Feed Me: How Chin Chin’s simple idea became a national dining custom
Pity the fussy eater. The neurotic diner. The one with more dietary requirements than a nutritionist’s conference. They’re the ones who don’t always get two of the best words you’re ever going to read on a menu: Feed Me.
Chin Chin chef Ben Cooper serving part of a Feed Me dinner. Source: News Corp Australia
“When we were in the planning stages of Chin Chin,” says Melbourne restaurant entrepreneur Chris Lucas, “and the chefs were doing menu testing, I just used to rock into the restaurant and say: ‘Feed me.’ It was as simple as that. It just sort of developed from there.” And how.
The Feed Me menu has spread like salacious gossip across the Australian restaurant landscape in the past three years, enjoying a highly symbiotic relationship with its host species, the ever-increasing casualisation of dining.
Just as sure as you can expect to hear a waiter tell you “our dishes are designed to share”, you can put money on a corner of the landscape-format menu saying Feed Me.
There is no real way to determine the provenance of the expression Feed Me on an Australian restaurant menu, or the adoption of the concept of a set price, set number yet open-to-discussion make-up of a table’s menu (although there is a case to argue that Gilbert Lau, of Flower Drum fame, was the first to make the idea of abrogating responsibility for ordering to the host so luxurious).
But it seems the Flinders Lane phenomenon that is Chin Chin was probably first in Australia to actually use the words Feed Me on a menu. More important, it was possibly the first place to differentiate a set price, flexible offering from a banquet menu of fixed items.
Most businesses, says Lucas, the proprietor of three, soon four, restaurants in Melbourne, try to steer diners towards set menus (aka degustation menus at the top end). “I didn’t like that idea. ‘Feed Me’ was supposed to be a free-flowing exercise, so the waiter would select what was appropriate. We trained up the staff to work that way … No format. Feed Me was, is, a two-way conversation.”
At its purest, the Feed Me at Chin Chin is seven items — rather than courses — for a set price ($69) with a fair bit of flexibility on the items or, if it’s what the customer wants, no decision-making whatsoever. It’s all about the luxury of handing over the thinking to the restaurant — and having enough confidence in it to do that.
And it works. If the flattery of imitation right across the country isn’t one measure of success, 3000 Feed Me “covers”, or almost 40 per cent of the restaurant’s weekly sales, is. No wonder the idea has spread west, north and south. It’s a subject that goes to the core of the very word restaurant — a place of restoration. In a maturing restaurant industry, with a maturing — in terms of sophistication — audience, the idea has merit. Foodies may enjoy the task of examining a menu; for most social groups, it’s anathema.
The Feed Me Generation needs staff, not another document to concentrate on at the end of another working day. That’s just more work. More information overload.
“I don’t have the head space to plan, to make decisions,” says a colleague. “I went out with some other mums last week, we had a few drinks, then said to the waiter, ‘Just bring us food; we don’t care about the menu.’ ”
Getting the Feed Me option on the table offers commercial and organisational advantages to a business, which gets a guaranteed minimum spend and less wastage.
“We found we were receiving more and more requests for bookings of nine or more,” says Sean Kierce of Ladro in Melbourne’s Fitzroy and Prahran, “so we thought offering a menu that allowed us to control what the diners were eating would assist the kitchen in getting all the food out in a reasonable time.
“I think it works really well for the punters. Nothing worse than going out in a big group and having to choose what you’re going to eat.” It is, he says, Ladro Prahran’s “biggest selling menu item”.
In Perth, Paul Aron has ridden the past decade of high-end, casual, dining, first at Greenhouse, now at El Publico and Mary’s, the night-time restaurant iteration of Mary Street Bakery. Both offer a Feed Me option. “We used to do something similar at Greenhouse,” says Aron. “We wanted to give everyone the best time but also be (commercially) viable … The style of shared dining lends itself to it and I think it takes the awkwardness out of it for the customer.
“For them it means trying new things and it allows us to give a great representation of what we do. And it means our customers can get on with the business of talking and eating and drinking. Sure, it means better revenue from each table from our point of view, but it’s definitely better value for money. It also means that come time to pay the bill the potential awkwardness about money is gone too.”
At Brunswick (Melbourne) eating house Albert Street Food & Wine, the Feed Me menu has a different emphasis. To choose it is to participate in a progressive human resources exercise.
“Each of the chefs needs to come up with a new dish every week,” says manager Oliver Gibson. “This becomes part of a five-course menu we call ‘Trust the Chefs’.”
Albert Street’s chefs get free rein to wander from the Mediterranean ties of the a la carte menu. Each dish is costed and rehearsed; wording for the menu is required and front of house staff need to be briefed.
“It gives each chef a glimpse into the future where one day they may be heading up a kitchen and carrying the responsibility that goes with it,” says Gibson.
“They have a sense of ownership of the menu which should create the desire for everything to be done perfectly.
Gibson says that as with any fixed-price menu, some dishes will not be loved by 100 per cent of the guests, but with the Trust the Chefs menu they have an entirely new menu every week. So your $60-a-head dinner may include buttermilk-fried witlof, ranch dressing (by Hayley); beetroot terroir (by Joel) and mirror dory, heirloom tomatoes, tomato consomme (by Chris).
According to Sydney restaurateur Sam Christie, a “spirit of generosity” is important. “Whether we’ve got four fashionistas or four footy players, you have to make sure people have enough food,” says the co-proprietor of Longrain, Cho Cho San, the Apollo and Subcontinental.
“Obviously we encourage larger groups but you have to be flexible. If they have never been before they get the signature classics that we reckon everyone should eat. If they’re regulars, we can play around with it a bit more. They can relax, are definitely going to be impressed, and they’re not going to get food envy.”
In the right hands, with the right customers, Feed Me does indeed seem to be a win-win. It’s about restaurants that take pride in their relationships with diners, and vice versa.
Feed Me. Trust Us. We’re here to fix your day.
Source : John Lethlean The Australian May 13th 2015
