F&B business owner Eric Teng explains why overcomplicated menus should be a thing of the past

A menu is what makes or breaks a restaurant. But in the quest to cater to everyone, some establishments fall into the trap of overcomplicating their offerings—with long-winded descriptions, endless choices, and dishes that try to do too much at once.

While having variety is good and all, overcomplicated menus can overwhelm customers, slow down service, or worse, compromise food quality.

To know more, we ask seasoned F&B business owner Eric Teng about why overcomplicated menus should be shelved—and why streamlined menus are the key to success.

When less is more

More than a list of dishes, a menu is a chef’s way of telling a story through flavors, ingredients, and culinary techniques. “It’s something that chefs want to do because it touches on their creative muscles,” Teng begins. “They want to keep doing something new. Something creative. Something that nurtures them and doesn’t bore them.”

But with so many possibilities, it’s easy to get carried away. “Sometimes, chefs want to showcase so much of their talent and their product that they hardly edit their menu. So when you see their menu, they are probably 10 to 20 pages long. That’s very difficult to manage for restaurants, especially for those with multiple branches.”

“When you have a big menu, you need to prepare inventory to cater to it,” Eric Teng explains. “You have to buy 10 kinds of pork, 10 kinds of beef, and 10 kinds of chicken—just because you have too many items in the menu—and that adds up in your storage”

Why? “When you have a big menu, you need to prepare inventory to cater to it,” he explains. “You have to buy 10 kinds of pork, 10 kinds of beef, and 10 kinds of chicken—just because you have too many items in the menu—and that adds up in your storage.”

“This can affect freshness because something is stored longer than it should be. Some restaurants just have a few items in their menu—no more than 20 or 30—and that’s because they want the commodities to be consumed as soon as they arrive in the restaurant. So having a small menu would help in terms of speeding up sales through their inventory.”

That said, Teng strongly believes that “a well-managed restaurant doesn’t really need a big menu.”

“In fact, we need to discipline and be able to edit our menu—not just with what we sell—but also to align it with the identity of the restaurant or the concept,” he advises.

Specialization vs. diversity

When designing a menu, Teng reveals there’s no set rules as to what’s too little or too much. “What’s a small menu for one person is a big menu for another,” he explains. “That depends on the restaurant’s concept.”

Even the appetite of the consumer plays a big part. “When you go to Japan, for example, a ramen shop sells ramen. A sushi shop sells sushi. But in the Philippine experience, people want to see ramen, sushi, tempura, and all the things that they’ve sampled in Japan to be inside one restaurant,” he says. “That’s because we want to order a lot of things and sample a lot of things.”

“When the restaurant communicates their concepts very well, people travel long distances to have that specific item in their restaurant. But new restaurants sometimes feel the need to prove themselves. They’re trying to showcase their skills, so they want to carry a lot more”

But this mindset has gradually shifted, with Teng noting that “more consumers are looking for more specialist places” these days.

“They’re not looking for a complete experience inside a restaurant anymore. So there are a lot of new restaurants that are much more focused on the delivery of experience and products.”

What’s more, it’s important to note that there are restaurants that have stood the test of time by serving the same dish all throughout. “Take Max’s Restaurant for example. You’re not suddenly going to see them without fried chicken,” he says. “This is why a restaurant needs a core item. If I want steak, I go to Wolfgang’s. If I want fried chicken, I go to Max’s. If I want chicken barbecue, I go to Aristocrat.”

“When the restaurant communicates their concepts very well, people travel long distances to have that specific item in their restaurant. But new restaurants sometimes feel the need to prove themselves. They’re trying to showcase their skills, so they want to carry a lot more.”

And that does not necessarily always work.

Overcomplicated menus can hurt operations

Even the size of the restaurant plays a big role in the size of its menu. “The bigger the kitchen, the more kitchen staff it has… the more it eats into your cost,” Teng explains.

“When you buy a lot of things that don’t get sold, your cost of goods go up,” he adds. “But of course, if you only have a few things, it gets sold over time. You have more turnover per item. So financially speaking, you use less money to sell more when you have a smaller menu, but when you have a big menu, you have to buy more to actually sell less.”

But overcomplicated menus? They can affect the very operations of the restaurant. “Your kitchen staff need repetition to be able to get certain things right,” the restaurateur elaborates. “If they haven’t prepared something in the last three months and suddenly a customer orders it, they might forget how to execute it properly or do it at the standard that they did before.”

