CAN WE ADD TO THE MENU PLEASE?
The
answer is yes. Restaurants are asking patrons to suggest ideas for their menus.
And even naming the new dishes after them
Change
is on the cards – the menu cards, to be precise. In an interesting experiment,
a number of restaurateurs have invited their patrons to suggest ideas, dishes,
and recipes for their menus. The move is a product of the times, of
crowdsourcing and evolving appetites, and it invariably tweaks that servile
line ‘The Customer is King’ to ‘The Customer is Co-creator’.
Aoi, an experimental Japanese restaurant fresh off the wasen, has gone as far as to create an entire (though abbreviated) menu called the You Menu, made up of recipes and ideas proffered by its patrons. About a month ago, this four-month-old restaurant in Mumbai ran a contest on Twitter, calling for off-kilter ideas in Japanese cuisine. They got 30 workable suggestions that they took to the kitchen and put to the test. About five made it to You Menu, namely fruit sushi, beef sukiyaki salad, a Japanese-style vegetable stew served with flavoured rice, pak choiwrapped white fish, charcoal grilled, and a hearty vegetarian broth with tofu, sprouts, asparagus, shitake mushrooms and ginger.
“It had been an idea we’d been playing with ever since we opened Aoi,” says the owner Mitesh Rangras. “We wanted to get our patrons involved through workshops, cookouts and user-generated menus.” Every restaurant worth its fleur de sel these days is looking to engage its customers in new ways. Cooking demos and Masterchef classes have been effective marketing ploys, but a natural progression indicates that the customer will be invited into the kitchen.
Megha Ghosh, an experiential marketer and food blogger credited on the You Menu for Pak Choi Wrapped Grilled White Fish rarely cooks but loves to eat. “And because I don’t cook, I didn’t submit a precise recipe, but I know enough about flavours to suspect fish and pak choi would go well together,” she says. Turned out she was right, the chefs at Aoi eventually hit upon the ideal way to couple the two. After they’d shortlisted their finalists, the Aoi team invited them to a tasting dinner where they sampled their own recommendations and gave the professionals their feedback. “Crowd-sourced recipes really takes the dining experience to the next level,” says Ghosh. “That a restaurant would go beyond asking if the salt in a dish is too much, to inquiring what you’d actually like to eat is a first-rate idea from an experiential marketing perspective. After all, that choice is a luxury you conventionally only have in your own house.”
Ghosh is not the only customer who gets to have her name on the menu (complete with her Twitter handle). On The Rocks, the Sheraton Park Hotel’s eatery in Chennai, has probably secured a customer for life in the guise of a certain Mr Speckman, whom they’ve featured on their bill of fare. “He is one of our regulars,” says Nimrat Pahwa, chef at this
global cuisine restaurant, “and we know he likes tuna tartare with wasabi. So we created for him a special dish and added it to the menu as Mr Speckman’s Tuna Tartare with Honey Wasabi Pebbles. When he visited us on his subsequent visit, he was so excited to be featured on the menu. This sort of engagement really adds value to the restaurant.”
With most restaurants today putting out seasonal menus, and ‘day’s specials’, there’s more room — indeed there’s a crying need — for new ideas. Of which customers today have plenty. “There’s certainly been a change in customer patterns in the last couple of years,” Pahwa acknowledges. “Earlier a customer unquestioningly ate what was set before him; today, they’re asking about cooking techniques and
ingredients, requesting certain ingredients to be replaced with others, and on the whole, being more vocal about their choices. About 60 per cent of our customers have a greater say in what they’re eating.” Pahwa says she even has customers offering her recipes they’ve picked up from chefs on their travels, and asking her to replicate the dish. “We take a couple of days to practice the recipe and then invite them over for the meal,” she says.
“Gone are the days when a chef was secretive about his/her recipes, and lorded it in the kitchen,” observes Rangras, admitting that his crowd-sourced recipe contest actually helped Aoi cut new inroads into Japanese cuisine. Moreover, customers are not only au courant with global trends, they’re now kitchen confident. Like Anish Arora.
This amateur cook’s Facebook updates usually feature images of his just-set chocolate mousse, freshly tossed piri-piri prawns, and immaculate cheesecake. So when Hard Rock Cafe invited recipes from fans as part of their Legendary Burger Fest promotions on Facebook in August last year, Arora took the bait. His recipe, called the Crispy Beef Burger, used black pepper and onions with paprika and garlic powder. It made ‘best entry’, was put on the menu at HRC Pune for a week in September and all proceeds from sales went to Arora’s charity of choice. “My recipe wasn’t too drastically different from their burger but I did Indianise it a bit with the onions and spices,” the 25-year-old modestly says.
It’s not just the international joints that are calling to the crowds. Even ID, a restaurant in Chennai that dishes out good old idli and dosai (in a hip setup no doubt) has been building its fanbase through recipe-anddemo contests that accommodate the prize-winning recipe on the menu for a week. In 2011, the joint (which is the dining extension of the multiplex company SPI Cinemas), ran a pickle cookoff called ‘What’s
in your pickle?’ The winner was ‘Velvet Grape’ by Karthika Devi, which was made available at the restaurant for a week. The top three pickle-makers won food grinders; others on the short-list took home kettles.
