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The Restaurant Roadmap is your guide to building and running a successful restaurant. Each episode explores the full journey of operations—from planning and development to menu design, execution, and growth. Hosts Danny Bendas, Amanda Stokes, and Chef Eric Lauer bring decades of expertise, joined by industry leaders and restaurant professionals who share their insights and stories. Together, they uncover strategies, tools, and lessons that help operators improve performance, strengthen teams, and elevate the guest experience. Whether you’re opening your first location or refining an established brand, The Restaurant Roadmap equips you to navigate every step with confidence.
Danny: Welcome to The Restaurant Roadmap podcast, powered by Synergy Restaurant Consultants, your go-to source for actionable insights and real-world strategies from the industry’s top experts, clients, and special guests. Whether you’re building a new concept or refining an existing one, we’re here to help you create a forward-thinking sustainable brand, elevate guest experience, streamline operations and maximize your bottom line. With decades of hands-on experience, our mission is simple: to deliver practical, proven solutions to the everyday challenges restaurant operators face. Let’s dive in and get to work.
Danny: Welcome everyone to the Restaurant Roadmap podcast, where we try to bring you the most current, up-to-date, and fun information about everything restaurant business. We thought today that we would do sort of an NRA show 2026 recap. I was there for two-and-a-half days. I bumped into what I thought were some pretty interesting things. And I am joined by Chef Eric, who you all know and love. Say, hey Eric.
Eric: Hey y’all. How are we doing today?
Danny: Good. So, we’re going to talk about some general principles based on what I saw at the show. I shared a bunch of the information with Eric as I was there, links to websites and things of interest. And oftentimes we’re shopping for our clients as well, so there may be a little something thrown in here for one of our existing clients doing some R&D. We’re always on the lookout for new and exciting things to help either current clients, future clients, or just helping all of us at Synergy become more knowledgeable about everything that’s going on.
So, we’re just kind of making this up as we go along, but I think it’ll be fun, it’ll be some good information. We’ll give you some names of some companies that were there with some websites for you guys to check out, if you’d like. So, the first thing you know, I wanted to spend a lot of time in the technology area, and of course, all of the buzz is about AI, okay? AI this, AI that, everything AI. And what I really wanted to start with—and this is where Eric, I’m going to put you on the spot right out of the gate, right—what is your opinion of AI, and how is it going to help us, hurt us, or be neutral in terms of the restaurant business? Any top of mind thoughts? And then I’ll add in as we go.
Eric: I think if you’re not using AI, you’re going to be falling behind the curve. You look at all of these folks from Toast to R365, they all have AI components within their programs and all of their protocols. So, you know, they give you the opportunity to utilize them within the program, you know? I know Toast, you can ask questions to it and it can go into all of your data and pull out the information regarding your questions. So, at the very least, if you’re not using that aspect of it, you are going to fall behind. It does help immensely, you can do [star dog 00:03:23] reporting and stuff like that at the touch of the button, and it just makes your job so much easier. So, I think AI will help in the long run, and I think if you’re afraid of it or you don’t want to use it, I think you’re going to fall behind a little bit.
Danny: So, I’m going to make a statement, and I’m going to ask you to comment on it, and it’s sort of a statement and an opinion, so let’s just call it that before we go here. So, AI is a tool to assist in your operations; it is not a tool to replace parts of your operation or your team members. So, having said that, how would you respond to that comment or that statement?
Eric: I agree a hundred percent. You know, AI is just another tool in your tool belt that you can utilize to help look at your business from every available angle. It will never replace that smiling host at the front door; it will never replace the cook who can make and execute your recipes to a perfect standard; it will never replace the ability of the server to connect with your guest at the table. It is just a tool. It is not anything that you can hang your hat on because as good as AI is today, and it continues to improve it still makes a lot of mistakes.
So, you have to utilize it the same way you would use email when email first started. I remember working in corporate restaurants, and there were area directors that I worked for that you still had to fax everything to because they didn’t like email. So, don’t be like those folks, you know? Don’t turn a blind eye to what AI can do for you and what it can help you with, but understand its limitations and what it holds you back from. And understand what it can’t replace, and just utilize what you can to help yourself in that way.
