Squeeze Cuisine

• Published in: The Wall Street journal. Eastern edition
• Main Author: By Pooja Bhatia
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, N.Y Dow Jones & Company Inc 15.02.2002
• Edition: Eastern edition
• Subjects: Chefs; Cost control; Industrywide conditions; Profits; Restaurants; United States > US
• ISSN: 0099-9660

Accept no substitutes? Not quite. With business still lagging, high-end restaurants across the country are resorting to wringing savings from the menu. From Olives in Boston to Lidia's in Kansas City, Mo., chefs are getting rid of pricey ingredients and subbing in cheaper ones. Out: fresh ravioli, foie gras and boneless chicken breasts. In: noodles from a box, short ribs and chicken with the bone still in it. The hot seller at Firefly's, a barbecue joint in Marlborough, Mass.? An 8-ounce brisket on a "throne" of toast to make the portion look meatier. Other chefs are going for the optical illusion approach, sending out bone-in steaks instead of fillets to make portions look bigger, or giving a small pork cutlet a "strategic pounding" so it takes up more dish space. Another tactic: Getting rid of labor-intensive dishes. In Chicago, the owners of Vong moved from haute-Asian fusion to simple noodle house -- changing the name to Vong's Thai Kitchen (VTK) -- and were able to trim the kitchen staff by 13%. "Operations are a lot more efficient when you don't have to make the dishes look as beautiful," says Kevin Brown, president of Lettuce Entertain You, which runs VTK. None of this is lost on high-end suppliers, who've seen a drop in orders in everything from duck fat to filet mignon. Niman Ranch, an organic livestock producer in California, says it's had a 33% falloff in requests for high-end cuts like New York steaks and rib-eyes and a surge in orders for cheap stuff like flatiron steaks and pork hocks. Shrinking demand has caused the price of top fish like black cod and sable to come down 10% and salmon prices to fall by a third at Wild Edibles, a New York supplier. Then there's Hudson Valley Foie Gras, a supplier of all things duck: Its orders have tumbled 20%.