Menu testing

It's that time of year to start thinking about our fall menu. We'll be picking up some dishes with heartier earthy tones for the upcoming season. We brought in some Four Story Hill Farm Cote de Boeuf. It has been dry aged for 28 days and has become one of my favorites pieces of meat.



We did a traditional bordelaise and a carrot caraway puree that came out really nice. The veg will change with whatever we have in house on top of a couple of staples that will always be on the plate(shrooms, turnip, eg..) Thinking about some carrot noodles as well to drape over and around the veg.



Part of being in the hotel environment everything has to be tested, documented, costed, and ran as a special to see what kind of feedback we get from our guests. When we get our dishes together then we do a tasting for f&b key players, exec chef and exec sous of the hotel, everything gets ran by Todd and he throws in what he wants. If everything is good then we go for a big change at once, if not we re-tool and look at problem dishes individually. Once everyone is happy with the pricing, the look, and the taste we schedule staff meetings for training. We'll go over all the products being used, their origin, what's special about them, any allergy concerns and substitutions for the FOH and BOH. Then we prep and put it into motion. It's a long process, of course we are always tweaking dishes and changing little things but the initial revamp is massive. This is the time of year where I wish I was at an independent restaurant, change everything all the time, tell the servers at pre-shift what is going on and the cooks will get a list of what they have to do that day and figure it out. Would be nice.