Danny: Yeah, and I ask that question, and I said I have an opinion, and you know, I think in this day and age, we are surrounded by so much technology, we have all this social media, we have TikTok, we have Instagram, and at some point I think people just want human interaction, okay? And that’s where, to your point, having a great greeter, you know, that has the expertise to know how to take care of you as the guest, you have a great [seer 00:05:50] server, and there may have been some elements of their training, or wine knowledge, or beer knowledge, or maybe that was assembled by doing an AI search, you know, what is bourbon, as simplistic is that is as far as training material, but you can’t train personality. You can train skill, and you can train process, right? You know, just like in the kitchen, and there are a lot of things that you need experience not a computer to generate. So, you know you were in operations for a lot of years. You know, you had a prep chart, you can generate an AI prep chart, but you, as the experienced operator, still need to have the expertise and the knowledge to make sure that what AI is telling you is actually accurate, right? Because it does make a lot of mistakes, as you said.
Eric: So, I was just at an opening with a client, and this client had built an AI tool to help with ordering, and what it does is it takes all the RSV files from around their vendors and plugs it in and gives you a great idea of what’s going on in that aspect of the business. So, there’s a lot of great things it can do for you. So, like we said, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, you know? Utilize it for what you can, and then go from there.
Danny: Yeah. So, in that regard, you know, again, using AI to complement inventory accuracy, complement your financials, compliment predictive ordering, which I think is really important, using past information, what’s the weather today? What are the promotions around the city? There’s a notification about a road closure two doors down from your place, and all of that information, there are software platforms that gather that to give you a predictive estimate of how much product you need to prepare and, by hour, how much product you need to produce if it has a reasonably long time to cook. And I always use fried chicken as an example, you know?
It takes 10, 12, 15 minutes to cook it. It has a whole time of maybe an hour at tops, so the more accurate you can be on predicting how much fried chicken you need between 12 and 1 o’clock the better your quality, the less waste you’re going to have, the more efficient your crew is, et cetera, et cetera. So, in that regard, you know, I bumped into what I think is a very interesting POS inventory management event planning—and this is one that we should look at as consultants at some point, Eric—it’s called Restroworks. It’s R-E-S-T-R-O works. They’re an Indian company. They have a lot of locations that they service internationally, but they’re just starting to enter into the US.
So again, they are—which is interesting—they are equipment agnostic. And there are a lot of POS companies that make their money, not necessarily on the equipment or other things, they make it on credit card fees. So, they don’t care who you process your credit card fees through, they don’t care what equipment you have. If you have existing equipment, they can accommodate you with their platform. But it gives you POS, it gives you inventory management, recipe management, accounts payable, it does all kinds of amazing stuff.
So, you know, it sounds great on paper. I think one day, you know, you get a demo, take a look at it, and research it. And again, it’s called Restroworks, and I believe the website is, if I can find it, just restroworks.com. So, anyway, I would suggest you check it out. And it was one really interesting piece of technology that I thought, you know, and we also live by the theory that the fewest number of platforms you have, the better off you’re going to be. Because everybody says everybody talks to each other until they don’t, right?
And then the other one that I thought was very interesting, and you know, we have very good friends at a platform called meez—M-E-E-Z—and they’re one of the best, in my opinion, recipe-writing platforms, but also inventory management and costing and theoretical versus actual inventory system platforms. We recommend meez quite often. You had experience with them at one of our clients, your first assignment with us actually at Synergy. So, talk a little bit about meez.
Eric: I love meez. I think it’s one of the best online platforms for recipe storage. It interfaces with so many different back office systems so you’re not tied to any one thing. They do a great job, their support is fantastic, just great people over there, and my favorite thing about it is, you know, chefs were the ones who developed these programs, so they understand the intricacies of writing a recipe, and how it’s supposed to work, and when you finish writing a recipe, how it’s supposed to look to someone who is utilizing it to prepare a product. It’s not just a spreadsheet; it’s not just, you know, inputting numbers, it’s, how do I get the best final product from this operation?
