Tag Archives: Food

November 1, 2013 · 10:35 am

Ssshhhhh…

Foodie Friday, and this week I want to talk – very quietly – about secrets. You might be familiar with the fact that some restaurants have secret menus. They range from the unofficial like Starbucks (you pretty much have to describe to the barista exactly what you mean by a Red Candy Apple Frappucino) to the official but hidden menus at In-N-Out Burger which puts the hidden menu on its website.  McDonald’s, Chipotle, and pretty much every other chain has off-menu items, as do many top restaurants.

What I find strange isn’t that some customers are “in” while others are left wondering what that was the other table was eating.  No, what I think is really odd are those establishments that are themselves hidden.  These are restaurants – and many of them are very good – that go out of their way to hide.  No sign,  and often an unmarked door so you can’t be sure of the address.  In fact, The Times just reviewed one of these places (so much for keeping THAT secret)  and pointed out the restaurant is in a basement. It is closed four nights out of seven. Its sole offering is a $100 tasting menu that is not posted in advance. Substitutions are not allowed.  Not exactly a prescription for embracing the customer and yet the place got two stars (that’s damn good here in NY, folks) and you know it will be mobbed.

There are hidden places in other cities as well so it’s not just a NY phenomenon.  But it got me wondering why a business would do this.  I get the whole “the first rule of Fight Club is don’t talk about Fight club” mentality.  I know many people like to be in on the secret and know something that someone else doesn’t.  But given that Yelp, Urbanspoon, and other review sites are out there, the odds of keeping the menu and the business itself secret are pretty slim.  I mean there are even websites dedicated to outing these places. Why bother trying?

Maybe it’s the sense of belonging to something even if they’re not really “secret.”  Maybe it’s an incredibly clever form of marketing.  In a time when it seems as if every business is trying to get louder, these are standing out by making no noise at all.  Interesting, right?

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October 25, 2013 · 10:19 am

The Godmother

Foodie Friday is a bit somber this week since our topic today is the passing of Marcella Hazan.

Marcella: will she peel my beans too?

(Photo credit: kattebelletje)

You might not be familiar with the name but I can assure you that you are familiar with the influence she has had in the food world.  Her obituary in The Times was entitled “Changed The Way Americans Cook Italian Food” and that may be an understatement.  Let me explain and point out a few things we can take away from her that might just apply to your business.

The comparison is often made between Marcella and Julia Child.  What Julia did for French food in this country, Marcella did for Italian.  I think that’s where the similarities end.  Julia was formally trained, Marcella was trained as a biologist, not a cook.  Julia was an American who went to Paris while Marcella was an Italian immigrant to this country.  Much of the food Julia prepares is complex; Marcella’s food is very simple but, as she wrote,

Simple doesn’t mean easy. I can describe simple cooking thus: Cooking that is stripped all the way down to those procedures and those ingredients indispensable in enunciating the sincere flavor intentions of a dish.

Of the hundred or more cookbooks I own, Marcella’s are the ones that are dog-eared and stained from much use.  If you want to learn to cook, begin with “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” which is her first two books in one volume.  In its introduction, she wrote the following about Italian food:

It is not the created, not to speak of “creative,” cooking of restaurant chefs.  It is the cooking that spans remembered history…There is no such thing as Italian haute cuisine because there are no high or low roads in Italian cooking.  All roads lead to the home, to la cucina di casa – the only one that deserves to be called Italian cooking.

What business lessons does Marcella teach us?  First, you can hear how she is confident in her positions and speaks with authority.  Second, she prefers the simple solution rather than the overly complex.  Third, she always seems to cook on a stove rather than in an oven – it’s so the cook can pay better attention to the food.  Fourth, she emphasizes great ingredients and bringing out the best from them.  Interpret that as a management goal with your team as the ingredients!

Finally,  as you read in the last quote, she always emphasized authenticity.  She disdained the use of microwave ovens to speed up cooking not because she was a Luddite but because the texture and flavor of the product was altered.   How many businesses suffer because they cut a corner or speed up a process only to denigrate their product?

Marcella was the Godmother of Italian cooking.  She changed how we eat and her lessons can change how we conduct business.  Does that make sense?

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October 18, 2013 · 9:38 am

Bad Menus

Foodie Friday!  Maybe you’ve seen one of the many shows that fall into what I’ll call the “restaurant rehab” genre.

Dinner menu from Water St./ Beaver St. locatio...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You know what I mean.  A restaurant is failing, a celebrity chef comes in, makes changes and voilà, business saved.  Inevitably, the chef changes the decor, makes sure the place is clean (and some are so disgusting you wonder why the health department hasn’t shut them down), savages the owner for faulty purchasing practices (a walk-in full of rotting food is a good sign you’re buying too much for what you’re using!), and, most importantly, goes over the menu and eats the food.

I think I can safely say, without it being too much of a spoiler, that in each and every case the food sucks.  You might think that bad food is the reason these places are having problems.  I think the bad food is a symptom, not the disease.  The real problem is a bad menu and maybe that’s a phenomenon that could cause problems with your business too.  Let me explain.

Nearly every place that’s been on one of these shows has a menu that’s similar in scope to an encyclopedia.  They have way too many items.  The chef thinks that they’re providing a service by letting diners order..well…almost anything.  The reality is that they setting the business up for problems.  More dishes requires more varied ingredients (the full refrigerator of rotting food).  Cooking them requires more staff training and quality control is harder.  After all, if a cook is making a dish once a week, they’re far more likely to screw it up than if they cook it hourly every night.  Finally, it confuses your patrons.  It’s stressful wondering which choice is great and which items aren’t.

Fewer choices executed perfectly is usually the solution on the TV shows and it is in most businesses and products too.  Think about Word, the widely used word processing program.  Microsoft filled it with features and, to be sure users would see them, put lots of buttons on the menu bar.  That was confusing and very few users cared about the new features each version brought so they didn’t pay to upgrade.  I know people who are still happily using Word 2003.

This notion goes as far back as Henry Ford.  You could get any color car you wanted as long as it was black.  Think of Apple – there is limited customization possible with their phone operating system but that’s just fine for most users and the products are high-quality.

We all want to give consumers choice.  What we don’t want to do is to confuse them or to offer an inferior product.  Just as the restaurants found out, that’s a recipe for failure.  Fewer options perfectly executed is my take.  What’s yours?

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