The Secret of Restaurant Menus that No One is Talking About

In Chicago, everyone knows what a “Chicago-style” hot dog is: a hot dog topped with onions, relish, a pickle, tomato, sport peppers, celery salt, and mustard.  Now, let’s say your restaurant sells hot dogs and uses a third-party delivery service, and an order comes in for a Chicago-style dog with ketchup and no pickle. Yes, it may be taboo in Chicago to add ketchup, but since the customer is always right, let’s say you agree to key in the order anyway. In your POS system, “Chicago-style” isn’t just a button you can press — you have to list out the ingredients the order requests and skip the ones that they don’t want. This might sound relatively simple, until you consider that everyone else ordering from you is also ordering named products with modifiers.If you’re like most restaurants, this can be quite the pickle (or lack thereof). However, there is a tech solution that can help: menu optimization (or, as we at Chowly call it, “menu mapping”).

What is menu…