Customers are not yet working shifts in the restaurant kitchen yet, but as far as contributing to the grub goes, it won’t be long before the practice picks up steam.
Aoi, an experimental Japanese restaurant fresh off the wasen, has gone as far as to create an entire (though abbreviated) menu called the You Menu, made up of recipes and ideas proffered by its patrons. About a month ago, this four-month-old restaurant in Mumbai ran a contest on Twitter, calling for off-kilter ideas in Japanese cuisine. They got 30 workable suggestions that they took to the kitchen and put to the test. About five made it to You Menu, namely fruit sushi, beef sukiyaki salad, a Japanese-style vegetable stew served with flavoured rice, pak choiwrapped white fish, charcoal grilled, and a hearty vegetarian broth with tofu, sprouts, asparagus, shitake mushrooms and ginger.
“It had been an idea we’d been playing with ever since we opened Aoi,” says the owner Mitesh Rangras. “We wanted to get our patrons involved through workshops, cookouts and user-generated menus.” Every restaurant worth its fleur de sel these days is looking to engage its customers in new ways. Cooking demos and Masterchef classes have been effective marketing ploys, but a natural progression indicates that the customer will be invited into the kitchen.
Megha Ghosh, an experiential marketer and food blogger credited on the You Menu for Pak Choi Wrapped Grilled White Fish rarely cooks but loves to eat. “And because I don’t cook, I didn’t submit a precise recipe, but I know enough about flavours to suspect fish and pak choi would go well together,” she says. Turned out she was right, the chefs at Aoi eventually hit upon the ideal way to couple the two. After they’d shortlisted their finalists, the Aoi team invited them to a tasting dinner where they sampled their own recommendations and gave the professionals their feedback. “Crowd-sourced recipes really takes the dining experience to the next level,” says Ghosh. “That a restaurant would go beyond asking if the salt in a dish is too much, to inquiring what you’d actually like to eat is a first-rate idea from an experiential marketing perspective. After all, that choice is a luxury you conventionally only have in your own house.”
Ghosh is not the only customer who gets to have her name on the menu (complete with her Twitter handle). On The Rocks, the Sheraton Park Hotel’s eatery in Chennai, has probably secured a customer for life in the guise of a certain Mr Speckman, whom they’ve featured on their bill of fare. “He is one of our regulars,” says Nimrat Pahwa, chef at this
global cuisine restaurant, “and we know he likes tuna tartare with wasabi. So we created for him a special dish and added it to the menu as Mr Speckman’s Tuna Tartare with Honey Wasabi Pebbles. When he visited us on his subsequent visit, he was so excited to be featured on the menu. This sort of engagement really adds value to the restaurant.”
With most restaurants today putting out seasonal menus, and ‘day’s specials’, there’s more room — indeed there’s a crying need — for new ideas. Of which customers today have plenty. “There’s certainly been a change in customer patterns in the last couple of years,” Pahwa acknowledges. “Earlier a customer unquestioningly ate what was set before him; today, they’re asking about cooking techniques and
ingredients, requesting certain ingredients to be replaced with others, and on the whole, being more vocal about their choices. About 60 per cent of our customers have a greater say in what they’re eating.” Pahwa says she even has customers offering her recipes they’ve picked up from chefs on their travels, and asking her to replicate the dish. “We take a couple of days to practice the recipe and then invite them over for the meal,” she says.
“Gone are the days when a chef was secretive about his/her recipes, and lorded it in the kitchen,” observes Rangras, admitting that his crowd-sourced recipe contest actually helped Aoi cut new inroads into Japanese cuisine. Moreover, customers are not only au courant with global trends, they’re now kitchen confident. Like Anish Arora.
This amateur cook’s Facebook updates usually feature images of his just-set chocolate mousse, freshly tossed piri-piri prawns, and immaculate cheesecake. So when Hard Rock Cafe invited recipes from fans as part of their Legendary Burger Fest promotions on Facebook in August last year, Arora took the bait. His recipe, called the Crispy Beef Burger, used black pepper and onions with paprika and garlic powder. It made ‘best entry’, was put on the menu at HRC Pune for a week in September and all proceeds from sales went to Arora’s charity of choice. “My recipe wasn’t too drastically different from their burger but I did Indianise it a bit with the onions and spices,” the 25-year-old modestly says.
It’s not just the international joints that are calling to the crowds. Even ID, a restaurant in Chennai that dishes out good old idli and dosai (in a hip setup no doubt) has been building its fanbase through recipe-anddemo contests that accommodate the prize-winning recipe on the menu for a week. In 2011, the joint (which is the dining extension of the multiplex company SPI Cinemas), ran a pickle cookoff called ‘What’s
in your pickle?’ The winner was ‘Velvet Grape’ by Karthika Devi, which was made available at the restaurant for a week. The top three pickle-makers won food grinders; others on the short-list took home kettles.
Customers are not yet working shifts in the restaurant kitchen yet, but as far as contributing to the grub goes, it won’t be long before the practice picks up steam.
• JOEANNA REBELLO FERNANDES Additional reporting by Ruhi Batra
TCR130629
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