Dear Reader ,

When you go to a restaurant and order from the menu, you should understand the thought process behind every dish you order.

This write-up is all about backstage of the end product called menu.

Menu planning and compilation is one of the interesting jobs for a chef. It asks for a lot of dedication, study, research and visualization.

I was always skeptical about whether my guests will accept the ideas and innovations which I want to show them.

Moreover it’s always a challenge to introduce a foreign menu in a stand-alone restaurant in the city. When I say foreign menu I meant which is not Indian.

One side we need to keep the Indian palate happy at the same time chef’s capability and ideas to be explored as well.

How will you do two things together?

Thankfully people of Bangalore know about the food especially those who are diners and patrons of restaurants.

The Second important bubble in the menu is vegetarian option .Again not an easy one. One really needs to crack his head to get the right dish.

Usual format of the menu is Appetizer, soup, salad, pasta, pizza, main course Veg and non Veg, dessert, tea and coffee.

And I followed the same.

The above format was for lunch and dinner.
Addition to the lunch menu was the sandwich /burger menu.
And separate lounge all day starters menu.

Altogether I put 50 dishes in the menu out of those 27 vegetarian dishes from the appetizer to the dessert. And in the lounge menu 12 starter are vegetarian out of 21.

Another aspect of Menu Planning is the supplies and commodities.

Suppliers and distributors in the locality, who can arrange the ingredients as per your requirements in quantity and quality.

The entire menu depends on the suppliers you have in your market.

But to get some French, Italian, Lebanese or Greek ingredients one need to import it and it is really expensive

Then the question of food cost comes into the picture.

So for now all the data required is been collected and thought process begins.

A First draft of menu is made. In this draft a lot of discrepancies are there like combination of sauces, selection of different meat items, availability of commodities etc.

A second draft of menu then made rectifying the earlier mistakes and then came the Final draft before printing.

Menu trials – This is the time when I get the result of my thoughts.
Every dish was be made and was tasted by a group of people whom you think can judge best.
And then we get to know about the apprehensions and aptness of the food.

Well this thing went on for almost 15 days and every single dish was made twice thrice and maybe more than that to train the staff as well.

Some of the menu items are from my experiences, in which I learnt and confident about, some of them are those whose base is very common but end product is different and some of them are absolutely new in trend and taste and are called signature dish.

The challenge for a chef is to convince people about its taste .So it justifies the number of trials.

I am sure by this time you would have got an idea of what chefs do in kitchen before you get to know about the place and food.