Top chefs explain how to create menus that bring in the diners and the dollars.

The head chefs working in the region’s luxury hotels have a tough dual role — to create an exciting menu offer in their outlets, and to generate significant revenue for their hotel. With close to a quarter of a hotel’s gross operating profit generated by F&B outlets (according to the Hotelier Middle East GM Survey 2009), chefs are responsible for a huge amount of money.

Therefore, menus have to be engineered carefully, taking into account food costs, profit spinners and guest appeal. This is a complicated process, with market demographics, ingredient availability, target audience and creativity all playing vital roles.

Hotelier Middle East selected six of the region’s top chefs and brought them together at Dubai’s best restaurant (as voted by Time Out), Rhodes Mezzanine at Grosvenor House, to discuss these issues and drill down into what lies behind a money-making menu.

Joining chef Paul Lupton from the host restaurant was Scott Price of Verre at Hilton Dubai Creek, together representing the high-end celebrity chef outlets, Southern Sun’s Geoff Haviland to give the executive chef opinion, Sam Alex from Six Senses Zighy Bay in Oman to educate on the concept of zero carbon and raw cuisine menus, and Spice Emporium at The Westin’s Khampun Plangthaisong and Asado at The Palace’s Norberto Palacios, both experts in offering authentic cuisine.

From establishing best sellers and chef’s tables through to offering fixed price dinners and allowing off-menu ordering, the highlights of the debate are revealed here.

When developing your menu, how do you find the happy medium between using you creative passions and complying with budgetary constraints?

Geoff Haviland: When you’re writing a menu, there’s a couple of key ingredients. There’s the creativity as one aspect, but the menu writing must be commensurate with the demographic of the customer base, because a restaurant is aimed at certain members of the public. So, therefore, you have to take into account factors such as ‘what is their budget, what price range are they talking about?’ It won’t dictate but it will certainly influence which ingredients you purchase. You have to look at your guest expectations.

For example, I changed the menu in Nezesaussi, which is an Australian/South African/Kiwi pub grill. They wanted it to be upgraded but it’s such a stalwart on the bar scene. We actually took away the bar and changed it to Nezesaussi Grill, increased the number of steaks on the menu, and got a specific supplier in, but there is only so much you can tweak it because you start getting a backlash from your regular guests. You have to balance it — you don’t want to get too creative to the detriment of your key customer base.

That’s where menu engineering comes into it, you look at the amount of profit you make on your bestsellers and what you dictate is a best seller — this is where you make a key profit margin — but then again you have another item on your menu where you say ‘I don’t want to look at food costs because food costs don’t pay the bills’. So if you’ve got a lobster dish or a foie gras dish where you make AED 150 (US $41)profit on that dish but you’re running a 50% food cost, it’s still AED 150 in your pocket you didn’t have the night before.

When you’re justifying your menu to a director of finance / cost controller / the boss, you actually have to do a sales pitch. This is one of the challenges that most chefs will face — we would all love to have top ingredients, that’s what we do, that’s how we got into this industry, but the reality of life is there’s different strata.

Norberto Palacios: Sometimes limits will bring out your best. You have a small percentage to play with and you say ‘I want to use this’ and you must be the support to the cost controller because you love it, so you compromise — have it for three months and then change.