By Nancy Kalish, CHC, a healthy menu and product consultant
When a family or group of friends goes out to eat, who chooses the restaurant? Usually, it’s the person who has a particular dietary need—the vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, or just plain calorie-conscious customer. According to the National Restaurant Association, 73 percent of adults are now trying to eat healthier at restaurants than they did just three years ago. Cater to their demands and you will fill a lot of empty seats. The good news: achieving this is easier than you might think. I’ve worked with many restaurants that just needed to do a little menu tweaking. Here are the steps I took to help one recent client, a small chain of Mexican restaurants.
Find Hidden Healthy Dishes on Your Menu: Chances are, you already have dishes that are vegetarian or gluten-free on your menu. Read up on the requirements, then scrutinize your recipes (or hire someone like me to do it) and pick out that those have the right ingredients or could be easily modified. For example, my client’s house-made corn tortillas were already gluten-free (if you serve tortillas, make sure they don’t contain wheat) and they served a vegetarian version with cheese. I suggested they add a variation without cheese to satisfy vegans who don’t eat dairy. Then, they reprinted their menu to highlight these dishes (and others like them) with icons that helped customers identify them easily. Even better: If you have enough dishes that fall into one of the health-conscious categories (ie. Vegetarian), create a new section on your menu.
Lighten Up: Creating lower-calorie versions of some of your dishes is another easy way to draw in more customers. Often, it’s just a matter of reworking the proportions of your current dishes. For example, my client was serving the traditional Carne Asada (grilled beef) with the equivalent of more than three portions of rice, four of guacamole, and only a small amount of grilled vegetables and beans. When I did a nutritional analysis, I found that the current dish weighed in a whopping 2100 calories! Even I was a little shocked. But when I increased the amounts of vegetables and beans and reduced the beef, rice and guacamole to one normal portion each, they were still able to serve a brimming plate of delicious food at just 600 calories. I revamped several dishes this way and put them on the menu under a new “Light” section.
Let Your Customers Know: The last step to success is to make sure your health-conscious customers are aware of your “new” offerings. At the very least, create some signage that alerts them to “try our new vegetarian and vegan dishes.” Better still, email a small announcement to the local media and especially the food bloggers in your area. Word of mouth travels fast in healthy food circles, so don’t underestimate the importance of getting your new offerings out there. Using my method, my client kept his current customers and created lots of new ones, and you can too.
Nancy Kalish, CHC, is a healthy menu and product consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. For additional information please go to website: NancyKalish.com
