By taking a continuous, team-oriented approach to menu planning, club and resort properties can offer a broader range of culinary themes and choices.

The menu is the foundation of every club and resort property’s food and beverage program. It’s what draws members in and keeps them coming back. A menu is more than just a list of food with prices, though. It’s a reflection of your property’s F&B style and concepts. And its contents are an important marketing tool that should be carefully considered by everyone in the kitchen.

The multi-faceted challenge of menu planning in a club setting is captured in how Jane Kuykendall, Membership Director for Hardscrabble Country Club, Fort Smith, Ark., describes the approach taken by her property’s Executive Chef, Ben Ortiz.

“At one time Chef Ben was asked to describe his style of cooking in one word and he chose ‘chameleon’—because in a club environment, you must be ever-changing to meet the dining needs and desires of your members,” Kuykendall says. “As a chef, he recognizes that there are always new members and guests coming into the club from varied backgrounds and cultures. His job is to identify dishes that will strike a chord with each person who dines with us.”

Since arriving two-and-a-half years ago, Ortiz  (pictured, above with Katie Horn (far left), Michael Akin, and Sous Chef Tina Kerr) has aimed to steadily build a menu that can please Hardscrabble’s 302 stock-holding members and 200 additional social members. These “construction” efforts have already paid off, with business growing by almost 15%.

“When I started here, I didn’t change everything at once, but rather built the menu with perhaps as many as six ‘specials,’ to get a feel for what the membership likes,” says Ortiz. “In a private club, members need to know they can expect consistency of quality and flavor, even with different ingredients.”

SUMMING IT UP Allow sous chefs to develop menus, but make sure they align with the property’s overall F&B concepts. Use point-of-purchase reports to determine the best sellers. Keep an eye on the local competition, to make your sure prices are competitive.

Ortiz loves to create unique menu items using culinary twists gleaned first-hand from noted chefs that he’s cooked with through the years. When he has an idea for a new menu item, he’ll round up his sous chef, sauté chef and broiler cook to get everyone’s input (see photo, pg. 28). Together, they’ll noodle around how to incorporate items that are already on hand into new presentations.

“When we redo the menu about two or three times a year, we have a core list of concepts that can’t be removed,” Ortiz explains. “Ribeye is the ‘big gun’; then there’s always a chicken, a pasta, some scallop dish, and crab cakes as an appetizer or entrée. We simply reinvent the protein recipes each time.”

Any proteins that aren’t used at dinner will typically be featured in a lunch special the following day. “Members want fast service and good prices at lunchtime,” says Ortiz. “If we roast a whole tenderloin for dinner, but don’t serve it all, we can slice it thin for a ‘special’ sandwich at lunch the next day.”

Aware that members sometime need ways to use up their food minimums, the Hardscrabble crew also menus an extremely popular Wednesday-night fried chicken buffet, for $10.95.

Collaborative Effort

In Florida, spring and fall are the prime growing seasons, and therefore the best time to buy from local farmers. At Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. (see “Something for Everyone,” C&RB, January 2011), Director of Food and Beverage Mark Butcher, Executive Chef David Scalise and several sous chefs review menus each month to observe the buying patterns of guests. They also take this opportunity to adjust  menus to feature what’s available in the marketplace, depending on the season.

“It’s a collaborative process,” Butcher explains. “The sous chefs come to the chefs with suggestions, then the chefs add their thoughts. Then we all get together and decide where we’re headed with each of the menus. From my  ‘1,000-foot level,’ I paint a picture of the message we’re trying to convey and focus on the service element, while David concentrates on the menu.”

Currently, Butcher is pushing for locally raised rabbit to be featured on the spring menu at the resort’s Augustine Grill. “We speak through our menu to our guests,” he says. “We’re farm-fresh—and rabbit can add value to that concept.

If It Sells, It Stays

There are so many menus—11 in all—at Barona Resort & Casino, Lakeside, Calif. (see “Turn of the Cards at Barona Resort & Casino,” C&RB, September 2009), that it’s a constant exercise to stay on top of them all.

With up to 12,000 guests to serve on a typical weekend, and 6,000 to 8,000 during the week, Executive Chef Jim Phillips, CEC—named Chef of the Year 2010-11 by the California Restaurant Association—and his 320 on-staff culinarians have devised a well-orchestrated menu-planning process.

“We create specials based on what’s available in the produce market,” says Phillips. “We don’t advertise these types of seasonal menu changes, because guests graze through different stations where the items are featured in an array of applications.

“Our strategy is to constantly change the menu as we see fit,” he continues. “Proteins mainly stay the same, although the recipes they are used in may change.”

Every Thursday at 2:30 PM, Phillips, along with his executive sous chef, chefs de cuisine, and purveyor partners, have an official culinary meeting.

During this time, the team works on its menu strategy, analyzing what worked, what didn’t, what should stay, what should go, and what should be tweaked.

