How chefs craft unique restaurant menus

Menus are at the core of restaurants and upmarket cafés, and chefs work overtime to strategise. Mood boards and notebooks with travel inspiration, links to Instagram and websites, even Pantone colour trends, are fodder for ideas. Additionally, there are “taste panels" in most restaurants with a select group of people, including food critics, senior employees, and some “regular" guests, trying out new dishes. Sometimes, ingredients command what is served—last year, almost all restaurants put millets on menus when Unesco declared it the International Year of the Millets.

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Though restaurants replace menus two-four times a year, small changes are made on a monthly basis. Restaurants also have a full calendar, complete with regional and global cuisine-inspired pop-ups, Michelin-star guest chef specials and other culinary events. Many times, these events lead some dishes to become a part of the main menu.

“It’s called menu engineering," says chef Gagandeep Singh Bedi of Roseate, National Capital Region (NCR), adding, “it is a method to strategically create dishes that can be popularised with patrons." At Roseate, the “food calendar" is prepared six-eight months in advance with celebrity chefs, pop-ups and other culinary events for patrons. Its Sunday brunch, which changes every week is especially popular. Bedi narrates an incident of a family, having enjoyed Roseate’s Patiala special, returning only to find a south Indian special. “They sulked but we got them some items specially made from the kitchen," says Bedi, adding that patrons should ask restaurants for what he calls, a “hidden menu" where some of the dishes, if not all, can be prepared in the kitchen on special request. 

At House of Ming in Taj Mahal, Delhi, a new menu was introduced less than three months ago with a nod to Sichuan, Cantonese and Hunan cuisines. “The new menu honours traditional Chinese techniques while introducing an element of surprise with the use of unexpected ingredients like truffle, caviar, and even Brussels sprouts," says chef Arun Sundararaj of The Indian Hotels Co. Ltd, the parent company of the hotel. The menu change had been in the works for over a year, he adds. Feedback forms, given at the end of meals to patrons, are meticulously collated once a month to gauge what’s working or not, explains Sundararaj.

At Delhi’s Kaméi, a premium luxury cocktail bar and restaurant specialising in East Asian cuisine, chef Aditya Moitra is busy working on vegetarian ceviches; he recently tried chayote, a tuber found in various parts of the North-East, but couldn’t get the crunch or flavour despite stir-frying it. That said, he’s finalised the rest of the winter menu with dumpling soups, skewers and winter broths.

Many restaurants are plan seasonal cocktail menus. VietNom in Delhi will be serving warm G&T infused with Darjeeling varieties of teas and hot toddy infused with lemongrass and spices for the winter. “It was a lot of trial and error in the last two months, especially with the ratio of the tea and spirit concoctions," says mixologist Hemanshu Badola.

“At times, a chef’s favourite also takes a beating," says chef Krishna Chaitanya of Zila, Hyderabad, citing the example of kachumber, an appetiser that was both a salad and a cold soup with heirloom tomatoes. “It didn’t work at all, no matter how much I tried convincing the guests; eventually, we removed it," he says.

At Megu in Leela Palace, Delhi, which launched its new menu two months ago, the first change since the pandemic, the process was detailed, complete with feedback forms circulated within the team. “Seasonality and sustainability is at the core of our changes," says the restaurant’s head chef Shubham Thakur, who has introduced vegetables such as okra and aubergine to honour regional cooking in Japanese homes. The award-winning restaurant for Japanese food, Megu has changed its menu only once before since its inception in 2012.

In most five-star hotels, which have four or five restaurants, menu change doesn’t happen at one go. “It is rotational," says chef Sandeep Kalra of Pullman and Novotel, both in NCR, adding, “we have repeat customers and we cannot suddenly bombard them with too many changes."

Chefs travelling globally are also regarded as an important inspiration behind new menu creation. Adwait Anantwar of the Indo-Japanese Inja in Delhi says that his recent trip to Tokyo helped him craft the new 14-course degustation menu. It features aam papad with tuna, a kadhi pakora that marries the Indian dish with Japanese yuzu (a citrus fruit), and dashi (a classic stock preparation). Anantwar adds: “Menu creation is a science, it’s eventual success or failure, however, depends solely on the patron."

Abhilasha Ojha is a Delhi-based art and culture writer.

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