Short YouTube dialogue (Donald Burns + another speaker) about restaurant menu engineering and turning kitchen scraps into profitable dishes. Main claims: many restaurants promote popular items without checking profitability; instead, promote high-margin items and repurpose byproducts (bones, trims, leftover vegetables/meat) into sauces and dishes (red wine sauce/demi-glace, cottage pie, ragù) to reduce waste, improve margins and staff pay.
Chapters
Huge mistake restaurants make. Like, if you look at their social media, most of them, if I ask them, hey, what's the profitability of that? They have no idea. But they're promoting it. And it could be like that. Like, that's why. That's why they're bleeding out money is because you're making busy, busy. You're making items that are not profitable, more popular, which is just. Just bears you. So we always have that rule, is that we always take the items that are, like, our most profitable but not maybe popular, and we promote the hell out of them, like you guys do, to make them popular. Now they become stars, which means they're high profit and popular, and then they stick.
Yeah, yeah. So anything that is made with a byproduct, which is what my chefs are trying to be. Right. I've seen it all my life. We then just promote the crap out of it. So when we like. I'll get a little bit cheffy for you, Donald. So we make our red wine sauce from the bones. So we don't buy bones in for our red wine sauce. And then we make the stock, and then we get the trim, and it goes into the pot and covered veggies and wine and then stock on and then reduce it, and that becomes the perfect red wine sauce. You know, demi glazed. But then all that veggies and the meat, there's nothing wrong with it. And then that gets turned into a cottage pie. So every chef. And I used to do it myself for bloody 30, 40 years.
I've done it too, man.
Yeah, just throw it in the bin.
It goes in the trash right away. Yeah. Oh, we got the stock out of it. Oh, what do I do with all the stuff left over? Just throw it in the trash.
Yep. And so we actually have now come up with a lot of recipes. Meat. And we've created pies and ragus. And then we just market it so we can pay our staff. So we can pay our staff correctly.
