Restaurant Menus: Exacting Standards
Kona Grill’s Zach Bredemann standardizes recipes and systems to bring approachable Pan-Asian fare to the masses.
By Monica Rogers, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 7/1/2007
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When Zach Bredemann signed on as Kona Grill’s first corporate executive chef in 2004, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company had five restaurants and a lot of great recipes, but no consistency. "They knew they had to tighten up a lot of things if they were going to grow faster," says Bredemann.
Rolling up his shirt sleeves, Bredemann, formerly a culinary supervisor with Buca di Beppo for five years, spent two years tweaking and standardizing Kona Grill’s recipes and systems. He scrutinized 55 menu items and 40-plus sauces, streamlining labor and enhancing training along the way.
With 16-unit Kona Grill now moving into greater growth mode, opening five to six restaurants a year, the efforts are timely, says Matthew DiFrisco, vice president and restaurant industry analyst with New York-based Thomas Weisel Partners. "This is a step in the right direction," says DiFrisco. "With growth happening quickly, consistency is very important. Menu standardization and codifying best practices should help reduce risk associated with new store development."
Bredemann and his right-hand man, Corporate Sushi Chef Takeshi Trinitapoli, are thrilled to see the newly honed menu taking off. Same-store sales were up 1.4 percent for the first quarter compared with the same period in 2006. Sales of enhanced items are improving. Five-Spice Baby Back Ribs, for example, which are being marinated and cooked longer at a lower temperature, are selling 4 percent better than they were before. New dishes such as the Diablo Shrimp appetizer, $11.95 (spicy jumbo shrimp with a blue-cheese dipping sauce), and the Lemongrass Crusted Halibut entree, $20.25 (with coconut-curry sauce, white- cheddar mashed potatoes and sauteed baby bok choy), are filling in gaps. Food costs are down to 29 percent. And more enhancements are on the way.
Mass Appeal
Understanding Kona Grill’s enhancements requires understanding the basic menu.Divided between eight categories at lunch and a slightly different eight at dinner, Kona Grill’s Pacific Rim-inspired food is intentionally approachable. Best-selling entrees include the Macadamia Nut Chicken, $16.25 at dinner, grilled chicken breast served with cream-enriched soy sauce, pineapple-papaya marmalade, white-cheddar mashed potatoes and wok-seared vegetables. There’s also Big Island Meat Loaf, $15.25, a mix of ground Angus beef and sweet Italian and andouille sausages baked and served with mushroom ragu, white-cheddar mashed potatoes and wok-seared vegetables.
Even the separate sushi menu, which represents 20 percent of Kona Grill’s food sales, has been carefully shaped with American tastes and guest preferences in mind. Sushi rolls, for example, normally sliced into six pieces at most sushi bars, are sliced into eight pieces at Kona Grill to make them easier to eat. "We’ve found that women frequently dictate the ordering process," says co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Jason Merritt. "And our female guests have indicated to us that easier-to-eat sushi is sushi they’re more likely to order. Smaller pieces are easier to chew."
Likewise, you won’t find traditional sushi ingredients like kohada (pickled gizzard shad) or natto (fermented soybean) on the menu, because they don’t appeal to the majority or to sushi newbies, says Trinitapoli. "About 30 percent of our customers who order sushi tell us that Kona Grill is their first sushi experience," he says. "We try very hard to ensure that that first experience will be a positive one."
Earlier versions of Kona Grill "were more sushi-centric and more heavily Asian and Pacific Rim influenced," explains Merritt. "But people were intimidated by what they didn’t know, so those concepts didn’t have mass appeal."
Bredemann says the key at Kona Grill has been very fresh, basic ingredients with exotic accents. The chain uses fresh seafood shipped in daily from Hawaii for both the sushi bar and the many seafood entrees. Of these, Baked Sea Bass, $21.95, marinated for 72 hours in a blend of sake and two varieties of miso, and served with shrimp and pork fried rice and Szechwan beans, is the best seller.
Flavorably Efficient
As with the seafood, exotic accents to meat dishes come in sauces and marinades. The barbecue sauce for the baby back ribs includes Chinese five-spice powder. The double-cut pork chop is sauced with hoisin. And the grilled chicken breast is glazed with sweet-chili sauce.
