Introduction to Marketing

The day started off with odds n' ends, the class' restaurant experiences since we last met. Lenin-pisser was at Cafe Lulu in Brooklyn over the weekend, and while dining, there was a horrendous crash in the kitchen and several people shouting, "Kill it! Kill it!" Mmmmm, delicious. Russian Pam Anderson brought up the news about Tavern on the Green, about how despite the fact they are the 2nd highest grossing restaurant in the country, they're probably losing their lease from the city.

Another student spoke of an article about crock-pot cooking, a new fad in times of lowered economic prospects. This reminded me of the crock pot I found in an old farm-house I was invited to cook at for a weekend over the summer. There were piles of crap from the 70s there, and the thing that stood out was the crock pot (pictured above) -- all it is is a slow cooker!! You can use any pot with a cover and wack it in an oven at a low temp and -poof- no need for another piece of equipment. Silliness. What is old is new again.

The next part of the class was dedicated to literally deconstructing the menu of LI DeNiro's family's restaurant, an Italian restaurant and pizzeria. The original menu is just a big friggin' mess. It's 6 pages, 100s of items, and a border of crammed, garish close-ups of food which gives the impression of poorly-composed piles of noise. It seems items were added chronologically since the place opened in 1965, without too much sense or clarity. Spelling mistakes abounded, sections broken over multiple pages.

By taking photocopies and cutting them up and pasting them, it wasn't that hard to make it make sense. However, if I was answering to an old-school off-the-boat pizzaman whose business has been just fine without the menu rejiggering, it may be a challenge! Just removing 15% of the items would loosen up the menu, a lot of dishes who use the same ingredients in different combinations. Veal 10 ways -- really?

The last part of the class was an introduction to marketing.Richard presented us with a simple 2 page mini-case study of some wealthy individuals who open a luxurious Asian restaurant in a small town because they were tired of traveling 90 miles to the closest city to get the food they liked. Unsurprisingly, the place flops and when they hire marketing consultants who tell them that the market in the town is not big enough to support this concept, they fire their manager and hope for the best. They soon go out of business and get bought out, and the new owners turn it into a family steak house with great success and live happily ever after.

The moral of the story -- it all starts with the wants and needs of the client. You ignore that at your peril. If you want a restaurant that serves what YOU want, cool, but what YOU want better line up with what the client wants. And off we go!

Menu Design (Unappetizing Demons)

The class started with a video, which if I was 25 years younger, would HAVE been heaven. Now, mildly interested but I can do this at home, dude. The program was a 'deconstructed' look at the bones of a restaurant, many angles which we have looked at in the first few weeks of classes. Lots of factoids were thrown at the watcher: people eat out 218 times a year on average, old and secondary cuts of meat are held for customers who order their meat 'well done', in Holland their Department of Health requires the restaurant's report grade posted for all to see, which resulted in less than 50% of their restaurants getting an A to over 75%. (Here in NY, a customer has to request the DOH report to see it.) Over all, it was informative and to the point, considering a lot of the ca-ca out there fronted by twits like Rachael Ray.

The next part of the class was a review of a chapter in our text, "Management By Menu", which provided illustrations to Richard's review of rudimentary principles of graphic design and typography. As a person in charge, even if you're not an expert, you need to share a vocabulary with your 'consultant', which is restaurantese for freelancer.

Richard presented each table with a handful of menus and we critiqued their design and layout. We lucked out and got a WTF kind of menu from a place called Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens, and if you think their name is a mouthful, you should see the menu. It looks elegant, but the natural colored paper is a poor contrast to the black ink. There is a large box about their food philosophy, that just rambles and sounds like a cranky old man trying to be funny. The descriptions go on at length, making dumb jokes, and the sections have cutesy headers like "Things You May Want to Eat Before You Eat Something Else" (that's appetizers, to us unwacky folk) And most inexplicable of all, there were random sketches of demonic characters all over the menu, which wasn't explained and didn't seem to have anything to do with the theme of the place. After, we find out it's a California joint -- ah, that explains it!

To close out the class, Richard handed out a graphic design disaster. Tomorrow, the last day of menus.

Menu Design (You Don' Mess With the Sushi Chef)

Monday morning started with odds and ends, students recounting their culinary experience from the weekend. Russian Pam Anderson went to a neighborhood joint near her home in the East Village, and found it both filthy and delicious. Slovack Ricky Martin seemed hung over as he recounted a business meeting at Daniel recently -- as good as the hype. English Rose gave us the heads up that Martha Stewart would be visiting four restaurants on 10th street this week on her show, and passed around an article from the Daily News about a sushi chef on his way to work when he got cut off by some yob. They pulled over, and sushi chef went all sushi on his ass with his 12" sushi knife. What that had to do with English Rose's weekend is beyond me.

Northfork Gal went to Tabla in the last week, and had a good experience with their Restaurant Week specials. I recalled a story for the class about how I used to go there relatively often for period when I was, errr, wooing various women n' stuff. After getting married, I was there with a friend out of town and a guy in a suit comes up to the table and asks for me by name. I nervously acknowlege that it's me, and he thanks me, as a rep of the restaurant, for being a loyal customer -- it was my 10th visit -- and the chef had a special course for me. Richard thought it could of been done in a quieter and less intrusive way, by just sending out the course and acknowleging the reason on the bill. Oh well.

The majority of the class was dedicated to menu design. First was a discussion of the general types of menus. All menus fall into one of the following categories, but they are not mutually exclusive either -- some combine them, some have different menus for different times of day, week or occasion.

• A La Carte: Literally 'from the cart', customers order individual items with individual prices at well.
• Prix Fixe: Set number of courses at a set price. Choices within course.
• Menu Fixe: Set number of courses at a set price, with set dishes. Usually at a catered affair.
• Degustation: A tasting menu of many fixed small plates, usually representing the thoughts of the chef.
• Table d'Hote: "Table of the Host", whatever comes out of the kitchen is what you eat.
• Cycle Menu: Menu cycles through a rotation over a period of days, weeks or months. Typical of institution with a captive population, like schools, prisons and corporate cafeterias.
• Du Jour Menu: Changes every day, without repeat
• Limited Menu: Few items. Used to be just fast food, but more upscale restaurants have focused on smaller menus. NYC French restaurants used to have 30+ entrees, now a days limit to less than half of that. Red-sauce lower-end Italian joints will still have something like veal or chicken 10 different ways each, on a large menu.
• Meal Period Menu: Multiple menus per day.
• California Menu: All meals at all times, like some diners.
• Party Menu: For specific events, like the super bowl.
• Buffet Menu: Less formal. The diner chooses food quantity and plate presentation.

Next we had an exercise with a menu from a restaurant called Le Cherche-Midi, where Richard served as maitre-d years ago, and has since closed. It was a hand-written thing that had an unusual French menu - rustic regional food of the provencal region. There was an a la carte menu and a fix prixe menu whose content was almost identical, except for the structure. Why? In the summer when things were slow, if someone wanted to come in just for a drink and an appetizer, no problem, things are slow. In the winter where there usually was a line to get in, some shmoe sipping a drink for an hour would cost the restaurant, so the menu guaranteed these people would not come in.

The rest of the day, I kind of tuned out -- it was a very basic primer in graphic design, about the importance of font, lay out, highlighting, serif vs. san-serif fonts, stuff that really takes a few months of hands on work to really appreciate, here summed up in under an hour. Sorry, readers, I was too tired to pay attention!