Menu Engineering: 14 Principles for Selling Great Desserts

This post is part of a series to help you build a winning menu that will engage with your customers, assist your team and most importantly, drive your bottom line.

Before you start building your dessert menu, start with this in mind: What if you had to offer desserts to a family of six (perhaps your own family..)?

Now, go round the table and try and guess their choices… What would Granny have? (Something soft, perhaps some ice cream.) Or that teenage daughter watching her waistline? (How many calories are in sorbet Mum?) What about Dad? (Creme Brûlée… I like what I know.) Or Mum? (Ooh chocolate, ‘cos I deserve a treat!) Or Granddad who’s kinda stuck in his ways? (I like me custard, does it come with custard?) 

As you can see, a picture of what might be on you dessert menu starts to take shape...

With this in mind, here are my topmost guiding principles in creating a powerful Dessert Menu that will generate sales:

Keep it to eight items
The more choice you have the more wastage you have.

Rotate your dessert list on a fortnightly or monthly basis
Achieving consistency takes a little time, so changing your menu too often can have a negative impact on quality.

Daily Specials
If you have a lot of regular diners, then offer one or two daily specials. These then tie in with the seasons and annual celebration days such as Shrove Tuesday.

Think contrast
...creamy vs crunchy, gooey vs brittle, warm vs frozen, perfumed vs tangy

Portion Control
- To ensure you control your food cost, items served in ramekins, glasses or coupes should be encouraged, especially if you are on a tight budget. And since everyone pays the same, they should get the same.

- For pies, tarts and gateaux, use one of these. They’re available in different denominations.

- If you’re following the latest trend of rectangular shaped bakes (what Patissier's sometimes call a tranche) then use a ruler (or scale) to ensure portion control.

- Bottom line? The trick is to leave your guests full, but wanting more...

Garnish, not garish

Creme Brûlée: Clever use of Caramel to add lift.

Get rid of that stupid out-of-season strawberry or mint garnish on everything. It costs you on every single plate you send out and doesn’t have the impact you think it does. Clever use of Chocolate, Caramel or even Tuille Biscuit can be far more dramatic.

Take a blank canvas
Invest in some great plates. I mean, really great plates. You can add a premium for this and it will have the impact you were looking for with that stoopid strawberry thingy.

Artistic flair
Dusting your plate with cocoa powder or icing sugar is a quick and dirty way to making a dessert look artistic. You can even cut out a stencil of your logo and use that. (Make sure the waitstaff know to serve any dusted part of the plate AWAY from the guest to avoid getting it on their clothes.)

Keep your reader informed
Don’t forget to mention if a dessert is Gluten Free, Low Calorie, Fat Free; Contains Nuts or any other dietary information that your guests should know about.

All good things
And if it takes time to prepare (such as a souffle), let them know in advance on the menu as well.

Create the experience
Never miss an opportunity to celebrate a guest’s birthday with a candle in their dessert. (More on this to follow in a separate post. Yeah, it's THAT important.)

Sell the Experience
If any of your desserts have a story, or an inspiration, or a unique selling point, then tell it. People are intrigued by this and will give it a go to see for themselves.

Don't ignore Cheese
In my experience, the type of person who orders cheese tends to be a good spender, especially when it comes to wine. If you offer a great cheese selection, you will encourage them to come back often more. At whatever level you decide to pitch it, make sure your cheese is fresh and preferably at room temperature, biscuits crunchy and fruit/celery washed.

A sale is a sale, even if it's half a sale
And if your guests are wavering, make sure service staff know to remind them that all of your desserts come with two teaspoons should they like to try one to share. It may even lead to coffee or digestif sales…

Apply these guiding principles to your dessert menu philosophy and you will have a range of products and services that your Service Staff can believe in and SELL. 

In my next post, I will be looking at the dishes that all good dessert menus should have. 

Menu Engineering: Winning Words Your Menu Needs Today.

This post is part of a series to help you build a winning menu that will engage with your customers, assist your team and most importantly, drive your bottom line.

Dining out is a social experience. Think about those words for a moment: Social. Experience. 

Mrs K. enjoying a chat over lunch at The Cube. (R)

Social in my mind means conversation, to regale a story or to enjoy your dining companion’s perspective. And what better way to trigger those stories, that human interaction, than with the document your diners collectively hold in their hands: your menu. As your guests browse the Chef’s list of recommended dishes, any emotive words or descriptive phrases will help trigger conversation. THAT is where the experience comes in. Your guests don’t just eat - they have a dining experience. And customers WILL pay a premium for the pleasure.

The funny thing is, they may not even remember what they ordered when they later tell friends about the meal they enjoyed at your great restaurant, (put that down to your awesome wine sales technique), but they will remember what a great conversation they had as they reminisce. Before you’ve even lifted a pen or a pan, your menu has captured the imagination and generated some great word-of-mouth referrals. Now you’re really cooking.

