Menu planning: Find your customer’s value center

Understanding your target market is the key to effective menu planning.

I am teaching a couple of menu planning courses at Hennepin Tech this fall, and my first assignment was just what you’d expect: go out and steal some menus.

Before your call the VP of Student Affairs to ask about latter-day Fagans and how you can get in on the scam (and shouldn’t you put down the Dickens and mind the store?), let me define my terms. “Steal” in the context of menus once connoted an act which was illegal, quasi-legal, or inevitable, depending on your perspective. Thirty years ago, every owner I knew had a collection purloined from all the other local owners, and one copy of the menu lost a week to your competition was considered a cost of doing business. You’d have given it to them for free, of course; and they’d have done the same for you—but where’s the fun in that? And the men envied the women owners with their jumbo purses, specially sized to hold three menus from Perkins without a telltale bulge.

Nowadays, everybody has a paper menu that you’re encouraged to take, or a web menu you may freely download. Theft has become obsolete and the word “steal” a polite romanticizing of “obtain legally”. I explained all this to my students as I encouraged their upright behavior. I did my best not to sound wistful.

What we were simulating in this assignment was a competitive analysis, a happy phrase used to justify industrial espionage. The menu is scrutinized first from the perspective of the customer: You’re looking for an intelligent mix of attractive offerings, fairly priced. Simple.

Until, that is, someone has the temerity to ask for details: Even the firmest of objective criteria get squishy when confronted with the corrosive subjectivity of the human gastrointestinal system. I have worked for people who thought that an intelligent menu mix was 220 items from eight different world cuisines. At the other extreme, there was a dinette in Albuquerque years ago which had four stools and one choice: Mulligan stew. It was open only for lunch, Monday through Friday, and would have a line down the block waiting for 11 a.m. Average time on the stool, eight minutes. Average stool turns, 22.5 each. Here’s your quiz: knowing only the menu sizes, which of the two businesses would you expect to be more profitable?

“Attractive offerings” also tend to exist in the salivary glands of the beholder. I could sell sweetbreads and brains without a problem in San Francisco; when I moved back to Minnesota, it was not quite so easy. Tripe is pretty exotic for our sophisticated downtown menus, but at Sixteenth and Lake, it’s no big deal. Without a clear understanding of your target market, the idea of an attractive item is by guess and golly. Attractive to whom—my 80-year-old retired pathologist father, who will pretend not to be looking at your sashimi platter as he launches into a discussion of fish parasites, or the 13-year-old neighbor boy, who can eat two Monster Thickburgers and a chocolate shake and add inches only vertically? The “something for everyone” idea has sunk so many restaurants that I don’t even want to talk about it any longer—hospitals and colleges are stuck with it; you’re not. Don’t do it. Figure out your damn demographic, or if you can’t be bothered, hire one of my students to do it for you.

Value, of course, is the most wildly subjective concept of the three. I will make the case that in terms of value, my $1 Whopper Junior and the dinner for two that cost three grand at Narsai’s in 1982 are identical phenomena. They both left the customer with a feeling of an extraordinary value received for the payment given. My whopperlet was a cheap bit of presclerotic delight, and the deuce at Narsai’s got to taste wines that few people on Earth have ever been able to try, in the context of a meal whose absolute perfection was the only assurance of survival for the cooks.

So with all those concrete categories turned to subjective mush, your only real solution is to get in the heads of your customers, current and potential: make your best estimates of their perception of a good menu mix, attractive offerings, and good value; then find a way to measure your accuracy so you can adjust your aim without having to stop and reset the target.