And just the back support of each ingredient is so fantastic. You can put the yield in for chopped onions versus sliced onion versus, you know, roasted onions. Whatever you want to do, you can individually yield that out, and it just makes writing a recipe so much easier from a setup standpoint. And now when you’re, you know, three, four, five months down the road and you want to do a special, you have your ingredient bank, you can punch in a recipe so easily and it spits out a great costed plate for you that you can make a really good decision on how to price that out to be profitable. And that’s, you know, we always say it’s all about the math, right? You don’t—nobody’s in this business to not make money, so you have to learn how to price your products and put it out there for you to be able to make money. So, that’s what I like about it.
Danny: Yeah, and I had the opportunity at the show to meet Ursula, who is our primary contact at meez, and she was telling me they are working on a prep function to help identify production planning and stuff like that, you know? So, they’re continuing to evolve. But as I said, I’ve looked for over 30 years for a platform that will give me a great recipe for the kitchen for the cooks and one that’ll do great costing and inventory management in one. And I looked at several other companies while I was at the show, and I couldn’t find another one that did what meez does, which is a great aid for the kitchen and consistency and operations and give you the cost side of things as well. So, it was really, really good. It was really nice to see those people.
So, another one that helps, again, you know, a lot of AI—and I think I sent you this link, Eric. This was an interesting one—it’s called BAR-I, the website is B-A-R-dash-I—like the letter I, lowercase—dot com. And they have a database, I think I heard them say something like 44,000 liquors in various bottles from 12-year to 24-year to whatever it is.
And they know the tare weight on all of those products, and basically you can either scan your open bottles at the bar, and you can also weigh it, and in addition to the fulls, it calculates the partials to give you a very accurate usage on your alcohol. And then it also calculates it against your product mix and how many drinks you’ve sold to give you a variance of how much Johnny Walker Black you should have sold versus what your inventory says. And it looks like it really speeds up inventory as well. So, you did a lot of inventories in your day as a manager in restaurants, so you got to believe that would be a big help, right?
Eric: Oh, yeah. Imagine not having to hold that liquor bottle up to the light to try to see exactly how much is in there. And my [0.4 00:14:32] is different than your 0.4, who’s different than the other manager’s 0.4, so this is a great tool to help and really get a consistent actual verse theoretical usage, so therefore you know exactly what you’re getting paid for, you know, and if there’s simple mis-rings or what have you in where the inventory is going, so it just makes it more standardized, and it gives you one more data point to be able to hold people accountable to what they’re supposed to be doing. And then you can look at what’s going on in it with a really, really thoughtful eye and manage it from that perspective.
Danny: Here’s another one for you. This one is called Harri, H-A-R-R-I. And I’ve known about these people for a while now. I’ve seen them, some various ads and stuff like that, but they’re a workforce OS platform that helps you manage labor, interview on board, I believe, and stuff like that. So, you know, again, another way to have AI help you manage your labor, manage your hours.
Before Covid and oil pricing, it used to be that labor was your biggest problem, not necessarily your food cost because food costs tended to be more stable than your labor. And you know, I think something like 26 states this year raised their minimum wage. And you know, just—you know, not that you pay minimum wage, but it tends to drive everything else up, and so labor and the management of labor, and maximizing the productivity of your labor becomes more and more important. You know, I’m sure your day, you know, you pushed a pencil, right, as opposed to the technology that’s available, and I’m sure this would have been a great tool for you as well, managing restaurants, right?
Eric: Absolutely. And yes, early in my career, it was all about sharpening that pencil and dialing your labor costs in that way. And then, as technology became more and more embraced throughout the industry, we started using forecast at scale—sales and sales per labor hours metrics that we would use, not just a straight labor number. And then working for, you know, national companies where you have states where they’re paying servers $2.13 an hour versus states that are paying $10 an hour to tipped employees. It gave you more metrics to look at, and it really helped. So that Harri, those folks got a good handle on what you’re wanting to do across the entire labor perspective. So, I think that’s another great tool for folks to look at and incorporate in if they need to.
