achieve that but those times are probably the exception.

The business point? Only the best ingredients, better known as your team. It’s worth spending more on the best you can get. Second, measuring, better known as data. If you’re not measuring how do you know how you’re doing? How do you know what’s working? It’s not enough that the cash register rings (and worse when it doesn’t). What’s causing it to ring? Can it ring louder and more often? Measuring is how we know.

Finally, putting the best ingredients in an environment where they’ll shine – the stainless shaker filled with ice, a chilled glass – made a big difference. You need to do the same with your team. Give them the best chance to be their best. Is it harder now with people working remotely? Of course, but finding a way to build that environment is your job, isn’t it? I’ve always said that a manager’s job is to help his team to do their jobs, first and foremost.

Try this: make your usual beverage next time but get the best ingredients you can afford and measure them carefully. Freshly squeezed juice, ginger beer with real ginger, whatever. Put them in a nice, well-chilled glass. Let me know if it doesn’t taste a whole lot better, ok?

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