A food menu can be one of the most visible expressions of a brewpub’s personality. It can give guests a reason to visit, create opportunities for culinary creativity and provide another way for a brewery to differentiate itself. But creativity becomes a liability when the kitchen cannot consistently execute what is on the menu.
For brewpub owners and managers, the challenge is not deciding whether to offer interesting food. It is understanding the kitchen’s operational limits and building a menu around what the business can execute consistently, profitably and at an acceptable pace. That starts with getting the kitchen and management team working from the same expectations.
“Your staff and manager have to be on the same page,” said George X. Peterson, president and founder of Central Coast Brewing. “A creative chef with no support will fail, but with support, can thrive.”
That support includes establishing financial boundaries before creativity turns into an expensive problem.
“Rigid food costing will always make menu building easier,” Peterson said. “You will have to make hard decisions to not break the percentage of food cost barrier you and your team have established.”
Food cost, however, is only one measure of whether a menu item makes sense. A dish can have an acceptable ingredient cost and still be expensive to operate if it requires too much preparation, occupies scarce equipment or slows down the rest of the kitchen.
Joel Will, president of Rohrbach Brewing, said one of the easiest limitations to overlook is the physical capacity of the kitchen itself. Rohrbach experienced that after adding more menu items that cooked on its relatively small flat top.
“It became very easy for the cook working on the flat top to run out of cooking space, which led to longer ticket times and inconsistency,” Will said.
The lesson is bigger than simply knowing the size of a griddle or fryer. A kitchen might technically have the equipment needed to make an item, but that does not mean it has the capacity to make that item while simultaneously handling everything else on the menu during a busy service.
Mike Key, director of operations at Silver Reef Brewery, saw a similar problem when the brewery experimented with brunch.
The idea sounded logical: People visit breweries on weekends, and brunch can create another reason to come in. But Silver Reef had a small kitchen line with three fryers, a small grill and limited capacity. The food itself was good. The operation wasn’t.
“Everything was really good, but we couldn’t manage it,” Key said. For Silver Reef, the experience reinforced the importance of knowing what a kitchen can realistically handle. If the brewery cannot execute an item consistently, the fact that the concept sounds appealing is largely irrelevant.
“If you can’t do it consistently and you can’t execute it, then just don’t do it,” he said.
That does not mean creativity has to disappear. Instead, Key’s experience suggests breweries can separate the idea from the entire program surrounding it. After brunch was eliminated, he said the brewery occasionally discussed bringing it back. Rather than recreating an entire brunch menu, the better question was whether the most popular item could be incorporated into the existing lunch operation.
“If we are able to execute it along with everything else? Okay, yeah, let’s bring it back,” Key said.
That turns menu development into a form of testing. Instead of making an all-or-nothing decision about a concept, you can identify which individual items generated meaningful demand and determine whether the kitchen can absorb them.
The same thinking applies to complicated dishes.
Key currently deals with that tension through a salmon entree that requires several components and a specific preparation process. It can create frustration on the line, but eliminating it simply because it is complicated would overlook another important piece of information.
“You look at the product mix and you’re like, ‘Holy shit, we sell a lot of those,’” Key said.
In that situation, complexity alone is not a reason to remove the item. Strong demand may justify the additional work if the kitchen can find a reliable way to execute it. That is the distinction brewpub managers need to make: Complexity isn’t automatically bad. Unproductive complexity is. A complicated dish that customers rarely order may be a candidate for elimination. A complicated dish that consistently sells can be worth the effort if its process can be managed.
Peterson said another problem arises when breweries expect employees to become capable of doing everything without sufficient training or realistic expectations.
“Trying to make everyone into a multi-tool without training, or overpromising the customer with timing, food costs and volume” can put unnecessary pressure on the operation, he said.
That pressure eventually reaches the guest.
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“Kitchen stress is always a factor,” Peterson said, “but managing expectations goes a long way towards a quality product without a meltdown in the kitchen.”
The goal instead should not be the simplest possible menu or the most ambitious one. It should be a menu where creativity is supported by the equipment, staffing, preparation time, financial targets and actual customer demand. That can mean saying no to a concept that sounds exciting. It can mean removing a dish that does not sell enough to justify its complexity. And sometimes it means keeping a difficult item because customers clearly want it and finding a better way to execute it.
The strongest menu decisions may ultimately come from asking a less glamorous question than, “What would be fun to put on the menu?” Instead: What can we execute consistently, what do our guests actually value, and what does each item require from the business to make it happen?
Answering those questions gives brewpubs room to be creative without allowing the menu to dictate terms to the kitchen.
