With our 24/7 conscious and unconscious thought commitment to food ideas, you would think that when we sit down to write the next set of exciting new dishes, it would be relatively easy. It is not.
We travel. We dine. We visit the homes of friends. We watch maybe a cooking show or two, begrudgingly. We go online and check out other restaurants. We view menus. We have even become modern enough to read a few blogs. We look at seasonal produce lists and seasonal fish lists. We flip through the meat buyers’ guide for cuts we have overlooked or forgotten. We buy cookbooks, good ones by the best in the world. We reread an old, dry textbook on classic techniques and think, these are still very good. We wonder what it would be like to run a kitchen where you could enlist M.I.T. to invent a new piece of equipment for you so that you could do things that you think might be possible, if such a piece of equipment existed.
We drive in our cars and our minds wander. We forget we are almost there. We miss exits.
With our 24/7 conscious and unconscious thought commitment to food ideas, you would think that when we sit down to write the next set of exciting new dishes, it would be relatively easy. It is not.
Six years ago, after my first season at the club, I sat down to work on what I would run the following year. I spoke with my GM and asked which dishes he thought we should bring back. He gave me a great piece of advice: none of them. If you do, some will love those dishes so much that you will run them again and again. Others will be tired of them. Instead of being the chef who is known for that great chicken dish or that great lobster dish, be known as the chef who keeps writing new dishes.
And that is what we have done. Sure, we always have a steak and the starch component has almost always been some form of a potato, but the fish dishes, the lamb dish, the duck, the foie, the apps, the sword, the fluke, the scallops, etc., have been newly conceived again and again. Further, we change constantly—about 3 or 4 of the apps and 3 or 4 of the entrees every two to three weeks. We are willing to change even more frequently, 1 or 2 items if situations dictate (striper season closes, or a dish turns out to be a dog).
Writing the menu is a difficult task with complexities that a diner will never see. How many items does the grill cook have already? How many on sauté? Saute already has two very tough bring ups. This one has to be easy. Maybe we should just go for it and see what happens. What ingredients are already being used on other dishes that are not changing in this cycle? Do we have enough fish? Do we have too much fish for it to move and stay fresh? Are we running too much red meat? How many high food cost items are we running already? Can we afford to run halibut too? We need a low cost money maker that actually sells! Does this dish fit in with who we are conceptually?
People walk up to us—members, cooks, Mom—and they have ideas for the menu. I say things like, well, we already have too much corn going on, or no, we are not really a big bowl of mussels kind of place, or I just can’t bear to fly in wild salmon from really far away and pay $17 per pound for it, when we have so many great fish right here (but sometimes I do it anyway).
I feel fortunate at our club, because there are several tough hurdles that our dishes have to clear before they make it to the diner’s table, and the House Committee is not one of them. House Committees are made up of excellent people who care about the club, but they are not usually experts in food, restaurants and dining. They have not devoted their professional lives to it. Nor is it the case that I wish there were no hurdles for our dishes to clear. I find that the hurdles are like a tough customer who demands a lot and knows a lot, and if we can clear them, we greatly reduce our chances of looking bad.
Many times I have dined out at very good places and experienced great plates, but occasionally there will be a plate with such a striking flaw that I wonder, how could this plate make it to table. I am quiet, of course, but that is what I think. The answer, I am pretty sure, is that they lack the candid participation of key people outside of the creative/productive team. People outside of the cooking team have a better ability to be dispassionate about it. They do not care that you have had a hankering to do spaetzle for ages, or that the steps to this dish are outrageously technical, or that the cost of this ingredient is high so it has to be sparing. No, they only see the dish as the customer sees it. We must recognize, as chefs and creators, that there will be times when we get so wrapped up in a dish that we lose our objectivity.
The creative team in our kitchen is comprised of myself and our Executive Sous Chef, with some additional input coming from a few of the cooks who have been with us a while. Outside the kitchen, we have significant input from our GM and some input from our restaurant managers. Almost always, say 95% of the time, flaws other than the plate-up are caught early, a week or more out, from the wording of the proposed dish.
Though we welcome criticism as an important part of the process, my Sous and I certainly do not want a lot of it, and we do not want anything to come up that we should have spotted ourselves. Because we take this care in what we present verbally, there are fewer flaws in our drafts than there once were.
We ask ourselves a list of questions:
—Is it bright, colorful, summery? If not, is there a darn good reason?
—Is there some element of the dish that is cool, thoughtful, modern or unexpected?
—Is the dish approachable enough not to come across as too esoteric?
—Does the dish have lots of nice vegetables/fruits/fresh things and not rely too much on the starch?
—Does the ratio of protein to vegetable to starch seem right? We always try for a generous protein, generous vegetable, small starch, unless there is some exceptional circumstance.
—Is the dish American seasonal with European influences? If not, is there already one ethnic or Asian dish on the menu? Because more than one would make us seem a little bit eclectic and we are not that.
—Does it make use of any of the season and area’s best ingredients available? Are we failing to use these ingredients at least somewhere on the menu?
Finally, at home or whenever a quiet moment can be found, we write dishes and the two of us, Chef and Sous, run them by each other. Sometimes after discussion there are dishes that do not make it through even this preliminary round. But those that do, I run by my GM, fairly confident that they are on their way to menu. Sometimes things come up that we had not considered, and a dish needs to be adjusted or rewritten entirely. Sometimes they all appear to be on the mark.
This is how I write menu as Executive Chef at Shelter Harbor Golf Club. I hope some chefs may find parts of this helpful or be willing to offer ideas on how their creative process works.
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