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A More Efficient Menu
Advice for Refining Your Cocktail List
A cocktail menu can be a poorly planned, ineffective document, or it can really reach your consumer and spur sales. A few key considerations can help.
What’s Your Venue?
First, let’s take a look at the food menu, venue concept, atmosphere,
ingredients, neighborhood and overall vision and projection of the
venue. After analyzing and defining all these points, now we can start
to work on what kind of ingredients and liquors we are going to choose
for our menu. For example, if it’s a club, we need cocktails that can
be made fast but consistently, and there are a few ways of doing so.
One is by pre-mixing our juices or by buying a great quality mixer. We
also want to have a menu that is fun, simple to understand and easy to
execute. If it’s a restaurant then we have to carefully analyze the
above points to be able to determine the direction of the cocktail
program in conjunction with the food menu. Other points to keep in mind
are restaurant volume, capacity, number of bartenders and the type of
consumer so that we can determine the ingredients, and this will
determine our liquor cost and the overall complexity of the program.
Limit of Ten
A well-done cocktail menu shouldn’t have more than 10 cocktails, for
the simple reason that usually bars are very limited in space — and
also, if you are using fresh juices, it’s very hard to keep a lot of
fresh juices. It’s better to keep it short and interesting, seasonal
and unique to your place. When deciding on the cocktails, if it’s an
ethnic restaurant, such as Mexican, then we’ll look into having five
cocktails with tequila, maybe one with mezcal, one with whiskey and one
with rum, or we could make it with gin, cachaça or vodka, as long as we
use ingredients that will go with the concept and food menu. Once we
have decided on our cocktail menu, now it’s time to determine prices,
percentages and how we are going to run it so that it is a successful
one.
Junior Merino has created cocktails for Partida Tequila, Siembra Azul Tequila, Leblon cachaca, G’vine Gin, Grey Goose Orange vodka, Christiania vodka and Jaral de Berrio mezcal, to name a few. He also has created cocktails for ANA Hotel in Tokyo, as well as some restaurants such as Mama Mexico, Walt Disney Coronado Springs Resort, the Hilton in Los Cabos, Café Frida, Bombay Talkie, Rayuela and more. He also created a cocktail for the grand re-opening of Bergdorff Goodman’s Café and the Purple Coming Up Roses for Oprah Winfrey’s Color Purple Show. Visit him at www.theliquidchefinc.com. |
