Toque of the Town: Mountain Elevation

Bugaboo Creek Steak House hopes Philip Butler’s value-priced lodge comforts raise sales and traffic.

By Monica Rogers, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 10/1/2005

It’s Aug. 29, 1916, and three hours into his climb up a steep, granite slope in Southeast British Columbia, Canada, famed mountaineer Conrad Kain faces a “bugaboo,” mining-speak for “dead end”: With easier paths blocked, the only way forward is directly up the sheer rock face. Kain makes it. The area is dubbed the Bugaboo mountain region, and Kain’s “will over wilderness” fortitude sets a standard.

Ninety years later, leadership at Rare Hospitality International’s Bugaboo Creek Steak House faces its own uphill climb: how to broaden its customer base, perk up flat sales and drive frequency in the face of an increasingly saturated midscale steakhouse segment. The current approach? Broaden the menu with more emphasis on mountain-style comfort foods and value pricing.

Philip Butler, who came on board in July as Bugaboo Creek’s corporate chef and director of culinary, has set the pace with “Lodge Comfort” menu items that will launch in October.

“My challenge is to create with foods that guests are comfortable with, but to present them in a rugged, rustic, mountain style that’s really true to Bugaboo,” says Butler, who comes to the 30-unit chain with diverse industry experience. Butler conceptualized, owned and operated Italian-, Latin- and Asian-themed independent concepts; shaped menus for Sky Chefs in Dallas when food was a favored airline amenity; and broadened prepared-food offerings for 7-Eleven. “But the strength I bring to this job is my approach to how plates are put together and presented,” he says.

Rustic Comfort
Take the new meatloaf on the core menu, for example. “Everyone’s comfortable with meatloaf, so I put some thought into how we could give that a Bugaboo spin,” Butler says. “We already had a killer meatloaf recipe with big chunks of diced onion, carrots and celery mixed into the meat to give it a rustic flair. So I kept that core recipe, but updated it.”

He shaped the meat into a smaller loaf, which slices up better for presentation. Instead of a red sauce, Butler switched to Bugaboo Creek’s house barbecue sauce: “A more adventuresome taste, which fit our niche better,” he says. The finished plate features four slices of meatloaf (three at lunch) with melted cheddar cheese, bacon crumbles and fried red-onion strings over a bed of smashed potatoes with customer’s choice of side dish, $12.99 dinner, $8.99 lunch. Butler shingles the meat over the potatoes and zig-zags the sauce to further enhance presentation.

Kain’s Chicken Cobb Salad, $9.99 dinner, $7.99 lunch, also joins the core menu this month. Hybridizing two classics, the traditional cobb and chopped salad, Butler tosses mesclun with blackened diced chicken, smoked bacon, blue-cheese crumbles, tomatoes, cucumbers, chopped egg, fried onion strings and Zinfandel vinaigrette.

Butler rounds out October’s Lodge Comforts launch with three seasonal specials that will be available through Dec. 4: Smothered Shrimp and Sausage Dip, $7.99; Burgundy Bleu 11 oz. New York Strip, $17.99; and Golden Harvest Apple Fritter Sundae, $5.99.

For the dip, Butler steered away from heavy use of garlic but liked the spice level and dense texture of andouille sausage with the shrimp. “I added creaminess with Jack cheese and selected a tortilla chip that would stay crisp through service and offered the added visual interest of tri-color shades,” he says. Initial versions of the dip had higher spice levels. “You don’t get the perfect balance right away,” he admits. “I started a little too spicy and tweaked the recipe to tone it down from there.”

With his Burgundy Bleu entree, Butler specified New York strip steak for its value and flavor. “I love New York strip. It offers a great price, good value and has great flavor to match the Three Blind Moose Merlot we’re featuring with the dish,” he says. Adorned with blue-cheese demi-glace, fire-roasted red peppers, smoked bacon and crumbled blue cheese, the steak “has just the right balance of earthy tones and creaminess,” Butler explains.