So here are a few pointers that I tend to use when describing my dishes:

Use Femininity 

If your menu appeals to ladies, then the fellas will follow. How many restaurants have mid-week tables of ladies enjoying a girl’s night out? Get them returning on the weekend with hubby or that dishy new beau with words like fluffy, softly, lightly-scented, gently folded, delicate. You get the idea...

Steaks are Masculine

Because men love to work that Barbeque. As do some ladies.

So use words like Seared or Pan-fried or Char-grilled - all manly things to do to a steak or a piece of chicken.

What other dishes could be framed as ‘masculine’?

Who Cooked It?

One of the most powerful ways of engaging your customers and your team is by mentioning the people involved. If Chef Robert makes the bread, then say so. Anna's Red Cabbage Coleslaw or Jan's Sandwiches (as we had in our pub once upon a time) really personalises the experience and wins loyalty. In fact Jan used to have to come out to personally inform our guests what her sandwich of the day was. Why? Because they loved it and came back time and again for more.

Drop that letter ‘a’

This drives me absolutely nuts. Welcome to Mediocrityville.

“Steak served with a Mushroom Sauce”. Why is that ‘a’ in there? Get rid of it.

Char-grilled Steak with Mushroom Sauce

Avoid the word ‘with’. 

Your page is valuable real estate. Don’t clutter it up with unnecessary with's, and's and a’s. Use a comma instead.

Fish Cakes with a Mustard Sauce becomes 

Fish Cakes, Mustard Sauce or 

Dill-Scented Salmon Cakes, Wholegrain Mustard Sauce or 

Salmon Cakes on Lightly Foamed Creamy Mustard Sauce

(Which dish would you choose?)

Invoke that sense of Smell 

Smells tap into your reader’s memory bank and that can be very compelling when making a choice on what to eat.

Scented with, infused, minted, pungent, caramelised

Describe Textures in your dish titles. Again this is great for feminising a dish.

A sauce can be creamy, shiny, silky, velvety...

Think Nigella...

Think Nigella: Use terms that invoke luxury

Smothered, rich, oozing, Luxurious, tipsy, soft-centred, gooey...

Think Heston: Invoke memories (Think of school days and apple pie here...)

Old-fashioned, retro, childhood, vintage, classical…

Think Delia: Mention the cooking method, but in a feminine way.

Gently Baked, lightly poached, herb-roasted, slow-braised...

Think Jamie: Describe how it’s dressed on the plate:

drizzled, a squeeze of, shavings, a cordon, sprinkled, layered, piled, bosh!

Compare and contrast

It’s a writing trick, but it’s also a way of constructing a dish, so an example could be:

Iced Parfait of Caramelised Hazelnuts, Warm Chocolate Sauce (Hot/Cold) or

Velvety Chocolate Mousse, Peanut Butter Brittle (Soft/Hard)

Talk up your Provenance

If you’re not mentioning how you source your food, then start today. 

Be aware however, of how you go about that. There is a current trend to mention the farmer, butcher, grower, cheesemaker, trawlerman or every man and his dog to get across the point that you are sourcing ethically and locally. If you think it makes sense to your customers, continue doing it. 

Personally, I find it clutters up the menu (Pan-Seared Red Tractor Sirloin, Creamy Sauce of John Smith foraged Wild Mushrooms just doesn’t work.) What does work is perhaps a small text box at the bottom or at the back of a menu that mentions all of those acknowledgements and logos in one hit. 

Oh, and train your staff to be ready for the question from inquisitive or enthusiastic guests. Those you nourish will flourish.

I hope this has given you some inspiration to revisit your menu wording and create that connection with your customers that’ll have them coming back for more. For more ideas on how to be creative with your dish descriptions, open any cookbook and have a browse. More than recipes, they are lifestyle aspirations. Have you got that on your menu?

Bookmark or Subscribe now: Upcoming posts will look more specifically at unlocking Dessert’s Hidden Treasure and the psychology behind a great Price Point Plan.

Menu Engineering: Upsell While They're Browsing

This post is part of a series to help you build a winning menu that will engage with your customers, assist your team and most importantly, drive your bottom line.

This is a brief post, but it is vital in getting those extra sales ringing through that till. If you have an engaging introduction set out in a nicely presented menu, people will naturally go on to browse it from beginning to end. 

During that time, they’ll probably want to order a drink. And since they also feel peckish, I'm guessing they wouldn’t mind a little snacky-bite (as Mrs. K calls it) before they err, eat. I now I usually do.

I mean, think about it: The table have mostly arrived, but they’re just waiting for one more guest. So you give them the menus and they start reading the intro (‘Wow, what a great story, I’d love to do that’) and  perusing the recommended dishes (more on that in my next post).