Staff down the ranks are also encouraged to experiment to find new dishes that might work on one of the resort’s menus. “The point-of-purchase reports determine what stays on a menu and what goes; it’s never a guess,” Phillips asserts. One recent surprise success revealed by the reports was a pasta dish featuring stuffed meatballs with spicy tomato sauce and fresh rotelli. Menued in the resort’s Italian Cucina and created by Chef Benjamin Moore, it features two beef meatballs stuffed with cold-smoked mozzarella and wrapped with bacon.

In addition to pleasing the palates of resort and casino guests, many of whom live only a short drive away, the menus also have to meet the approval of 350 tribal owners from the Barona Band of Mission Indians. “The Tribal Council, including a chairman and vice-chairman plus five Council members, hold their own weekly meetings,” Phillips says. “They are very active in what we do, so when we change a menu concept, they’ll come for tastings.”

Barona’s pricing is unusually low, Phillips points out, because food and beverage is used as a draw. “There are competing casinos in the area,” he says, “but we know where we have to be price-wise for our guests, and they’re coming—we’re at capacity on the weekends!”

Comparison Shopping

About once a year, Executive Chef Kevin Walker, CMC, AAC, takes all of his sous chefs from Cherokee Town & Country Club in Atlanta out to dinner. At a cost of about $1,000 for the 10 or 11 of them to dine together, both Walker and the club reap the benefits of this investment the following day, when the group gathers to deconstruct—and improve upon—the menu they enjoyed the previous evening.

“Sometimes I’ll do ‘takeout’ and bring in meals for discussion, plus I always encourage my staff to dine locally,” says Walker. “Since there are about 300 restaurants within one mile of here competing for our members’ dining dollars, we must stay current, know what our competition is doing, and make changes to our menus as necessary.”

To that end, Walker also brings new menus to a House Committee meeting and takes suggestions from members. These days, he’s focusing on what the Moms among Cherokee’s membership would like to see menued for their kids. “We have to have broccoli, for example, because the Moms want it, even though the kids don’t always eat it,” he reports.

Besides forcing youngsters to eat their veggies, the House Committee meetings also help Cherokee’s F&B team market new menu changes. “We really want to keep members informed,” says Walker. “Then they can be our advocates to other members.”

How Do You Know What Needs to Go? Hardscrabble’s house-smoked country pork chop served with loaded potato hash and topped with a roasted grape sauce is a consistent best seller. Knowing—really knowing—which items should stay on the menu and which should be ditched (even when back-of-the-house staff love them) is critical for the continued success of a club or resort’s dining program. At Atlanta’s Cherokee Town & Country Club, Executive Chef Kevin Walker relies on the club’s POS system as the most effective means for making the right decisions. “We also look to see if a dish has a high cost with a low return, as that may be driving up food costs, too,” Walker says. “We have a matrix that includes food cost plus selling price. Then the system indicates the item’s performance as being either ‘a star,’ ‘a plough horse,’ or ‘a dog.’” Speaking with the servers and cooks is almost as important as the reports, since they know first-hand what’s selling and how many guests may be asking to substitute “X” for “Y.” Executive Chef Jim Phillips at Barona Resort & Casino, Lakeside, Calif., concurs: “If it sells, it stays.” At Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., there can be cases, reports Director of Food and Beverage Mark Butcher, where an item that doesn’t sell as well might still stay on the menu, because “it helps define who we are as a restaurant.” For example, Sawgrass finds value in retaining a pork chop that is cut from locally sourced whole pigs. “Our customers tell us it’s some of the best they’ve ever had,” says Butcher. After menu entries have been selected, the next critical step is writing—and often re-writing—descriptions that can do each dish proper justice. “I’m a firm believer in having 10 pair of eyes look at [the description], read it to see how it sounds, and tell me if it makes sense,” says Ben Ortiz, Executive Chef at Hardscrabble Country Club, Fort Smith, Ark. Ortiz also makes a special effort to create a buzz in the dining room when menu changes are brewing. “I’ll go out and tell members, individually, ‘I want you to know I’ve got a great salmon dish coming,’ and I’ll describe it—so I’m really pre-selling it,” he reports. At Sawgrass, the honor of inputting menu updates goes to chef de cuisine Brett Smith. “We created a spreadsheet in Excel and it prints out into the menu,” Butcher reports. “To get the word out as to what’s new, e-mail blasts are sent to about 8,000 of our ‘best friends.’ ” The local concierge is also alerted, plus there are posts on Facebook, Twitter, and OpenTable.com, as well as the location’s own website. Phillips at Barona Resort & Casino utilizes InDesign, a desktop publishing program, with input handled by F&B administrator Brenda Barron. A newsletter (sent through the mail) includes blurbs highlighting changes to the menu or menu concepts. For Walker at Cherokee Town & Country, Publisher is the menu program of choice; individual chefs input changes from their own computer, although Walker makes sure to look them over before they’re printed in final form. Once they’re ready to go out, the menu updates are broadcast via e-mail blasts and within the pages of the club’s monthly magazine, and are also made available online.

View menus from Barona Resort & Casino, Lakeside, Calif., Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and Hardscrabble Country Club, Fort Smith, Ark. here.