TCC #9: The best restaurants have simple menus. Why?

Keeping it simple

Author

Joshua Poh
November 21, 2023

One of my favourite chendol hawker stalls in Singapore sells one thing with four variations.

Note: (Chendol's also known as cendol), is an iced sweet dessert with shaved ice, coconut milk, chendol and gula melaka (palm sugar syrup) popular in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. I will spell it as chendol here.

And they’re good at it!

Serving sizes are generous, ingredients are high quality, service is fast and cost is affordable.

Everything is made by hand and scooped with skill.

They didn’t branch out into serving 20 different desserts out there like your general ‘desserts’ stall at food centres. They focused on one thing, do it well and let the food speak for itself.

Which is pretty cool, as they were recently featured in the Singapore Michelin Guide - the only chendol stall in Singapore to earn that honour.

**

I think of the sushi restaurant Sushi Jiro in Tokyo, Japan, made famous in the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

It’s notoriously hard to get a reservation. The restaurant takes reservations on the first day of the previous month, fills up within days and must be made in Japanese with a Japanese address and Japanese phone number.

Its menu fits on one page.

And you'll get 20 sushi pieces for 55,000 yen plus tax.

From Sushi Jiro’s Tokyo’s website

The restaurant only has ten counter seats. Since we procure sea food daily from Tsukiji that complements the taste of sushi rice, we do not have snacks to serve with sake.

I believe the best restaurants have simple menus.

Both examples could have added more items to their menus. They could have made the restaurant bigger, served more people, etc.

But they didn't. And I believe adding more would have dulled their focus.

But wait, is this just an anecdotal observation?

Can you really correlate the number of items on a menu and how good they are?

After all, I’ve only cited two examples.

But if you think of it logistically, adding more services and food items to your menu means you make your operations more complex per item added. You’ve got to:

  • Stock more ingredients with implications on your supply chain, sourcing and production back-end operations

  • Buy new machines to cook the new menu item

  • Introduce more quality control checks

  • Hire more staff to make sure everything works out well

By introducing new products to your menu, you introduce more complexity, which can give you less time to be damm good at what you do.

Writing on Quora, writer Ryan Chew puts it more eloquently on what happens if you choose to add fish and chips as a menu item, together with pictures!

The kebabs are a hit! But requests are rolling in for Fish and Chips. Simple enough innit? After all, it's we just need to fry up some fish and potatoes and we're golden. Let's go for it.

We'll need: 1)Fresh Haddock and Cod fillets
2) Flour
3) Baking soda
4) Beer, lager, for the use of
5) More lemon
6) More salt and pepper
7) Vinegar
8) Potatoes
9) Cooking fat
10) Newpapers for the wrapper. High five!

But hang on, we'll also need to purchase a deep fat fryer, an extra prep table or two, a mixing bowl for the batter, a whisk, a freezer for the fish, plus we'll also need to peel and cut the potatoes, mix the batter, watch the fryer yada yada yada.

We'll need to hire someone. We'll need to train him/her as well. We'll also need to sort out the requisite HR paperwork, calculate the salary and tax deductions, set up payroll, calculate vacation days, schedule shifts etc. etc.

—

What does all this have to do with business and marketing?

It’s about a month away from 2024, which means we’re all going to be inundated with calls to “do more!”

Try this new thing! Try these untapped marketing channels! Expand into these verticals! Add AI to our product!

Which might make sense for your business in 2024.

And if it is, then by all means, go ahead!

But adding stuff isn’t the only way forward for business growth.

Making a decision to intentionally narrow your focus - and being damn good at what you do is another way forward in 2024.

Writing this as a reminder to myself, and whoever needs it, as we plan for 2024.

3 thoughtful reads

I love behind-the-scenes content of any business, and this excellent banger from Sprout Social has cool examples, data and references from their own content. Learned something new and inspired my own writing

When we’re all wondering what to do next in marketing, Colette brings us back to the fundamentals. “Marketing’s all about earning attention, with things worthy of it.”

3) Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google?: First, oof! That title! Fantastic storytelling and incisive writing on how we got to an Internet filled with stuff pushing ads and people wondering if you can trust anything online”. Closely related to the second piece.

My favourite paragraph:

So who ends up with a career in SEO? The stereotype is that of a hustler: a content goblin willing to eschew rules, morals, and good taste in exchange for eyeballs and mountains of cash. A nihilist in it for the thrills, a prankster gleeful about getting away with something.

Non-work things I’m enjoying

If any of this resonated with you

And you’d like to make thoughtful content that opens sales conversations, educate your customers and generates leads a more significant part of your business, I’d like to invite you to work with me.

Here’s how we can work together:

  • B2B SaaS product-led content: Educate your ideal customer on how your product solves their problem

  • Customer case studies: Celebrate your customer’s success! Emphasise how your work has helped your customer get results.

  • Whitepapers, research reports and e-books: Showcase your brand’s unique POV and power your marketing campaigns with a solid long-form content asset

  • Content repurposing: Don’t let the content you worked so hard to put together collect digital dust after publishing. Repurpose your existing content to reach a new audience.