Consider Menu Overlap To Save Money

In this month’s F&B feature on menu trends, I quote Jean-Pierre Etcheberrigaray, IHG’s vice president of F&B — The Americas, who says hoteliers should be looking at consolidating their various menus to save on the cost side.

"How do you consolidate and criss-cross items to make better sense of your trimmings?" he asks. "There is more focus [today] on the use of food and cross-utilization of items."

And Philip Mott, assistant professor at Les Roches School of Hospitality Management at Kendall College in Chicago, fully agrees.

"Chefs are getting smarter about menu designing and the effect it has on the kitchen," he notes, adding that moving forward, "Menus will grow smaller and daily specials will grow in importance."

Yesterday at an educational session on the evolution of hotel dining at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago, two hotel chefs offered even more support for this strategy.

At Lockwood restaurant in the Palmer House, a Hilton hotel in Chicago, Chef Phillip Foss says overlapping items on the restaurant’s menu with items on the bar’s menu and the roomservice menu (both of which are served by Lockwood’s kitchen) helps with labor, as he only has four or five cooks in the kitchen at a time.

Creating overlap of items on different outlets’ menus "makes a lot of sense" in terms of managing costs and inventory, he says.

And Frank Brunacci, executive chef at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Chicago, says he encourages all his chefs in the hotel to "utilize what we’ve got" rather than ordering more product.