Ways To Simplify Your Restaurant's Breakfast Menu

Serving breakfast is a great way to increase your restaurant's revenue and draw in new customers. However, managing an extensive breakfast menu can become cumbersome. You don't want ingredients to spoil before you use them, and you don't want to offer so many different dishes that your chefs struggle to keep everything straight. But how can you simplify your restaurant's breakfast menu? Here are a few options. Feel free to implement one, two, or all of them to suit your needs.

Use whatever fruit is in season.

Instead of keeping apples, blueberries, bananas, and raspberries all in the cooler to make various dishes, consider rotating fruits by the season. So in the winter, all of your waffles, pancakes, and other dishes that come with fruit come with bananas. During strawberry season, everything comes with strawberries — and so forth. This strategy will lead to a lot less spoiled fruit, and it will also save you money since in-season fruit is cheapest.

Offer different versions of a few items.

Rather than offering one pancake dish, a waffle dish, a couple of different egg dishes, and a whole list of other creations, try offering several dishes that are riffs on the same thing. For example, you could include four different eggs Benedict dishes on the menu that all have the same base but somewhat different toppings. This will simplify matters for your chefs and help reduce the number of ingredients you have to keep on hand.

Change your menu weekly.

Another option is to offer a different menu of just three or four options every week. This will keep customers coming in again and again to see what new items you have. Keep track of what sells best and introduce that dish repeatedly every couple of weeks. When you do things this way, your dishes can be a little more complicated since your chefs can focus on making just those few things all week.

Offer everything a la carte.

Figuring out which sides go with which specials and which platters contain which ingredients can waste a lot of your chefs' time. For breakfast, it is much easier to just offer an a la carte menu. In other words, list every item on its own, and have customers order every item on its own. Instead of offering a platter with pancakes, hashbrowns, and sausage, for example, your menu can separately list pancakes, hashbrowns, and sausage. This also saves customers from trying to make substitutions.

Whether you use one of these strategies or several of them, your simpler breakfast menu should be easier to manage. Enjoy!

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