Lower Checks, Higher Traffic
Rather than increase prices with new launches, all of these dishes are priced in the midrange of existing menu options. The company hopes that a reduced average check and greater value offerings will drive more traffic into the stores. Senior Director of Marketing Kim Jensen-Pitts won’t release exact numbers, but she says, “When we featured sirloin tips, we saw a strong increase in second-quarter traffic. We expect to see the same thing happen with the meatloaf launch.”

Bugaboo Creek’s demographic is heavily family oriented, targeting customers 25 to 54 with children. However, because of the chain’s $16.50 average check, many families consider the restaurant to be a special-occasion place.

“If Bugaboo Creek is to succeed in getting families to come in more frequently, the price point will have to come down,” says restaurant analyst Hil Davis of SunTrust Robinson Humphrey in Atlanta. But Davis thinks Bugaboo Creek needs to go beyond food to drive traffic, adjusting the atmosphere to make it more inviting to customers without children. “They’ve gotta tone the kid ambience down a bit to appeal to other guests,” he says.

Bugaboo Creek believes Butler’s culinary comforts have the power to coax new customers of all sorts, without changing the decor. “We believe the lodge artifacts, even the animatronics [squirrels, raccoons, buffalo and moose that move and talk], enhance, rather than detract from, the overall ambience,” Jensen-Pitts says. “Marketing to the business crowd is something we’re just beginning to explore.” The company will launch a test program Oct. 17 promoting lunch to consumers where they work.

Enhancing Bugaboo’s kids program is also on the agenda. “We have a good kids menu but think we can do a lot more with it,” Butler says. As a first foray into this realm, Bugaboo Creek did a Mini-Mountaineer burger promotion in conjunction with the Fireside Sirloin Skillet Tips launch in April, which the company says was well-received. “We skewered two mini burgers on a plastic pick,” he says. “The presentation was fun, and the kids loved it. Look for more kid-food promotions to come.”

And Bugaboo Creek is sticking with the quarterly food-promotion strategy it launched two years ago as it moves into 2006. The company plans to introduce four promotions that will each last eight to 10 weeks and feature two to four new menu items.

While it’s too soon to share specifics, Bugaboo Creek will be looking at opportunities to enhance lunch sandwiches and burgers with a more upscale appearance.

Formal Processes
That task falls to Bugaboo Creek’s Calendar Committee. Formed in June, the group is comprised of operations, training, marketing, research and development, and purchasing personnel and meets monthly to make the menu-development process more collaborative.

“The idea is that getting everyone on board sooner, discussing seasonal trends, potential items and LTOs, will help us avoid working so close to market,” Jensen-Pitts says. “Our goal is to get things ready 16 months out, rather than four or five.”

Bugaboo Creek also wants to formalize its testing procedures. Right now, it’s a haphazard, “some we do, some we don’t” testing approach, says Butler. Meatloaf, for example, tested six months in advance of its launch, while the cobb salad tested just weeks before launch. “We want to improve on this process, timing wise, testing things far enough ahead of time so it makes sense,” he explains. “We don’t want guests testing a cold dish in the dead of winter or hot comfort-food entree in the middle of the summer.”

Currently, customers fill out forms to indicate their opinion of overall quality, taste and value of test items. But cultivating closer relationships with its loyal users, Bugaboo Creek is launching an e-mail club, The Creek Club, and hopes club communiqués will reflect customer opinions and provide a forum for guests to share ideas.

Feeding the new-idea pipeline from within the ranks, Butler also hosts a biweekly conference call with all kitchen managers. “It’s meant to be an open forum for ideas,” he says. “I’m a big believer in that.”

Bugaboo Creek also emphasizes culinary training. As Butler develops new menu items, he trains six culinary captains in the intricacies of each dish. They in turn pass the skills on to the kitchen managers in each region. Between training sessions, a culinary operations manager travels to monitor units for consistency and quality control.

Moving ahead, Butler is looking forward to cultivating closer relationships with both his culinary team and his vendors as he develops new ideas to fit the Bugaboo Creek mountain-comforts motif.

“It’s a lot of fun to think about the possibilities,” he says. “Everything about the concept is warm and rustic, in color and feel. There’s nothing sparse about it.”