Cutting menu sizes will help combat cost increases

Returning to the Dolphin pub in the village of Melbourn in Cambridgeshire for dinner recently, I was struck by how much more comprehensive the menu appeared. In among the new additions were a selection of appealing looking small plates, which my family took advantage of in ordering a large array of dishes to share across the group.

?But then we were told that the food would take an hour to arrive as the chef was in the kitchen on his own (along with his kitchen porter) for this Saturday dinner service. An hour later, we were informed that the food would take another 30 minutes, and would we like a round of drinks on the house to help us pass the time?

What eventually came out of the kitchen was excellent, and we will definitely return to the pub, because a less conscientious chef could easily have thrown out sub-par food. He was clearly under great pressure but did not let his standards slip, and so despite the long wait, we gave him a hefty tip and much thanks, because the poor guy was pretty stressed. Looking at the complex spread of dishes on the table, I could not help feeling that the menu was making the life of the kitchen team at this pub, and the many other Greene King-owned boozers running the same menu, particularly tough during these times of extreme staff shortages.

In complete contrast is North London pub The Plimsoll, which I visited recently, and was impressed by the menu of a mere ten dishes. This limited choice was certainly not deterring guests, because I was informed the dining area is fully booked for dinner service every night of the week. What was noticeable was the amount of its Dexter cheeseburgers that came out of the open-plan kitchen. This is the dish that made the owners’ names when running the kitchen at a nearby pub, The Compton Arms. Its popularity is certainly making life a lot less stressful at The Plimsoll.

Flying out of the kitchen: Dexter Cheeseburgers at The Plimsoll

It’s clearly not only labour shortages that are prompting these simplifications of menus, because escalating prices of raw materials are also having an increasing impact. This is being felt across all parts of the industry. It was reported that Michelin-starred Cornerstone restaurant will no longer be putting monkfish, hake, John Dory, cod and scallops on its menus because it was economically unviable. Its signature scallop dish would have to be priced at ￡30 versus its previous price point of ￡16.

At the pub end of things, Marston’s has been following the menu streamlining principle, with the number of dishes having been cut by 35%, thereby helping improve efficiency in its kitchens as it looks to offset the inevitable price increases to its menus. It has undoubtedly been helped in this task by the knowledge from the pre-pandemic period that a mere ten dishes made up 80% of food sales.

In the US, this trend for reducing menu items has been in evidence over the past several years, according to Technomic, who found it dramatically accelerated in 2020 as covid-19 took hold. To liven up these shortened menus, many restaurants have been introducing limited-time-offerings.

Such obvious action does not yet seem to have been adopted across the hospitality industry in the UK, because between February and April 2022, the number of food and drink items on menus increased by an average of 1.8%, according to Lumina Intelligence’s Menu Tracker. Pubs and bars were the main culprits of this menu sprawl, with an average of 219 food and drink options available – of which food encompassed an incredible 92 different items.

Whether it’s because of the chronic shortage of people or the ongoing inflationary pressures on raw materials, it is surely inevitable that all hospitality business will have to take the knife to their menus and cut off those items that don’t stack up financially, or are making the lives of chefs unnecessarily tough at a time when they really should be recognised as assets of community value.

Glynn Davis, editor of Retail Insider?

This piece was originally published on Propel Info where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. He would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.