Menu Trends

Allison Perlik, Senior Editor — Restaurants and Institutions, 12/2/2009

David Machado, owner of Vindalho, Lauro Kitchen and Nel Centro in Portland, Ore., discusses consumers’ quest for ‘happy hour’ dining, why he no longer sources foie gras (it’s not about the geese) and the dangers of discouting.

What kinds of foods will your customers and American diners in general want to see more on menus in the next year?

Globally, check averages are down. For sure people are spending less on food when they go out. They’re chasing after this concept of happy hour in a way I haven’t seen since the early 80s. So discounting is the biggest trend, and what customers call it is happy hour, but it’s really a code word for saying, “How have you discounted your menu to let me in the door? How can I use you at the price point I think is fair?”

People are buying down. Instead of the $20 entrée, they’re buying the $10 hamburger. Because of the recession and a general anxiety about life, we’ve seen cyclically that they tend to buy comfort food. So cutting-edge concepts are concepts that have difficulty and homey concepts or established concepts are ones that are having a better go of it.

Appetizers are selling more than entrées. We’re seeing that. Cafés are doing better than restaurants. To-go is doing well, food carts are doing well. A lot of the downscale opportunities that are left in the food business seem to be the ones people are interested in.

Bars are doing well. I don’t see a drop-off in alcohol consumption. Across the board I see food sales down but not alcohol, except one segment, which is bottled wine. So glass wine has gone up but bottled wine has really dramatically fallen, as much as 20%. The commitment to a $60 or $70 or $80 bottle of wine is not there. Surprisingly, beautiful, high-end cocktails for $10 are selling as strongly as they’ve ever sold. So if they don’t order a bottle of wine for $60, they’ll order 4 cocktails for $10 each.

As an operator, I’m looking to buy all cuts of meats that are less costly, from chicken thighs instead of breasts to whole chuck roll to be used to make beef stew rather than New York Strip steak. The foods are the same, but the parts of the animal that can be braised or ground are the ones we’re looking for to try to stay in the game financially.

This year we saw some common dishes/themes on menus such as housemade sausages, Korean-style beef, doughnuts. What dishes might we see more on menus in the year ahead?

Chicken wings are big right now, and they’re really cheap and they’re flavorful. I have tamarind-flavored wings at Vindalho that people love. Riblets, like lamb riblets, have the potential to be big because they’re flavorful. Anything that can be transformed into cocktail food or happy-hour food has potential. I see not necessarily the demise of the high-end entrée—fanciful, highly sauced, highly garnished—but that’s not really what people are looking for. So instead of foie gras—I don’t buy it—I get chicken or duck livers and do recipes with those instead.

What about ethnic cuisines coming more into the mainstream?

We’ve seen Spanish cuisine become pretty big; we’ve seen Southeast Asian become pretty prevalent. I think there’s a general trend of upscaling ethnic cuisine. Whoever the culinarian is that decides to put their minds to doing the research—going to Thailand or India or the Caribbean or wherever you want to go—and looking at hot, spicy or fully flavored food and then retrofitting that into an upscale-dining situation could be successful.

I don’t see the point of going after Italian again and French again and all the things that have been done. People are looking for a big blast of flavor. Others that haven’t gotten as much notoriety are cuisines from the Middle East and North Africa—Morocco, Tunisia, those kinds of places. They haven’t yet been upscaled, but there’s plenty of potential there.

What about cooking methods?

If we look back historically, in the ’80s there were the sautéed items in the pan. The ’90s was [about] everything on the grill, and now we’re in a period where a lot of things are being braised. Also confited—cooked in oil, whether it’s pork shoulders or duck legs or lamb. Braising in liquid and confiting in oil are two methods right now that are right at the forefront.

How will the economy affect what you menu next year?

Here’s the short of it. The cost of food has been stable. We went through a little inflationary pop about 18 months ago with food, mostly commodities like flour, salt, sugar, eggs, dairy, those kinds of things. They’ve all stabilized, so while we’ve had dropping cover counts and check averages, we have stable food prices, so we’ve been able to absorb it. But by all indications these commodities and agriculture products are always subject to the weather, so if we have a spike in food costs—whether commodities or egg or meats—we are going to be faced with the first situation of higher food prices coupled with lower food sales, and that will spell trouble for the operator that’s not experienced, and I do see that could happen ahead.

The heavy discounting is really the No. 1 challenge. It’s an overwhelming challenge in the industry because while everyone’s discounting and chasing covers, whether with coupons or two-for-ones or happy hours or early or late [specials] … This has been the biggest across-the-board effort that almost everyone in the industry is participating in, and I have great concerns that we’ll be able to unravel this thing when the economy gets better. The [chance of the] general dining public saying, “That’s what I liked, it’s a price I could live with, and I don’t want to go back to those prices”—that’s the big issue facing us.