New dish ideas deserve harsh interrogation

Before giving away real estate on your menu, try invoking a little Jacob Marley attitude.

All of us, I think, indulge in certain sadistic fantasies. I like to picture myself in a leather chair behind an enormous teak desk with my back to the open door of a bank vault. Huge stacks of cash are visible through the doorway: I am their guardian. Humble supplicants crawl before my desk to beg the loan of a few pathetic dollars, and my face never loses its scowl as I question their character, solvency, haberdashery and hygiene. I probe their stories for any weakness. My finger quivers above the button that will slam the vault door shut in their unworthy faces.

The world would probably be better off if banks had employed a few more such vile creatures over the last decade, which gives my fantasy a nice flavor of self-righteousness. I have a feeling that I couldn’t last at that job, though: I don’t know that the moments of sadistic glee would come often enough to stave off the boredom. Restaurant people tend to need more frequent stimulation.

Oddly enough, this perverse part of my psyche has found an outlet in menu development. When an idea comes to me hoping to get a place on a menu, I interrogate it with the ferocity of a Jacob Marley being approached for a small business loan: “What, I ask, will you do for me? You are proposing that I lend you valuable real estate on my menu—and that I should evict a tenant to give you a space—and like as not, you’ll repay my kindness by overworking my cooks and chewing up space in my inventory. Who’d buy a plate of slop like you, eh? Anyone? Prove it! Oh, and you say you’ll make them buy a beer or two as well? Would that be to drown out your miserable taste before they leave my establishment never to return?”

Every new item should be walking up to you with a business plan of its own, and you should look it over like a banker. You are taking out a loan when you put something new on the menu, y’know: You’ve invested time for development and market research, you’ve put together a campaign to support it (right?), and you’re loaning it retail space on your menu and inventory space in the back. Large corporations reduce the criteria for acceptance to two, and make a shopworn maxim out of them: First it has to make sense, then it has to make dollars. It has to fit your ‘brand,’ and it’s got to perform.

And so you get benchmarks that come along with your prospective item. It will sell this many at such a time, and it will contribute to our overall health by… by what? Here’s where you get to play the restaurant version of Menu Stratego: Are we hoping to bring in new customers, maintain the interest of regular customers, increase check averages, or drive tag-along sales? Please don’t answer “yes”—you can’t do them all with one item. Think of how you are pricing stuff: If you are putting something on to lasso new business, you can (and should) afford to take at least a small hit on the item’s production costs. It’s new business, after all. With regulars, they will indeed be happy to see new stuff, but will you be happy to see them switch from a high-margin item to one you almost make for free? Profit is getting thin enough without shaving it here.

As to check averages: everyone wants to increase them, sure, but increasing margin is a wee bit more important. And it’s overall margin we’re looking for here: An item designed to sell multiple beers can take more of a margin hit than one whose upsell is, “Fries with that?”

So with your new item’s mission statement firmly in hand (“I will sell your beer!”), you ask for revenue projections: “How much beer, wise guy, and when? And this is gonna cover all the grief you’re sure to cause me? And we’ll check week by week, and you’ve got two months to make it, chum. Don’t screw up my labor.”

You need to send your new star out to its debut with clear definitions for success and failure. These don’t have to be the complicated, region-weighted, statistically abstruse models that a worldwide operator would use, and they don’t have to appear in tidy graphs that you make in your free time. Should you want them, there are many tidy graph-makers available. They do need to let you evaluate how the item performs the revenue-raising chores that you have set it. This is the final piece of the business plan: The tools which let you decide the poor thing’s fate when the judgment day rolls around. Keep your finger on the vault door’s button.