Restaurant bucks trend and cuts prices with ‘zero waste’ menu

A chef has lowered prices at his restaurants by 10-15% despite soaring inflation by adopting a ‘zero-waste’ approach in the kitchen.

 

Stuart Gillies (pictured with his wife Cecila), former chief executive of Gordon Ramsay Group, said he wanted his venues to remain accessible to customers as household budgets were squeezed.

 

Gillies runs the Bank House in Chislehurst, London and Number Eight in Sevenoaks, Kent where he has challenged chefs to get two dishes out of every ingredient. The menu is adapted daily based on the produce available and teams meet twice a week to plan.

 

Gillies said: “Like everyone we were slowly tweaking our prices up as things like salmon have tripled in price. About a month ago I looked at the pricing structure and thought ‘this doesn’t look like value for money anymore’.

 

“We can’t become a special occasion restaurant. I’ve got two local businesses that are part of communities and it’s people spending their own money, it’s not on corporate account or tourism.”

 

Operators across the industry have been forced to pass on huge increases in their food and energy bills to customers, with Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation reaching a 40-year high of 9% in the 12 months to April 2022.

 

To keep costs down, Gillies’ restaurant teams have become strict with purchasing and dropped products which have become too expensive.

 

The restaurants are busiest at the weekend, after which the menus for Tuesday to Thursday are planned out using the remaining produce left in-house.

 

Gillies added: “It’s a really big mind-shift for the team. We still buy high quality things like white crab meat, scallops, and chateaubriand, but we are careful how much we buy and make sure we get everything out of it.”

 

This approach extends to the bar, where Gillies said in the past teams would buy and stock items that were sometimes unneeded. Now, any bottles opened at the weekend are sold by the glass for a discounted price on quieter days at the start of the week. “We still get a small margin on the drink, and the guest gets a bargain,” said Gillies.

 

He added: “I keep looking at competition locally and…everybody is putting up prices. The market is continually competing. I spoke to lots of our regulars about our prices. There are a lot of wealthy people in these areas but everybody is really mindful of cost. People said if they spend they want to make sure it’s great value for money.”

 

Buying from the source

 

Other operators are also having to adapt their menus to cope with rising inflation.

 

One restaurateur told The Caterer he had removed around 30% of fried dishes from the menu after the price of kitchen oil doubled, while chef Tom Brown is no longer serving scallops at his Michelin-starred restaurant Cornerstone in London after it became too expensive.

 

The Gunpowder restaurant group, which has three sites in London, has begun working directly with farms to source lamb and beef and purchases whole chickens, which are more likely to be sold at a cheaper price, to keep costs down.

 

 

The restaurant has reworked menu items to use every part of the animal, with different cuts sold in dishes across its three restaurants.

 

Co-founder Harneet Baweja said: “We serve the beef sirloin in one restaurant and mince in one restaurant, we’re not buying the whole cow but large parts together. We end up doing butchery ourselves but that tends to have less wastage which all help with costs.”

 

He added: “Prices are not going to go down any time soon. In some instances we have had to raise prices. Lamb chops cost twice as much as they did last year, so some of that we have passed on [to customers].”

 

Gunpowder has increased some wine prices but also widened its selection to offer customers more alternatives.

 

Baweja added that there wasn’t “one solution” to the issue but said he was confident the industry would adapt. “After what we’ve been through, we’ll be fine. We’ll be different, but we’ll be fine.”