“Your kitchen staff need repetition to be able to get certain things right. If they haven’t prepared something in the last three months and suddenly a customer orders it, they might forget how to execute it properly or do it at the standard that they did before”

“A smaller menu affords the kitchen staff more opportunity to hone their skills and perhaps even improve on it on a daily basis—several times a day. But if something is ordered just for, you know, once every three months, generally, you can’t expect the kitchen staff to be familiar with the process three months ago.”

Quality also takes a hit with an overcomplicated menu. “If you put something in the freezer long enough, it can suffer from freezer burn,” Teng laments

“And then suddenly, on the off chance your lolo or uncle orders that item, he’s not going to enjoy it because that thing was sitting in the future for months—just waiting for that one customer.”

“Sometimes, we have to be very ruthless in culling our menu—making sure we only put things we can execute very well and frequently,” he stresses.

The risk of decision fatigue

Moreover, an overcomplicated menu can overwhelm customers. With just so many choices on the table, people struggle with decision fatigue—which takes away from what should be a good experience.

“Speaking for myself, I go to a certain restaurant because I know what I’m going to order,” Teng reveals. “Unless, of course, it’s a new restaurant. Then I ask them what they think I would like, and I trust them because they won’t recommend something they cannot execute properly.”

“Good food doesn’t have to be complicated. Restaurants have to be honest and just be good at what you really are good at and not pretend to be something else”

“But when I see a lot of word salad in the menu then I know that they’re trying to disguise something basic or different with words,” he adds. “It makes me suspicious, like they’re trying to be more than what they are. Sometimes, they just go overboard and forget what they’re trying to communicate. It’s just a lot of loss of focus.”

This is why Teng stresses the importance of honesty. “Good food doesn’t have to be complicated. Restaurants have to be honest and just be good at what you really are good at and not pretend to be something else.”

“When you get the formula correct and do something correctly, you create an identity and a story out of it. People will remember you as that restaurant with that special dish in your menu. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.”

Finding the balance between a manageable menu and maximizing profitability

In the Philippines, it can be hard to downsize a menu, given that culturally, people want variety. They want multiple items on the table. The more, the merrier.

The solution? “Offer diversity with the smallest menu that’s acceptable to the customer, while considering their needs and preferences,” Teng says simply.

And for everything else, the restaurateur adds, “I don’t think there is a clear formula on how to do it. I think every owner needs to look into their concept and see where they can find that balance point that sets them apart from one restaurant to another.”

“If I want to showcase my mom’s recipe and my mom only makes two or three things, then my menu can just have those and a couple from say, my grandmother. Certainly, a lot of restaurants do it that way”

“If I want to showcase my mom’s recipe and my mom only makes two or three things, then my menu can just have those and a couple from say, my grandmother. Certainly, a lot of restaurants do it that way.”

And if that doesn’t work, business owners will need to rethink their strategy. “We remove something because it doesn’t work,” Teng says. “You have to bite the bullet and say it didn’t work.”

“Yes, it’s hard for restaurants to remove it, but if they really feel strongly about something that was their mom’s heirloom recipe, they can always promote it. They can always present it differently. They can always offer wine or something to complement or they can always ask the service staff to push that item to their customers more aggressively.”

And if anything, removing a menu item isn’t the end of the world. “Just because I remove a menu item doesn’t mean I’m going to lose a customer,” the restaurateur says simply. “We will always have something that the customer will find interesting.”

“Just because I remove a menu item doesn’t mean I’m going to lose a customer. We will always have something that the customer will find interesting”

“But of course, if it’s a core item, I don’t think any restaurant owner would dare remove it. That is the main reason why the customer goes to your restaurant in the first place,” he laughs.

“But if we’re only saying that one certain item is not sellable, nobody orders it and you remove it, I doubt anyone would notice that the menu item is gone. The whole point is to remove things that are not popular or not sellable—not to remove things that are sellable or identifying for your restaurant.”

Communication is key

Above all, Teng stresses on the importance of communication. “There needs to be an open channel for communication with the kitchen team, the service team, and the customer. They have to be there to be able to look at what their customers are really ordering.”

“Sometimes, it’s more about asking questions than coming up with answers yourself. You really need to constantly make sure, or try to at least understand what everyone’s doing”

What’s more, no two restaurant branches operate the same way. “One restaurant might do well with a certain menu in one location, but when you put that same restaurant in another location, they may find that people have a different [preferred] item in their menu.”

“So you have to really do your homework—ask people, observe properly, and talk to the frontliners and get their inputs,” the businessman opines. “Sometimes, it’s more about asking questions than coming up with answers yourself. You really need to constantly make sure, or try to at least understand what everyone’s doing.”