Article

Right Sizing Your Menu

Targeting the Optimal Number of Items on Your Independent Restaurant’s Menu

“The restaurant business starts with the menu,” says John Buchanan, president at Chicago-based Lettuce Consulting Group. He should know. Buchanan has decades of restaurant development experience with Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants, which started with one restaurant in 1971 and has since created 135 concepts with more than 280 locations. And yet as fundamental as the menu is to every aspect of restaurant finance, marketing, and operations, the menu seems to present the greatest challenges to independent operators in concept planning and development.

The reasons for these challenges vary. Operators – just like us all – often have emotional connections to certain foods, which they hope will appeal to their guests. That is not always the case.

The menu is the primary driver of prime cost, the most important number on the profit-and-loss statement (P&L). Avoiding food waste and optimizing kitchen labor are as important as ever.

If you dine out relatively frequently (if for no other reason than to see what your competitors are doing), you might conclude that there are no hard-and-fast rules to menu sizing. We experience successful concepts with sprawling menus and successful concepts with tight menus. (Of course, unless we can look at their profit-and-loss statements we cannot say how well their menus are performing.)

Nevertheless, in this article, we delve into the question of how to “right-size” your menu, leaning on the expertise of people who make it their business to find the answer.

Menu Psych 101

While “right-sizing” a menu could involve menu expansion, in today’s inflation-prone economy, operators might be best served looking for ways to pare down offerings rather than broaden the selection. Says Buchanan, “There are certain concepts that can get by with ‘tight menus,’ but then most concepts could get by with a bit of trimming.” He believes that “10 percent of the items could be dropped and inside of a week they won’t be missed. So, I would say that just about every menu can be trimmed with no ill effect.”

Cornell University research suggests that giving guests too many choices on the menu can confuse them and even cause them to be dissatisfied with their order, according to Karen Malody of Culinary Options, a 20-year-old restaurant consultancy based in Seattle.