When Marketing Departments Start Writing Restaurant Menus

Over the past decade I’ve noticed something in the restaurant industry that honestly surprises me.

More and more often, the people writing the menus aren’t chefs.

They’re marketing departments.

Now before anyone misunderstands what I’m saying, marketing absolutely has a role in restaurants. Branding matters. Menu descriptions matter. The way a dish is communicated to the guest matters.

But there’s a big difference between helping describe a dish and designing the dish itself.

And lately, I’m seeing marketing departments doing exactly that.

They’re creating menu items based on what they believe will trend well, photograph well, or fit a particular campaign.

From a branding standpoint, that may sound logical.

From an operational standpoint, it can create serious problems.

Where Menu Development Is Supposed to Start

In a properly engineered restaurant, the menu doesn’t begin with marketing. It begins in the kitchen.

Menus should grow out of fully developed recipes. Those recipes determine nearly every operational system in the restaurant.

A single dish dictates:

• the ingredients required
• the inventory that must be carried
• the equipment needed to execute it
• the prep time required
• the labor structure in the kitchen
• the timing of service

Multiply that by an entire menu and you begin to understand why the chef and the kitchen team must lead menu development.

When dishes are created first for marketing reasons and the kitchen is asked to “make it work,” the operation ends up forcing execution into a structure that was never designed for it.

That’s when the real problems begin.

What Happens When Marketing Drives the Menu

When menu development starts outside the kitchen, a few patterns show up almost immediately.

The first is ingredient sprawl.

Marketing-driven dishes often introduce ingredients that don’t cross-utilize with the rest of the menu. Suddenly the restaurant is carrying additional products that serve only one item.

That drives up inventory and increases the chance of waste.

The second issue is prep complexity.

A dish that looks beautiful in a marketing meeting may require steps that are difficult to execute on a busy line during service. Extra components, delicate plating, or specialty ingredients slow the kitchen down.

The third issue is execution inconsistency.

When a dish hasn’t been designed around the actual flow of the kitchen, it becomes harder for cooks to reproduce it consistently during a rush.

Guests may love the concept of the dish, but if the kitchen cannot execute it cleanly every time, the experience becomes unreliable.

And in restaurants, inconsistency is one of the fastest ways to lose trust with guests.

The Role Marketing Should Play

None of this means marketing should be removed from the process.

Quite the opposite.

Marketing should absolutely be involved in shaping how the menu connects with guests.

Once the chef and kitchen team have engineered dishes that work operationally, marketing can help refine the presentation of those dishes.

They can help tell the story.

They can help shape the language.

They can help position the menu so it resonates with the audience the restaurant wants to attract.

But the operational structure of the menu must begin in the kitchen.

That’s where execution lives.

Restaurants Run on Systems

Restaurants are not sustained by trends.

They are sustained by systems.

A dish that looks great on social media might attract attention once. But if the kitchen struggles to execute it during service, the long-term cost is far greater than the marketing benefit.

Great restaurants balance creativity with structure.

The chef designs dishes that work operationally.

Marketing helps translate those dishes into language and imagery that bring guests through the door.

When that balance is respected, both sides of the operation support each other.

When it isn’t, restaurants often find themselves chasing trends instead of building systems.

And systems are what make restaurants profitable.

— Chef Joseph Chouinard
The Hospitality Doctor