Somewhere around the middle of August,the menu has to change a little bit based on summer produce. It starts with Chef Ben walking up and saying "here's my ideas." Nothing formal about it. We've worked together long enough that I trust the instinct behind it.
That's the part I truly enjoy. Just the two of us, no one else in the kitchen, and I'm tasting every dish as he builds it. I take notes while I chew. Does it make sense? Is there balance? Is something on that plate that doesn't need to be there? Half the work isn't adding, it's subtracting. A garnish gets swapped, or dropped. One ingredient that was doing too much, or nothing at all, comes off. We iron it out dish by dish.
Then it goes cold and administrative for a while. Food costing: what the dish actually costs us to make, what we need to sell it for, and where that number has to sit against everything else on the menu and what a guest will believe it's worth. That math doesn't care how good the tasting was.
Once the price makes sense, Chef reaches out to Kennedi and Hunter, our Marketing Manager and in-house photographer, respectively, to schedule and shoot under the restaurant's own light, both natural and artificial. It goes into the menus, the website, the socials, digital buttons in our ordering system.
Last stop before a guest sees it: staff tasting with Chef. He walks them through why each dish is on the menu, not just what's in it. The reasoning, the allergens, what can be modified and what can't. They need to be able to answer a guest's question before it's asked.
At last one of the best parts I think of being a chef…a guest orders that new dish and you and your team get to make it. That feeling is hard to replicate.
