Be efficient with your inventory


From the classroom, at least, chefs of tomorrow show they have a grasp of menu design with a calculated inventory. Let’s review, shall we?

For the next assignment I think we’d better explore Plan B a little further. It’s not that my Menu Planning students don’t get the concept of the cross-use of inventory. They seem to agree that thawing 30 lobster tails for Saturday night may require the debut of a Lobster Benedict for Sunday brunch.

And they understand that if a bouillabaisse is your only seafood item, you are buying Plan A seafood for a recipe whose origins were strictly Plan B. In other words, you’re buying a variety of fish and shellfish, each of which you can sell with its own fancy recipe, and using it to make the stew you would have made from all the scraps anyway.

Still, there’s theory, and then there’s the smell of ammoniated fish from the cooler: an olfactory way to underline the ravings of chef instructors. Most of my students have not yet had to make the direct connection between expiring inventory and a poorly designed menu, so we talk about it a lot. The discussion might be more effective (I’m always looking for new teaching tools) if we did it over a pile of last week’s halibut.

A week ago they turned in their preliminary menus for their imaginary restaurants, and I’m pleased to report that the next generation of chefs seems to know what it’s doing. There was a great deal of creativity in evidence, and a growing sense of market acumen. One young man presented a straight-ahead menu for an upscale steakhouse—pretty much like every other steakhouse menu in its price range—and I asked what he could do to distinguish his menu from the competition. He grinned at me and told me there wasn’t any. He’d chosen a site in Shakopee, and there isn’t a posh carnivorium within 20 miles. Objection overruled.

There are always loose ends to be tied, though, and loose cannons to be fired. I’ve got one menu with a chef salad and no other items using turkey or ham. I have an Italian menu that’s so close to being entirely chicken that the two veal items could be hung out to dry. I have mozzarella sticks and buffalo wings whose marketing plan is that some people like them. And I have a lot of filets.

OMG do I have filets (I am learning TLAs from my students: indulge me. Oh, and TLA stands for Three Letter Acronym). Everybody who puts a steak on the menu—whether a steakhouse or not—seems to start with the most famous, tender, expensive, boring hunk of meat. I have nothing against them, mind you. Even with the marbling bred out, you can still wrap them in caul fat or cover them with a sauce of Roquefort and Madeira. I do object to the price tag, particularly if an anxious economic climate makes covering the cost uncertain.

Manny’s and Murray’s are stuck with their filets, of course, and have to figure out a way to sell them. Steakhouses serve steak. We will call this “Monoculture Marketing,” and perhaps I’ll write a thesis about it. In the meantime, I’m sure some PhD. in Hospitality Forensics has come up with a meat-cost-to-rot-date ratio which tells you how much you can spend on an item with this shelf life and this menu price and reasonably expect a profit in a town of 32,000 with an average education level of some college and 3.07 cars/household (one of which was bought new; two from a sleazy brother-in-law; and 0.07 left in the yard by a previous owner).

On the other hand, if your restaurant is of a slightly different species, you could simply look at your menu and say, “I ain’t a steakhouse. Let ‘em eat flatiron.”

This really sums up the menu strategies of tough times: aggressive marketing, aggressive menu surgery, or some combination of the two. And once you’re done, find a way to get a free, unbiased hymn of praise sung about you. I just discovered an exciting new approach: Good Housekeeping, the magazine, has partnered with a manufacturing company to put out its own line of sauces and marinades. And each of them comes with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, no less. You can find inspiration anywhere you look, if you squint.