On failure: It ain't always bad

A new menu item has several opportunities for failure. But the crux of the failure conundrum is that failure can be bad or good; it’s all in how you manage it.

I made a lovely breakfast for myself the other day, which of course got me thinking about failure.

Now, before you dismiss this as just another foodservice pathology like paranoid schizophrenia, misanthropy or cheerful optimism, please understand that I am not obsessed with failure. I’m rather comfortable with it, really.

But breakfast first: I painted some slices of baguette with olive oil, sprinkled them with kosher salt and granulated garlic, and grilled them. As I flipped each one over, I sprinkled the grilled side with leaf thyme. Next to them I grilled five slices of Roma tomato, some thin Edwards ham (a salt-cured smoked ham, like Smithfield) and a couple of eggs. I stacked it up like a Benedict’s Provençal cousin—baguette, ham, tomato, egg—and topped it with some Feta cheese and crushed red pepper. Bruschetta and eggs. Delicious.

So, to failure: I’m not sure whether this little item has much of a future. It tastes good, has an understandable name (I had a delightful moudjendra and eggs a few days back. Sell that; I dare you), and it has a couple trendy ingredients in the designer ham and the feta. I’m afraid it just doesn’t knock me back on my heels. It’s not an obvious stunner like putting eggs Benny on crabcakes was, even if everyone is doing that now (and why is no one using lobster? Look, it’s easy—muffin, Canadian bacon, lobster, poached egg, and Newberg sauce; the old-fashioned kind with the sherry béchamel mixed with Hollandaise. I can’t believe the stuff I give you for free).

Here’s a decent enough item, then, which has several opportunities for failure. First, it may not be appropriate for a given concept. This is a kind of failure of which I strongly approve, and which I wish more people would recognize. You have a menu already, which presumably has some innate defining character of its own. In this arena you are not just permitted, but encouraged to refuse some potential immigrants because of their ethnicity. It has the wrong kind of accent? Out. Looks a little overdressed? Out. Throws a little too much money around for our kind of people? Out. If you’ve been in this business for a while, you’ve accumulated all sorts of prejudices that are sitting around just aching to be used. This is where you use them.

Let’s say that my item has made it past your checkpoints and has passed the tests of appropriate ethnicity, price point, daypart, and so on. At this moment, the adventure is just beginning—whole new worlds of potential failure now open before it. Are you going to throw it on the printed menu along with those stalwarts which have been paying your bills for years? This is a grand opportunity for a flop—a menu is a commitment, after all; you’re promising to have the food you say you have. If it doesn’t sell, it’s wasting retail space on your menu and shelf space in the kitchen. And the ham is about eighty bucks for twelve pounds or so, bone-in, and has to be scrubbed, soaked and boiled for a full shift before you can use it. It wouldn’t by chance, be single-use inventory, would it?

Well, you can get around that with specials; good ingredients on hand make good cooks get better. I’m much less concerned about ingredients that go into only one item than I am about items that are tossed into a menu to sink or swim, and not given the chance to fail on their own merits. And since we’re on the subject, wouldn’t it make more sense to introduce this as a special, so it has some immediate attention given to it and generates more looks and (we hope) more trials, thus giving its potential failure much greater value?

The crux of the failure conundrum is that failure can be bad or good; it’s all in how you manage it. The idiots who tell you that failure is not an option are imagining themselves to be masters of their fate: a dangerous fantasy. Fate may deal good hands or bad, but it tends to clean the table eventually. So arrange your potential failures carefully, and learn from them.

Most importantly, set clear guidelines to help you recognize them. Did it meet sales goals? Did it bring in new traffic? Generate positive comments? Overstress the prep cooks? All of this stuff can be measured—including the stress on the cooks—and put into nice clean numbers that will tell you if your item has failed. And then, with a clear conscience, you kill it.

Our most successful former client is headed by a woman who was brought in to straighten out an accounting mess in a chain that had grown too fast. She dug her way through the various books at the various stores and found that some locations just weren’t worth keeping. They were closed, and the system got stronger. Good failures—but only when recognized as such.

And this company has grown so much we can no longer serve them—we helped systematize the process for introducing new items, and it worked, and since they are so big now that they have to have a permanent development staff of their own, you might say they fired us. Which is a pretty nice failure, all things considered.