Standardizing recipes for these and other menu items, Bredemann looked for best flavor and efficiency. He balanced the quantities of fruit used in the pineapple-papaya marmalade that’s part of Kona Grill’s signature Macadamia Nut Chicken, for example. Then he reduced waste by switching to single-lobe breast portions, rather than having chefs portion from double-lobe breasts.
Bredemann also improved the Szechwan bean recipe, which used to require deep-frying and saucing Chinese long beans. He now blanches regular green beans and tosses them in slightly less spicy, chili-paste-based Szechwan sauce. "The long beans were hard to source and not always the best quality," he explains. "So there was a lot of waste involved."
Beyond recipe efficiencies, Kona Grill streamlined kitchen procedures by changing the scope of the new saucier position last year. "It used to be sauces for the sushi bar and sauces for the grill were tasked separately," says Bredemann. "With our most recent stores, we redid the saucier position so that one person is now making all of the sauces for both sides, which really helps bridge the gap between the two."
Bredemann explains that Kona Grill makes more than 40 sauces in house and one or two are generally used in every dish. Shoyu cream sauce—a blend of soy sauce and heavy cream—is a guest favorite, as is the honey-cilantro dipping sauce accompanying the $8.25 Avocado Egg Roll appetizer.
Bredemann has started shaping sauce recipes that can do double duty between the sushi bar and the grill. First out of the chute: The recipe for the spicy tuna sauce in the $7.95 Tuna Wasabi appetizer was revamped last year so it would also work for spicy-tuna offerings on the sushi-bar menu. The Wave Roll, $8.00, for example, has spicy tuna, tempura-battered fried shrimp, avocado and cucumber in soy paper. "We cut back on the mayo and increased the spice in the recipe," says Bredemann. "This allowed the flavor of the tuna to come out more and made the dish a bit healthier."
Filling the Gaps
Bredemann also added several new dishes in 2006 to fill gaps in the menu and make broader use of underutilized items. One of the most successful is the Ahi Tuna Burger, $9.95, with avocado, basil-pesto aioli sauce and a side of taro chips. It uses fresh trim and odd-sized pieces of tuna not served as sushi, says Bredemann, and is one of the top two sandwich sellers.
To fill gaps in consistent execution, Bredemann has increased training on all levels. Traveling culinary training teams rotate throughout units biweekly to oversee operations. Monthly conference calls update chefs and general managers. And Bredemann meets annually with all executive chefs and sushi-bar managers to show new dishes, discuss what’s coming and encourage interaction.
"A lot of the chefs know each other by name only," he says. "Getting them together, they’re more willing to pick up the phone to exchange ideas."
Bredemann and Trinitapoli allow sushi-bar managers to run special sushi rolls (one special at a time). Some of these ideas have done so well locally that they’ve been added to the core menu. The new Spider Roll, $11.75, deep-fried soft-shell crab layered with crab mix, avocado and cucumber, wrapped in seaweed and soy paper, and served with eel sauce, originated with Sarah Shelton, sushi manager at the unit in Sugarland, Texas, a Houston suburb. "We had soft-shell crab one other place on the menu and were looking for a way to cross-merchandise it," says Trinitapoli. "The chef in Houston told me this was doing very well." Since adding it to the core menu, soft-shell crab sales have doubled systemwide.
"At some point, we’d like to allow the executive chefs to feature their own daily specials as well," says Bredemann. For now he wants to give everyone in the system the chance to become more familiar with the new specs for core menu items and new items coming down the pike.
Desserts, for example, which used to be outsourced, will soon be prepared in house. "Making those from scratch will add some challenge for the chefs," he says.
So will entering new markets. "Wherever we go that’s new for Kona Grill, there’s a learning curve for both the guests and the staff—especially with sushi," Bredemann says. He explains that first-time guests often don’t understand that each sushi item is handcrafted and made to order. "They don’t like to wait," says Bredemann. "Keeping ticket times down brings us full circle to training and standardization. For the time being, that’s where our focus has to stay."
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