Danny: Yeah, and I think there were a couple of others. And I listened to a demo—I don’t remember the name, but I’m sorry to say, but you can Google search and find some—but voice AI. And this company did a demo on it, like, we called in to their platform to place an order, and it was really amazing, the quality of the voice, you know? It wasn’t like the old Jetsons-sounding kind of stuff. And you know, threw it some curve balls.
Now, was it all pre-programmed for the show? Who knows, right? But the question and the answer, the follow-up, it was very user-friendly, very accurate, and it had ways of overriding. If you got to talk to a real human, it lets you get in touch with a real human, if you have a specific question about something that it cannot answer. And what I liked about it was it takes pressure off of the people in the restaurant having to answer phones, having to deal with, you know, these orders, where they can take care of doing a better job of their service, fulfilling the orders, and managing those sorts of things. So, I think voice AI, not like it hasn’t been around for a while, but I thought this one in particular was pretty good. So, have you had an experience with that at all, Eric, in any projects we’ve built?
Eric: I have not. I know I read somewhere that those systems are way better at getting add-on sales and those types of things put to the bottom line. It helps the guests navigate the menu a little bit easier because it’s programmed in such a way that it is interactive like that, so you’re seeing more top-line sales coming from that because they reach deep down and you know offer the guacamole with that, whereas sometimes the to-go person who answers the phone is too busy to do those types of things. So, it really follows the script and gets the folks to where they need to get to as far as optimal order that the [unintelligible 00:19:26] wants.
Danny: Yeah, and you know, again it gets down to ways of assisting not replacing, and reallocating to get better guest service all the way around. But you know—and again, not to be a replacement. And what I really liked, again, about it was, you know, you’ve been on—you’ve call people, you got to go through 20 buttons, and maybe you can finally talk to somebody, and that’s very, very annoying, I think, to a lot of people, so, letting this get to a human quickly, if you need it, I thought was a really big selling point, right?
Eric: Well, here’s the other aspect of it, right, so you think about what to-go percentage sales has become in our industry, you know, you’re looking at restaurants that are doing over 30% to-go sales, and that’s an extreme burden on the staff that’s within the four walls, so this is a tool to help those. And it helps in such a way that now this person can totally focus on packaging the entire order the way it’s supposed to be packaged, and now you’re seeing less mistakes on that side of the business. So, yes, it’s a tool. It doesn’t replace anybody because as good as AI is, I haven’t seen it pack a bag anytime lately, and I don’t think it’s going to be doing that anytime in the future yet. So, you know, again, it’s a tool to assist in your operation. It’s not replacing those folks.
Danny: Yeah, and the last one I thought was very interesting—and again, there are a lot of music services out there. We just went through some of these challenges with one of our clients, as far as keeping up with all the legalities of music, et cetera. A very interesting platform is RX Music—so basically rxmusic.com—and they offer a whole bunch of really interesting services to help with your music selection, and when the music plays, if you want to interrupt that to do something else, if you want to run a little quick blurb about, “Hey, margarita is two bucks for the next 15 minutes,” very user friendly, very ability to create your own programming and stuff like that. So, I thought that was a pretty interesting concept, also.
And it may not necessarily fall in the AI part of it, but it is a tech version that I think they keep a lot of people out of trouble. Because you get these some independent operators, and they just play Spotify, and they have no legal coverage in paying royalties and stuff like that, where these systems, they have all that stuff built in, and that’s part of the fee that you pay, you know, is for that protection.
Eric: Yeah, the licensing is always what gets you into trouble on those things. And you know, we’ve seen a lot of operators where they think they’re paying the right licensing, and then there’s other—so you kind of are not hitting every part of it. So, having a system like that would definitely help navigate those troubled waters, for sure.
