menukarma blog

Considered the most romantic dining room in San Francisco, Fleur de Lys has played host to the city’s finest for over 45 years. Our new “Salon”, offers semi-private dining with closable draperies for parties of 10-12. The “Alcove” offers semi-private dining for 20-25 guests. Both the Alcove and Salon are available for two seatings nightly. Fleur de Lys may be available for buy-outs. The restaurant seats a maximum of 105 people. The private wine room, seats from 14 to 16 guests. There is one seating nightly, allowing a broader range of seating times as well as the flexibility to set a pace that best fits the needs for your party. MENU

Craftsteak New York redefines the concept of a steakhouse by focusing on beef sourced from the world’s top ranchers and artisanal producers and dry-aging it in the restaurant’s own aging room. Several ages of beef are on the menu at any given time allowing guests to experience the various flavours and textures of aged beef. Craftsteak features a 11-seat raw bar serving the freshest oyesters, crudo and marinated and chilled seafood. The restaurant also enjoys wonderful Hudson River and High Line views and a painting of the High Line by Stephen Hannock.  I think my little brother, Anthony Mardach used to work there or maybe still does.  MENU

To feed the growing consumer hunger for nutritional information, restaurant operators continue to enlist new technologies.

For Ontario-based pita sandwich chain Extreme Pita, the answer may be something called the Nutricate Receipt System…

The Nutricate Receipt System, which automatically prints nutritional information on the customer receipt, is the brainchild of Jay Ferro, CEO of Nutricate Inc. Ferro is also part owner of Santa Barbara-based Silvergreen’s, and says he was inspired to develop the Nutricate Receipt System by the number of customer requests for the nutritional breakdown of menu items they get at the Silvergreen’s restaurants.

The system, which provides information for the foods a customer has actually ordered, is a great improvement over pre-printed nutritional “brochures”, according to Ferro. “The Nutricate System knows exactly what you are going to eat”, he said. “We enlisted a team of nutrition professionals to analyze the Silvergreens’ menu and calculate the nutritional information for each of more than 400 ingredients. Our sales rose by 25 percent in the year following the release of the dietary information and installation of the reporting technology”, Ferro said.

The results were so good at Silvergreen’s, Ferro decided to launch Nutricate Inc and offer his receipt-based nutrition information system to other restaurant chains.

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Government-imposed food labeling requirements have had a profound influence on the packaged food industry. They have also trained the consumer to expect nutritional information to be available whenever they make a food purchase. It will probably be a long time before restaurants are required to disclose nutritional information, but it’s not a bad time to think about doing it voluntarily — like on your web site.

I can confirm that search engine queries containing the terms “nutrition” and “calories” are definitely on the rise. People are coming to menukarma searching for nutritional information about specific prepared foods (especially ethnic foods), and they are also looking for nutritional information about the food from specific restaurants and chains.

I can tell you that the most nutritionally scrutinized menu on menukarma is the IHOP menu. What I cannot tell from my referrer logs is whether people are looking up the calories and fat of a Grilled Turkey Super Stacker with hopefulness before they indulge, or afterwards, with guilt and regret.

I’ll leave that for the good folks at IHOP to worry about.

I tried to stir up some discussion about restaurant web sites recently on a popular food service industry forum, but the topic sparked little interest. It seems word of mouth is still king in the marketing mix, to which I responded: “I guess the question is not so much whether word of mouth is still more important than having a web site. Of course the answer to that is ‘Yes!’ The question is whether the potential benefits of having some sort of an online strategy are still so negligible that the average overwrought restaurateur should continue to ignore them?”