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The right menu: A game changer in times of crisis

By: Reading Time: 4 Minutes

The menu and the recipe creationsrelated to it are the DNA of every restaurant. In difficult times, it pays to think about it more carefully – for example, by relying on the intelligent cooking systems from Rational. But not just that.

Too few employees. High fixed costs. A crisis here, a crisis there. And on top of that, increasingly demanding guests. Yes, entrepreneurship in the gastronomy industry is not easy at the moment. However, as an industry that has been dealing with crises for years with reliable unpredictability, it is also constantly coming up with new solutions. These include a four-day work week, earlier closing times, better pay and modern employee management. Surprisingly, relatively little is said about solutions that relate to the core purpose of a restaurant: the food. Why is this the case? Perhaps because it’s a more complex topic than reducing working hours, wage issues and the like. But it’s certainly no less relevant.

When we talk about eating in a restaurant, we mean two things from a business perspective: the menu design  and its recipe creations, in short the menu. This means: What do I offer? Why do I offer it? And how do I make it as efficiently as possible? If you can answer these questions correctly for your restaurant, you have already made a lot of progress. But what exactly does this mean?

Menu and meal selection: Less is more

“In times when there are fewer employees, you should first keep the menu small,” says Florian Hartmann, Vice President Product Application iCombi at Rational. As we will soon see, this has many advantages, not only in terms of recipe creation, but also from a marketing point of view. A restaurant that offers everything is considered to be rather uninspired these days.At best, it manages to do everything fairly well, but it never really shines with any dish. “The concepts that we know actually work don’t need 100 options on the menu,” explains Hartmann. “The concepts that work are based on a precise concept. Potential guests are also aware that if only a few dishes are offered, the food is usually the fresher.” Another important factor is the logistical effort involved.

Florian Hartmann - Specialist for menu creation

Image: Rational

Decoupling food production from service

“If I want to please everyone, I can’t help but turn to convenience food,” says Hartmann. “In the vast majority of cases, it is frozen, which takes up a lot of space and energy. Therefore, it is no longer really sustainable.” However, this certainly does not mean that every restaurant with a small menu can and should cook everything fresh and to order during service hours. “Our flagship customers have decoupled production and service,” Hartmann reveals.

This means they rely on well thought-out mise en place – in the truest sense of the word. Hartmann explains this using the example of a traditional German restaurant. “Someone comes in the morning and makes the schnitzels, hash browns, Kaiserschmarrn and so on. Nothing is cooked yet, just prepared and then shock-frozen. In the evening, all you need is an employee who can prepare everything in the combi in just a few minutes. One of our customers uses it to serve over 80 meals in a single evening.” Hartmann talks about the “Rational system”, which demonstrates its full efficiency here. A system that actually proves its worth in every kitchen line, as Rehan Uddin proves in his Indian restaurant in England. The secret behind this are the cooking paths.

Everybody can cook

“Standardization is easy with Rational products, be it the iVario or the iCombi,” explains Hartmann. “This means that I can display every dish on my menu on the cooking system’s personalized user interface and then select the desired cooking path with the touch of a button. There are 120 different cooking paths on Rational cooking systems, so more than enough.” Ok, but what exactly is a cooking path and why are they essential if you want to cook efficiently?

In short, a cooking path is a cooking program that is intelligent. In other words, a program that doesn’t simply roast every joint of pork at 190 degrees for 45 minutes, but rather recognizes how to best prepare each individual one based on its size, core temperature and degree of browning. “The chef can also define the exact core temperature or browning level they want in the presets. They specify the result, the rest is done by the intelligent system,” says Hartmann. However, the decisive advantage here is that even unskilled employees can prepare any dish successfully with the predefined cooking paths, ideally with just the touch of a button. Hartmann says, “As a chef, you also get back a bit of freedom because you no longer have to do everything yourself and be there all the time due to lack of staff.”

IVario and iCombi from Rational for the right cooking paths

Image: Rational

So less is more, as a small menu shows. Mise en place is everything today, as Florian Hartmann’s many years of experience in the industry shows. And intelligent cooking paths from Rational transform a good menu into resource-saving processes that finally pay off financially.

Whether restaurants find the right recipes for their menu themselves depends on one thing above all, according to Florian Hartmann: “As a chef or restaurateur, you simply have to take the time to deliberately address this issue. To do this, you also need to get to know the individual functions and cooking paths of the Rational cooking systems. Rational offers face-to-face and online training courses for this purpose. Individual support for your business is particularly useful when it comes to designing your own menu and optimizing efficiency. In this case, a holistic concept is developed together with the head chef to optimally use the cooking systems available in the kitchen and to enhance kitchen workflows. And so far, they have paid off for every customer.”

Would you like to revise your menu and recipes?

Together with Rational, you too can get the most out of your appliances and optimize your menu. Find out more about Rational’s operational support now.

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