This week, Wall St Journal writer, Juliet Chung wrote an article aptly named Cutback Cuisine. Chung’s article discusses how some restaurants in cities like New York City, Boston and San Francisco have been forced to reduce costs of dishes with the increase in food prices.

Some of the cost cutting strategies mentioned in the article include;

1.Using beef fillet trimmings to make a marinated beef maki roll
2.Serving a ½ confit of duck; as buying whole ducks is cheaper than buying duck breasts
3.Adding more pasta options to the menu
4.No caviar as garnish on dishes
5.Not using expensive ingredients like truffles
6.Using cheaper oils like vegetable oil instead of using extra virgin olive oil
7.Not using expensive vegetable ingredients like Asparagus but rather Brussels sprouts.
8.Avoiding imports like French cheese, Italian olive oil and European wines.

When times are tough chefs are forced to think about the ingredients they use and how they can reduce costs. But reducing food costs and evaluating ingredient prices shouldn’t be something that you do when you are in trouble. This should be a standard practise every time you put something on the menu, from something that’s going to be on the menu permanently right down to today’s daily special – every dish should be costed.

Many of ideas mentioned here will be described in much more detail in my new book Kitchen Profitability. It’ll be the chef’s guide to food costing and menu engineering, so if you’d like to be updated when my book is released, then register at www.kitchenprofitability.com.

Finally, I’d like to know more about how you control and manage your food costs and am running a food costing survey at present. The survey takes just 3 -4 minutes to fill in.