Name: Why every restaurant has the same desserts
Uploaded: 2024-12-07T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 7 min 17 s
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Modal verbs - B1

There's something you might notice when you go out to eat.

Depending on the restaurant you go to, the entrees and drinks can vary a lot.

Adverbs of degree

But then, the dessert menu drops, and you're almost always left staring down the same options.

A cheesecake, maybe a chocolate lava cake and some type of fruit pie, probably a sorbet or ice cream.

Desserts in a lot of restaurants are kind of boring.

Menu curation can make or break a restaurant.

Because frankly, it's really hard to make money in this business.

Profit margins for restaurants are not particularly high.

It's interesting because so many people want to go into the restaurant business because they think it's glamorous or whatever.

Catherine Gordon teaches restaurant and culinary management at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York.

The revenue is going to come in on the food and the beverage sales, and then there's going to be the cost of goods to support those food and beverage sales.

Things like ingredients and staff salaries, rent, electricity and more.

What's left is a low number, and then of course it has to be taxed after that.

The menu is really their one chance to maximize profits.

When priced right, the entrees will bring in the most profit.

And it's not really a secret that drinks are relatively cheap to make and easy to upcharge.

And people will often pay that multiple times throughout a meal.

But outside of drinks and entrees, it's not so easy to make money.

Look at appetizers, for example, with an average profit margin all the way down at 22%.

Luckily, if you're savvy, there are ways to work appetizers into a menu and recoup the cost.

So what people try to do is what we call cross-utilization of product.

For example, you can buy a full chicken cheaper than pieces of a chicken.

And then… You might be able to use the chicken bones after it's broken down for your base for your stock.

And then that stock can become a sauce or it can become a soup and you can sell that.

And then you can sell like your chicken breast like on a salad or something, you know, at  And then you can have the chicken thighs in a dish at the dinner time.

And then you might even have like little scrap pieces and I don't know, you're selling chicken tacos at the bar, something like that, you know, so it's like full utilization.

So when done properly, the menu fits together like a neat little puzzle.

But desserts are sometimes hard to fit in.

Making them is one thing, but making them well requires an entirely different skill set from the rest of the kitchen.

Plus… You want that amazing wow kind of thing at your restaurant.

You have to dedicate space and not every place has it because the rents for how many square feet you're getting is just astronomical these days and people just can't afford more little physical location.

Cream cheese and chocolate and nuts and things like that.

You may not be using them in other parts of your menu.

Desserts are one of the most expensive things to make in terms of ingredients.

Ingredient costs in the world change like consumers see inflation as well.

It's more than the egg inflation we've all been frustrated with.

In 2018, the cost of vanilla skyrocketed due to a crisis in Madagascar.

It's stabilized, but it's never really returned to where it once was.

Bad weather in West Africa, where around 70% of the world's cocoa comes from, has led to dramatic increases as well.

When all is said and done, desserts are tied with appetizers as the lowest average profit margins in restaurants, and one of the hardest to fit into that neat little menu puzzle.

So when a restaurant is struggling, in-house pastry chefs are often the first to go, especially because restaurants can offer desserts at a much lower cost by outsourcing them entirely.

Thus, the same desserts everywhere you go.

But there is something about dessert these places are often missing.

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Now, from aesthetically pleasing websites, back to aesthetically pleasing foods.

Recent data suggests there's a shift in how consumers are viewing desserts.

When going out to eat, only 11% of boomers on average order dessert, compared to over 30% of Gen Z or millennial diners.

At Bad Roman, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, that number is much higher.

It's close to 40% of our guests are ordering desserts.

Chef Craig Koketsu and pastry chef Lucy Blanche helped create the restaurant's dessert menu.

And part of the reason so many people are ordering from it is because they've tapped into the importance of marketability.

You know, the saying is that people eat with their eyes first.

You know, so you want to capture them first visually.

Chef Lucy's viral lemon cheesecake really captured people.

I mean, it's a lemon cheesecake beautifully molded to be shaped like lemons, served on a lemon plate.

It's even fun to eat, since you're encouraged to crack the shell before diving in.

It's very important to me that things look wonderful, but more than anything, also that they taste amazing.

I remember one of the team members that were at the table when we brought the dish out saying, well, this is a home run.

At the end of the day, the only way for a restaurant to really make money is to get people into seats.

Viral hits like this can drive customers into a restaurant, and more customers can obviously turn more of a profit as they spend on entrees and drinks.

But in order to get diners coming back again and again, chefs can't rely on one dish.

The entire menu has to work together, and desserts have a unique opportunity.

It's the last thing that the diner, you know, sort of like identifies with on the table.

Everything will be memorable, but I feel like the last thing that they eat, it's always like that.

What's going to make it, you know, what's going to make your entire meal?

Dining out has always been about more than what you eat, and so that's how dessert can fit into this menu puzzle.

 As a final cherry on top of the experience that makes you want to come back and send your friends and spend a little extra at the end.

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Why every restaurant has the same desserts

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