Danny: So, yeah, so moving on, away from AI, and, like, you know, I always tell people, you know, like when I first started in this business, you know, a long, long time ago, there was like a total vacuum of technology, and now you know technology, there’s so much your head will explode. So, you know, good to research and good to see a lot of these things, but only get what’s going to give you the biggest bang for your buck, and try to consolidate as much as you can to get the information that is the most actionable for you, and you don’t suffer from what I call paralysis by analysis. Because you get so much data after a while, you can’t make a decision because you just kind of go, “Okay, I have no idea anymore,” right? It’s kind of mind-boggling how many ways you can cut, dice, slice, and try to figure out your business right? And then rely on your expertise. I mean, you live it, so you understand your business, you understand the industry, I really believe better than AI does, you know. And again, it’s a tool, it’s not a replacement.
So, the other thing that’s been happening for a number of years now, but just I think it’s always worth bringing some of these things up, is pieces of equipment to help make your life easier, give you a more consistent product, save footprint, and maybe not need to have as much skilled labor as you would otherwise normally need. So Eric, you’ve had a lot of experience, you worked a lot of kitchens, you worked with a lot of our clients at Synergy. You’ve seen tiny kitchens and you try to make them work right, so what do you say?
Eric: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, think about labor pool in itself, right? So 30, 40 years ago there wasn’t as many restaurants on the block as there is today, and you know you’re pulling the same amount of people from the same labor pool size and you might have five to seven times the amount of restaurants as you had before. So, if there was ten good cooks in that labor pool area, you know now it’s spread out between 30 restaurants, where before it was spread out between three. So, you want to make these easier and more functional for lesser talented people, and I think, you know, you can look at a lot of different pieces of equipment, you know, from a TurboChef Bullet Oven to a TurboChef Double Batch, to, you know, any of these air fryers that people are seeing today out on the market, there’s so much that you can do now that is very easy and giving you high-quality, repeatable, consistent results.
And let’s face it, at the end of the day, that’s what the guests want. The guest wants, you know, if they come in on Monday and they get chicken parm, and they come in next Tuesday and they get chicken parm, they want it to taste the same, right? Because that’s why they came back. They came for that great flavor that they got the previous time. So, there’s a lot of those technologies that are available out there, and it’s great to see so much that operators are actually leaning into those these days, and not falling back on the old primary pieces of equipment and the familiar stuff that they used in the past.
Danny: So, there’s a couple of pieces of equipment I want to talk to you about, and one of them is from Middleby Marshall—and Middleby Marshall is also TurboChef—but they were demonstrating, at the restaurant show, a product called Wavelengths. It’s called LongWave Infrared Conveyor. So, it’s like TurboChef on steroids, let’s just put it that way. And they were demonstrating, they had two of these pieces of equipment, two different versions with different widths, one double belt and one single belt, and they were cooking New York steaks, right, medium rare. So, they had one belt set up for the steak.
And so, you can cook steak, you can cook chicken, you can cook fish, I would assume you can cook shrimp. I asked them about cooking a burger. The answer was yes. And this piece of equipment, my desk is roughly six feet long by about three feet wide. It’s about the size of my desk.
So, if you can imagine a piece of equipment that can cook all of those things in that footprint and do it consistently, accurately, and once you program your food and your menu—you know, and the other thing I said to the chef who was demonstrating at their booth, “So, what happens, you know, how do you manage temperature?” And he said, “Well, as you manage through everything, you know, if you run a medium-rare steak through a belt and you need a medium well, there’s another belt program, so when you give it a pass on the other belt, it’ll bring it up to medium-well, or a half a push to get to medium.” So, you cover the various temperatures, you cover burgers, and the other beautiful thing about this piece of equipment is it’s self cleaning, so you know, you’re not tearing the whole thing apart. And you know, good or bad, I guess you have to look at it and do a demo and decide.
Most everything is cooked on a pan of some sort, which keeps a lot of grease and stuff from dripping, dirtying the conveyor, you know, and stuff like that. So, I thought it was a really amazing piece of equipment. Again, the next step beyond the TurboChef oven, but allows you to do a whole bunch of things in a very small footprint. You can also do pizza, I forgot to say. So, this is, like, okay, what can’t you do on this thing? It was actually pretty amazing, right? So, similar to what we did at a project we worked on a few years ago, where a couple of pieces of equipment were really the workhorses, once you program them, you just kind of pitch and catch, or you just put them in and take out, right? So.
