By: Roman Herrle, F&B Management Professional
During my apprenticeship at a ‘Nouvelle Cuisine’ restaurant I was introduced to the set-menu system, which today seems basically forgotten.
As I have liked it also as a guest, I tried to introduce it in Italy after my apprenticeship, alas with only very limited success. I soon realized why: they already has some kind of ‘set-menu’ which does not work anywhere else, though.
The next country where I tried it, was Brazil. Although still for an Italian restaurant, it worked remarkably well, especially so after adapting it to our Brazilian conditions. My traditionally excellent contact with FOH taught us, that, in contrary to other restaurants elsewhere, here the patrons choosing the larger menus were the ladies, whereas men chose the ones with less courses. When we started tailoring the 7 course regular and 9 course surprise menus for ladies, and the 4 course ones for the gentlemen, all three became an incredible success.
How to tailor a set-menu? Well, as we can see above, it depends on the guest they are aimed at. Ladies have other preferences than gentlemen. But what they all like, are evergreens that we gastronomer sometimes feel ashamed of putting on a menu, especially so if we pretend to do something above upscale casual. In a set-menu, these will not only become plough horses, but stars. In a more than double sense: in most cases they can be low-cost items, which for their popularity will allow us to spend a little more on the other courses, which may not be popular per se, but which, due to a fancy, high-price ingredient can rouse the interest of the client. If we have a good connection to our service, they will report us our guest’s acceptance for these courses and we can start experimenting on them, thus training our kitchen, and preparing off-screen our next ‘a la carte’ menu, which we then will be able to roll out anytime later on without implementation trap-falls. Our guests will have heard of the dishes and our personnel will know them well before selling them. And we can start out for new adventures with the unknown being, our patron.
The puzzle about the ladies preferring larger menus than the gentlemen will be answered on request. RomanHerrle@web.de
