Latest / Restaurant Business with Fexingo: Food Service, Hospitality, and Independent Operators / Why Restaurant Menus Are Shrinking to Win
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, I was looking at the menu at a new spot in Brooklyn last night, and it had exactly twelve items. That's it. Two apps, two salads, four mains, two sides, two desserts. Luna: Twelve? That's almost minimalist. I feel like menus used to be novels. What's driving this? Lucas: It's actually a pretty deliberate shift. And I think it's one of the most underrated operational moves a restaurant can make. We're seeing data from the Culinary Institute of America and the National Restaurant Association showing that when restaurants cut their menu by about 25 percent — say from 40 items down to 30 — kitchen speed goes up by roughly 18 percent. Lucas: And food waste drops by about 12 percent. That's not trivial when margins in this business are usually single digits. Luna: That speed improvement makes sense. Fewer items means fewer ingredients to prep, fewer things to keep in inventory, less chance of a cook fumbling for a recipe. Lucas: Exactly. And there's a psychological layer too. Have you ever sat at a table with a menu that has 80 options and just felt... stuck? Luna: All the time. Especially at those big Tex-Mex places in Houston where the menu is practically a phone book. Lucas: Right. And the research on 'decision fatigue' is pretty clear. When people face too many choices, they either default to the same thing they always order, or they get frustrated and leave. Some studies suggest that for every ten items you add beyond 20, you lose about five percent of customers who just can't decide. Lucas: So a smaller menu isn't just about efficiency in the back of house. It's about conversion at the front door. Luna: There's a famous example in Chicago — Au Cheval. Their menu is famously tight. I think they have like a dozen things total, but they do enormous volume on that one griddle. Lucas: Yes. Au Cheval is the perfect case. Their menu is built around a single cooking station: a flattop griddle. They do burgers, fried eggs, hash browns, a couple of sandwiches. And they reportedly generate over two point four million dollars a year in revenue from that one small kitchen. Lucas: The reason they can do that is because every cook on that line knows those 12 dishes cold. There's no learning curve. No wasted motion. Luna: But what about places where variety is the whole point? Like, I'm thinking of a classic Houston Tex-Mex spot with 200 items. That's part of the charm, right? Lucas: It can be. And there are certainly markets where huge menus work — family-style places, tourist districts, certain ethnic cuisines where variety signals abundance. But even there, the trend is toward consolidation. The National Restaurant Association's 'What's Hot' survey for 2026 shows that 62 percent of chefs now say they're actively reducing menu size. Lucas: And it's not just fine dining or fast casual. Even casual dining chains like Chili's and Applebee's have been trimming their menus over the past few years. Luna: Speaking of fast casual — Sweetgreen and Dig Inn are built on this idea. They have rotating but limited menus. Sweetgreen's winter menu might have eight salads. That's it. Lucas: Right. And they've been extremely disciplined about not expanding. Dig Inn's founder has said in interviews that they intentionally cap their menu at about 12 core items because that's what their supply chain can handle with real freshness. They don't want to carry 30 ingredients that might sit in a cooler. Luna: So if I were opening a restaurant tomorrow, what's the magic number? How many items is 'right'? Lucas: There's no single answer, but the industry rule of thumb I hear most often is between 12 and 20. That's for a full-service concept. If you're fast casual, even tighter — maybe 8 to 12. And if you're fine dining tasting menu, you're looking at maybe 6 to 10 courses, but that's a different beast. Lucas: The big variable is your kitchen setup. If you have one line, one grill, one fryer — you can only produce so many unique items before you bottleneck. Luna: And the other variable is the type of cuisine. A taco joint can have 10 fillings and 5 salsas and that feels like variety. A French bistro needs more distinct dishes to cover the classics. Lucas: Exactly. The key is to match your menu size to your operational capacity. And I think a lot of new restaurateurs overestimate how many dishes they need to attract customers. They think 'if I have 50 items, everyone will find something.' But actually, the data suggests that a well-edited menu of 15 excellent dishes will outperform a sprawling menu of 40 average ones. Lucas: There's a great paper from the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly that looked at a chain of 80 casual dining restaurants. They found that the restaurants that reduced their menu by 20 percent saw a 5 percent increase in same-store sales over the next year. Luna: Five percent — that's huge in a low-margin business. Lucas: It is. And the mechanism was partly operational — faster turns, less waste — but also partly about the customer experience. Diners felt more confident in their choices, so they ordered more add-ons: appetizers, drinks, desserts. The smaller menu actually increased check size. Luna: So the counterintuitive takeaway is that by offering less, you sell more. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the kind of insight that, honestly, if it makes you think differently about your own business or your next dinner out, then this conversation was worth a coffee. You can find the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo — just a small way to keep these episodes ad-free and focused on the data. Luna: Yeah, it's a low-pressure way to support the work. We really appreciate the listeners who do that. Lucas: So back to menu engineering — one more angle I find fascinating: the 'hero item' strategy. Some restaurants are deliberately keeping their menu small to force attention on one or two signature dishes. Luna: You mean like how In-N-Out has basically just burgers, fries, and shakes? Lucas: Classic example. Or think of a place like L'Appart in New York — it's a tiny French restaurant with maybe eight savory dishes. But everyone goes for the roast chicken. It's iconic. And because the menu is small, the kitchen can execute that chicken perfectly every time. Lucas: When you have a hero item, it becomes the reason people come. And it's much easier to market one amazing dish than 30 decent ones. Luna: That also helps with social media. A single beautiful plate can become a signature image. A sprawling menu just looks like noise. Lucas: Right. And from a supply chain perspective, it's simpler to source high-quality ingredients for a few hero dishes than to try to source 50 different proteins and produce items with consistent quality. Luna: What about the risk? If your hero dish is a fried chicken sandwich and suddenly there's a supply shortage of chicken, you're in trouble. Lucas: That's a real risk. And that's why you see smart operators building flexibility into their small menus. Maybe the hero is a technique — like the griddle — rather than a single ingredient. Or they have one or two 'pivot' dishes that can swap in if a key ingredient becomes unavailable. Lucas: But overall, the trend is clear. Restaurants that think carefully about menu size — and I mean really interrogate every item — tend to outperform those that just keep adding. Luna: So if you're a restaurateur listening, what's your first step? How do you start trimming? Lucas: Look at your sales data. Pull the bottom 20 percent of items by revenue and by contribution margin. Then ask: do these dishes require unique ingredients that no one else uses? If yes, cut them. You'll simplify your inventory and your kitchen flow immediately. Lucas: Then look at your labor. If a dish takes 12 minutes of active prep and sells 10 times a night, that's a lot of cook time for relatively little return. Compare that to a dish that takes 4 minutes of prep and sells 30 times. Luna: That's a great framework. I've also seen consultants talk about 'menu math' — calculating the gross profit per minute of labor for each dish. Lucas: Yes. That's the next level. You want dishes that have high gross profit AND low labor time. Those are your stars. Everything else is either a candidate for redesign or the chopping block. Luna: It's almost like portfolio management for the plate. Lucas: Exactly. And it's a discipline that too few operators apply. But the ones who do — they tend to survive longer, cycle through trends more gracefully, and keep their customers coming back for that one perfect thing.