Eric: I did—that kitchen, I know which one you’re thinking of—was very small, so having the ability to cross-utilize the same pieces of equipment and cook multiple different products within them was crucial to that restaurant’s success. And by all stretches of the means, they’re still succeeding today utilizing those two pieces of equipment and pumping out massive amounts of food to the guests that keep going every day, so it’s fantastic.
Danny: Yeah, and—go ahead. Sorry.
Eric: I was going to say, I would recommend any operators that really want to see anything like that and have any questions about it, you know, reach out to us. We’ve worked with a lot of these pieces of equipment, we know how to utilize them, and we’re, you know, subject-matter experts on them, and we can help fit your menu through these pieces of equipment and get you more profitable from that aspect and more consistent, and delivering the product that you are guaranteeing the guests to get on a consistent basis.
Danny: Yeah. And that’s one thing I think we at Synergy are really good at, is doing our best to keep up with what’s new on the market. And that was really the biggest reason that I wanted to go to the show this year, was to really spend quality time seeing what was new, so that we can bring that information to our clients as we help them, whether it’s design, menu development, menu refresh. It really allows us to be better consultants and really help our clients achieve their maximum success. But anyway, two points real quick, before I forget.
The trick to any of this high-speed equipment, generally speaking, you got to have really tight purchasing specs, right? So, if you’re going to cook a piece of salmon, you can’t have a piece this thin and a piece this thick the next time because you’re going to be all screwed up in terms of your output, okay? So, really important that if you’re going to do a steak or a burger, uniformity of size, uniformity of thickness, uniformity of specification is critical, otherwise, you’re not going to get the end result that you want.
And then number two—and we kind of learned this the hard way—one of the first times we used a high-speed oven for a project several years ago, you got to have all of the raw material that goes into these things at the proper temperature, or the temperature at which you determine the programming for this equipment because if the raw temperature of your raw material product varies, then doneness and the output is going to vary also. Because if it’s at 40 degrees or 36, those three or four degrees of raw material temperature are going to affect the finished product. So, make sure you get that straight, and then once you get these things programmed, literally you’re just pitching and catching, or putting in and taking out. Which means, as I’m sure you can appreciate, Eric, you don’t need the skilled labor force of a great broiler guy or a great saute guy, necessarily, to be able to execute great food. And to your point, we actually did a really good job executing that with our client a few years ago.
Another one that I thought was interesting is a company called Marshall, and again, this is not new, but I think it’s worth bringing up is they had a conveyor broiler. Which I’d kind of forgotten about them over the years, but something that I want to make sure I remember. And again, we specify equipment based on the client, the menu, and the R&D work that we do. But they have a broiler, basically a conveyor charbroiler, if you will. They have three belts, and again, once you program your product to the belt, you know you can cook seafood on one belt, you can do chicken on another belt, burgers on another belt, and again, it’s not a very large piece of equipment. It’s basically a conveyor charbroiler. But again, you get that consistency of product that allows us to execute consistently without a lot of the labor or the high cost of labor that it requires to be an expert real person and be able to get the right temperature of the salmon every time, or whatever it is that you’re cooking, right?
Eric: Quickly on this. A lot of this equipment too, they’re making ventless, so there’s a lot of those types of possibilities where you’re not having to put a hood into these kitchens, so it opens up different aspects of menu production that you may not have thought was possible previously, due to constraints of what your kitchen is configured as. So, you have the ability to open up your menu a little bit more and not have to put in a 30 to $50,000 hood, so you can save money, have menu difference, and really deliver a great consistent product to your guests.