‘Ooh look, nibbles - at the top of the page.’

Congratulations. You just gave them an opportunity to spend some money.

Polenta with Fig

Simply put, browsing the menu is a fantastic opportunity to up-sell. From Olives and Breadsticks to Mini Fish and Chips and Smoked Salmon Canapés. The list is endless. 

Three rules to follow however:

• Make them expensive (if you dare)*
• Serve them quick, 
• Don’t make them filling. 

*Why make them expensive: because people who choose expensive snacky-bites while they browse the menu are making a statement of intent. They intend to enjoy themselves, whatever the price. So serve them up quick and get ready to follow suit on the wine and supplements.

*There is another reason to make them expensive, which I learned the hard way. Some diners will have nibbles INSTEAD of starters! I know, right? It’s a little annoying when it happens, but console yourself in the knowledge that you made good margin on the snacks they did order.

Once those drinks and nibbles are on the table, you're next question is; What steps have you taken to influence their food choices that work for you? 

Check in with my next post to find out more.

Sport Relief vs Tax Relief

It struck me that the Chancellor - every chancellor, I guess - must be pretty heartless when it comes to announcing a budget. No matter who he tries to please, there are always people on the other side of the fence who feel they got a raw deal. 

And so it was with the so-called ‘granny tax’, which wasn’t really a tax at all but the Red Tops didn’t focus too much on such details. What mattered to them was that ‘’little old ladies” were being screwed out of their hard earned cash while the fat cats in Downing Street retired to their subsidised bar for a snifter. And that sells papers.

Talking of bars, the licensed trade were incandescent with rage that Duty was sneaked in under the rather misleading statement of ‘no changes to duty rates’ when in fact it meant the 2%-above-inflation calculator would still apply from previous years. In real terms that means an additional 9p on the pint while the punter paying for it thinks there was no increase at all.

The problem with all this wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth at such injustice is that we can’t make a difference. Yes we can vote in a new government, who will happily provide more of the same. Or perhaps we can lobby for some changes, but this only moves the burden elsewhere. Perhaps we can start a movement...

But wait. Before the Chancellor can even begin to worry about such a backlash, he is given a massive get-out-of-jail-free card from the general public as a result of one frenzied night of overwhelming generosity. I am of course talking about Sport Relief and the amazing achievement of raising £50M during a frantic night of charity broadcasting. 

The worst thing that could have happened from Mr. Osborne’s perspective, would have been if Sport Relief had had a dismal disaster with worse-than-ever results to report on the night. Mr. Osborne would have woken up to headlines screaming their vindication that the economy was not working and that heads should roll. 

Alas that didn’t happen. In typical British form, we accept our lot, count our blessings by giving a little to charity and begrudgingly pay that little extra for our hard-earned pint down the pub.

Who can blame the Chancellor’s heartlessness, when the great British public has more than enough heart to go around?

The Myth of 'Cheaper by the Bottle'

Let's take a bottle of wine (750ml) which you are going to sell at £12.00, then it is fair to say the equivalent large glass (250ml) of wine should work out at £4.00 (one third) to bring in the same revenue. Most operators however, will charge MORE than this per glass as they want to encourage you to purchase the full bottle.

My strategy to encourage a good following of regulars in the bar (to supplement our dining revenue) was to make it 'cheaper by the glass'. In this case, perhaps £3.85.

But is this fair to your diners who you want to encourage to return? Well let's think about that for a minute. Whether it is the couple on Table 1 or the group on Table 12, they will tend to order by the bottle regardless of pricing for any number of the following reasons:

To quickly get 'settled in' for the evening or occasion.
To enjoy the 'sharing' element that such a purchase brings.
To avoid the hassle of looking for the waitress every time they need a refill.
To show off. (To their date, to other tables nearby or sometimes just their wealth.)
To feel pampered.
To get a quick consensus (in a group)
To easily calculate everyon's share of the bill.
And because they figure they will be paying less for it as it's usually 'cheaper by the bottle'.

Therefore if you charge less by the glass:
The average diner won't notice - especially if the food and service meet expectations.
The astute diner will figure it out and perhaps order by the glass. (But will they count how many they have?)
And the best diners won't care - and they are the ones you should be working to attract anyway by exceeding their expectations.

And if you still need convincing why your bottles should bring in more revenue, don't forget about the added cost to your bottom line for the service staff, linen, rented floor space and general cost of time and energy that adds up while uncorking and topping up at the table.

Meanwhile in the bar, very few of your punters buying their drinks in rounds will calculate how much wine they are consuming by the glass and consequently drink more of it. And if they think it is good value, they will convince themselves to have another round since they are "saving" every time they spend.