Restaurants Will Be Successful By Featuring A Viral Item In A Full Menu
Every single week at Foodbeast, we create videos highlighting unique food items that have the potential to go viral. In the past month alone, it’s happened to our videos on sushi donuts, a brisket-loaded burrito, a buffalo chicken chimichanga, and a GIANT slice of pizza.
It seems like restaurants are coming out with these hyped viral food items all of the time now. It makes sense, since customers will flock to those restaurants for that one item.
Many chefs that don’t create these items, however, are adversely affected as a result of this new food trend. Playground’s Jason Quinn brought that up in this past week’s episode of “The Katchup,” stating that restaurants who don’t create viral food items and stick to their menus are losing business to “hype-item” foods.
However, restaurants that rely on these items for success don’t succeed either. In “The Katchup,” both Jason Quinn and Project Poke’s Andy Nguyen brought up that restaurants who invent and sell single food items that go viral lose business once their label as “the next big food item we have to try” wears off over the span of a few months.
To adapt to this shift in food culture, I don’t think restaurants should focus on a single “hype item” or only have a set menu. In a restaurant industry that is on the decline, neither of those are recipes for success.
The success of a restaurant isn’t measured by the number of new customers they get, but by the number of customers that come back. Retention is one of the key goals of a business these days, but it’s also important to draw people in.
So how do you do that? Simple: have a set menu around something that people love and features a wide array of high quality, tasty choices, but also create a “hype item” to draw people in and generate interest in your restaurant.
That’s what worked for my favorite sandwich chain of all time — Ike’s Love and Sandwiches. The Bay Area-based sandwich shop gained a viral following for it’s MASSIVE sandwiches, like the 4-pound Kryptonite. When that sandwich appeared on “Man vs. Food,” it drew in curious customers like myself to check out this beast of a sandwich.
I was drawn into Ike’s by the Kryptonite, but I stayed for the remainder of the sandwich menu. In the five years since I first went to an Ike’s, I have now tried 30 different sandwiches across the menu and gone at least 50 times. For Ike’s, I am the perfect example of the customer that you want to create as a result of the “hype item.”
Famed pastry chef, Dominique Ansel, would also love a customer like me. He went from bakery shop owner to international phenomenon when he first launched the Cronut out of his humble shop in New York. The donut-croissant hybrid went so viral that bakeries across the globe began imitating him. However, he still continued to exhibit a mastery of the cronuts as well as other baked goods, which is why he’s continued to be a success and even just announced that he would be spreading his bakery business to Los Angeles.
Even all of the other viral videos I talked about from this past month have their own set menus. Ray’s BBQ went viral for their brisket burrito but is beloved for a whole range of Texas-Style BBQ. Chicken Charlie’s Frybq got millions of hits for their Buffalo Chicken Chimichanga, but has an amazing menu and is a staple restaurant in San Diego. Even PizzaBarn, the maker of the giant pizza slice that recently went viral, is more than just a place that makes huge pizzas. They do a whole range of pizzas, pasta, and sandwiches. The hyped items they created help bring more customs in, but their expansive menus will have people coming back for the rest of the restaurants’ experiences.
That’s why Project Poke’s Sushi Donut will only help the poke shop grow. They’ve already been around for months and have a set menu of poke bowls and sushi burritos. The Sushi Donut has drawn hour-long lines and tons of new customers that only mean more business for Andy Nguyen and his team. Several customers will come back and try the rest of the menu, and potentially even become regular customers in the future.
The key to a successful restaurant in this age of viral videos and trendy foods isn’t having a set menu, nor is it having a single “banger” food item. It’s having both.