Danny: Yeah, that’s an excellent point. I was just thinking when you said that I thought, “Yeah, watching them cook steak at the restaurant show using that [unintelligible 00:34:15].” They didn’t have a hood in McCormick Place. So, you know, I don’t know if they have built-in fire suppression or not, but that’d be something to check out. I would imagine they have something to help protect against that. But yeah, that’s tight spaces, no hoods, and just make sure you have enough circulation in your space to, you know, to exhaust out temperature and stuff like that. So yeah, that’s a great point, Eric. Thanks for bringing that up.
And then the other one, Winston CVap, or Winston Industries, they manufacture really good quality holding ovens. And I know we did some work before, and again, I’m just bringing it up because we’ve had some clients too, actually, that do an awful lot of poached eggs for everyday breakfast or brunch, and they have a piece of equipment with the technology and the ability to literally put a flat of eggs in this warming cabinet, set the proper temperature and the proper humidity, so it’s a food-safe product, and after a certain amount of time, the egg in the shell is perfectly poached. So, you’re not standing there trying to simmer water, poach an egg, overcook the egg, break the egg, have all kind of egg white floating around. You just kind of crack it, drop it on your benedict, sauce it, and serve it. Really pretty amazing.
And they have the ability to do the same thing with burgers. So, if you do a predominantly burger business or a large quantity of burgers, you can program this to hold burgers, so it—and you don’t take temperatures, or at least if the majority of them are medium, it brings it up to a temperature—food safe—of a perfect medium, and then you just quickly sear each side, and you got a perfect burger every time, like, two minutes, right? Same thing with chicken breasts. And we’ve had plenty of experience with poached eggs in some of the clients we work with, right, Eric.
Eric: Absolutely, and we’ve seen the folks who do it… not great, and then we see the folks who do it great, utilizing this type of equipment and technology, and I tell you that the difference is unbelievable. The last time we had it and they did it correctly, it was one of the best egg benedicts I’ve had in years. It was fantastic. So, don’t be afraid of technology, you know? It’s [unintelligible 00:36:42] to help you.
Danny: Yeah. Yeah, and you got to kind of push the envelope. It sounds weird, and I thought it was weird, but it works. And it all gets down to manage the process because obviously, you know, food safety is top-of-mind. But you get it down, it can make your life a lot easier and help you guarantee a really great guest experience.
Eric: It touches all the buckets, right? You have less waste, you have a better quality product, your line cooks are more productive—because they’re not doing all of the things that you spoke of, standing up a pot of boiling water, trying to poach an egg perfectly—and then you just… it frees the people up to do more things. They can be even more creative on the line and push out higher quality products, so it’s a win across all the board.
Danny: Yeah, and again, you don’t need as much skill, and you’re relying more on process, and then you’re delivering a great product, your throughput improves, a whole bunch of good things happen, right? So, I don’t know if it’s controversial or not—switching gears—the last topic I wanted to talk about a little bit, and it gets back, again, to labor, talent, ability, equipment package, build-out costs, footprint size, the idea of making versus buying. And you know there are some companies that insist on making everything from scratch. There are others that look to buy everything, or over time they end up commercializing a lot of things because they’re growing. So, let’s talk philosophy just a little bit in that regard. Eric, what do you think?
Eric: Well, I think you have to develop your concept in a way that you know what your defined goals are, and once you do that, then it’s easier to make those decisions. So, if you want to come out and say you’re a scratch kitchen, obviously you don’t want to go to prepackaged, premade anything, but if you want to be known as high volume and great quality and consistency across the board, you know, then there is the ability to bring some of these products in and make it easier on your staff to pump out the high quality, high volume food that you’re looking to do. And that’s what it comes down to. You have to make the decision upfront, and you have to know what your brand is going to be when it grows up, right from the beginning because that’s where you begin that journey to either a scratch kitchen or a high volume kitchen or an easily executable kitchen. That’s what it’s about. So, knowing who you want to be and executing that vision, I think it comes down to that.
Danny: Yeah, and again, I think a lot of people miss the opportunity when we talk about, you know, make versus buy—first of all, let’s back this train up a minute. If you’re going to make it, make damn sure everybody knows you made it. Get credit for it, and focus on the items that you can get credit for. And you know, are you going to make ketchup or are you going to buy Heinz ketchup, right? So, yeah, you know, it’s like, really? So, are you going to make a ten ingredient ranch dressing mix, or you’re going to buy Hidden Valley?
But if you’re going to make it, get credit for it, and make damn sure that you got a great recipe that people follow, and it’s consistent every time, and hang your hat on it, right? Or buy a product and add to it, and jazz it up, which is what we call speed scratch, or you can find a really great product that you can buy outright that you can afford, it’s another alternative, you know? And you know you don’t have to make everything necessarily. You want to deliver consistency, great quality, a great value, and hopefully you have a few pennies left in your pocket when you’re done, right?
So, two things I saw at the show—there was a lot of food there, obviously—the first one is a company that produces a lot of dried fruit slash bar garnishes. The name of the company is called the Essential Mixologist. They’re owned by a master company called Fresh Connect, and they also have micro herbs and a whole bunch of other stuff.
But you know, I’m looking off camera here, just for a minute, just to tell you just a brief list. So, they have dehydrated orange, dehydrated blood orange, limes, lemon slices, grapefruit slices, citric fruit garnishes, vegetable garnishes, exotic tropical garnishes, and a whole bunch of stuff. I think they had dried jalapenos also. So, I think, you know, as drinks are getting more popular, more crafty, you know, we actually—I hate to say this, we did a project with a client a while back, and one person spent—and I know he’s already laughing; he knows who it is because we worked on this together—an amazing amount of time freeze-drying strawberry slices for a specialty drink. Now, in the meantime, there’s all kinds of other problems going on in the restaurant, but we had fresh dehydrated strawberries. It was just kind of like, mind-boggling. But anyway, the point is they had what looked like a really nice product, a really nice assortment. Dehydrated fruits and vegetables seem to be all the rage these days, in specialty cocktails. All right, Eric, any comments?
Eric: I love that you brought that story up. That was hilarious. It sounds like a great company to work with. I think that, you know, a lot of these folks, you can get those great things, and I love that they have the micro cilantros and the micro greens of the world because they make a quick, easy, really fresh looking-garnish on some plates, and that would be fantastic.
But I’ll give a little anecdote here. We were on a project, and this was with somebody else in our, on our team, and they don’t enjoy those dehydrated fruits in their drinks, so [laugh] they ordered a drink and went to use the restroom, and I tipped the bartender extra, so they filled up his drink with just a ton of those dehydrated limes [laugh]. It was hilarious.
Danny: Just to get a rise out of them, right?
Eric: Oh, yeah. It was. It was awesome [laugh].
Danny: All right, and the last one again, you know—and there’s only a bazillion different soup manufacturers out there, right—but this company is called Victory’s Kitchen, and they have what I thought were some really good, high-quality soups and some other sauces and stuff like that. So, again, the idea, you know, buying out a product versus making it, buying it, and embellish it, take a buyout product, add some fresh herbs, squeeze some lemon into it, whatever, it changes the flavor, makes it yours, adds freshness cues, and you don’t have to start from scratch and build it from the beginning. So, anyway. Well, Eric, we thought this was going to be a quick 20 minute debrief on the NRA show. Here we are at 45 minutes, but it’s always fun, right? So, I want to thank everybody for listening. Again, if you have ideas, thoughts, comments, suggestions on how we can help you, feel free to email info@therestaurantroadmap.com. Eric, thanks so much for participating and jumping in.
Eric: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Danny: All right, everybody. Have a great rest of your time, and we will talk again soon. Take care. Bye-bye.
Eric: Bye, y’all.
Danny: Thanks for tuning in. We hope today’s episode gave you valuable insights you can put into action. If you have questions, want more info on today’s topic, or need support with your restaurant-specific challenges, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out anytime at info@therestaurantroadmap.com, and visit synergyrestaurantconsultants.com to explore our services, sign up for our newsletter, and catch up on past episodes. Don’t forget to follow and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook so you never miss what’s next. Do you have feedback or a topic you’d like us to cover? Contact us. We’re here to help make the world a better place to eat.