Why do most restaurants have such variety in their menus?

Why do most restaurants have such variety in their menus?

Why not just do what Jiro has done and pick something and then perfect it?

because women are picky eaters

There are very few things that would work for, and with sushi there's still a huge variety based on whatever fish came in that day, so people will have different experiences in the future.

You can be a baker, but you still need to sell a shit ton of different kinds of bread if you expect customers, unless you make the greatest baguette in the world and half the city is aware of it.

>>women
haha, usually its the men, not by much, but by enough. See women are basically the same as men when it comes to taste and being picky. The problem of course is for women its much more drastic social pressure to conform and fit in. men otoh it is slightly more acceptable to be a faggot who only wants dem tendies. end result is women will bitch less because theyre used to not paying at a restaurant and fitting in with other people. men will be far less likely to stab eachother in their social backs for being a basic eating cuckasaurous wreck

I think it could work if more people were ballsy enough to take on the idea of having a menu with minimal variation, and then worked towards making whatever they sell a really great thing. However, that also requires a particular mind set that most people probably don't have.

If a cafe was out there, and only sold espresso, latte's, and cappucino's and americanos and did them exceedingly well with an excellent seasonal menu, I think a place like that would do a lot better than some other cafe trying to emulate starbucks in terms of variety

>i've never worked at a resteraunt, the post

There is nothing more annoying on the planet than a middle aged, entitle woman.

Because if you only sell one thing on your menu then you are going to get a lot less business because people might not be in the mood for what you are selling and the odds of someone not wanting what you have goes up with each person in the group and you usually go to restaurants with other people.

Tl;dr woman detected

Yep

Working class cafes tend to have minimalist menus.
But it's not so much about perfecting a skillset as it is giving people who work for a living a non-mind taxing consistent meal of bland shit.

Novelty excites humans

Wouldn't a restaurant with only one thing on the menu be more of a novelty than a regular restaurant?

>Most restaurants only have about 20 dishes on menu
>Most of these are slight variations on 5 or 6 main ingredients or recipes
>Maybe different sauce or different veggies
>"Oh so different, why not perfect one"

Because it's piss easy to prep 10 sauces to put over 7 dishes served with different ground-roots and some fruits to make 50 different dishes.

It's different when you're working pretty much solely on WHAT you have to serve rather than WHICH COMBINATION of things to serve.

You're oversimplifying what Jiro has done. Just because it's all sushi doesn't mean it's the same dish. You might as well say IHOP has just perfected one thing since it's all breakfast.

Not if it wants repeat customers.

There is a korean dumpling restaurant that does the following:

- steamed
- fried
- mixed dumpling salad
- dumpling hot pot
- dumpling soup

The dumplings themselves come in: pork, chicken, or kimchi.

5 things and nothing else. Every night it has a line out the door and always has repeat customers.

I would say it does work, but I guess the star of your dishes needs to be extremely good.

Well I can't speak for other restaurants, but at the place I work at all of our dishes are made out overlapping ingredients. For instance, we sell a marinade chicken on angel hair pasta dish and a chicken alfredo dish, and the only real ingredient difference is in the sauce. Or we sell a moussaka dish and an eggplant parmesan sandwich, and they use very similar ingredients. Basically, it's only slightly more work to add another dish to the menu when you already have the ingredients in the store. My restaurant sells mostly greek and Mediterranean dishes, so the ingredients have a ton of overlap.

Jiro's menu depends entirely on what is available at the market at the moment. At most restaurants the food is stored in bulk so they can offer whatever.

Most good restaurants can do what they do well and restrict their menus to have variety. Jiro is an autist special snowflake that has mastered vinegar rice with raw fish and uses fame and hype to get shekels

What's the deal with Japanese Castella? What's different from the original Portuguese cake?

I remember watching some stupid Food Network show like Restaurant Makeover and they would often comment on the size of the menu, i.e.: a shitty restaurant often has a massive menu and the result is lots of frozen foods, not much coherence, etc.

That sort of stuck with me and I definitely noticed it is often an indicator of quality.

That's 15 things retard. Not 5

Good post, I agree

not sure to be honest. I personally want to try making it... because it looks challenging..

What this guy said, I used to work at an Italian place and basically you just need a few different sauces and a relatively modest variety of other items and that makes a full menu relatively easily.

I see this all the time with fast food restaurants.

places that sell chicken/beef teriyaki bowls and nothing else

vietnamese places that sell egg rolls and pho and nothing else

mexican places that sell tacos and nothing else.

when you sell so few things you can get the ingredients for cheap since it will always be in bulk, and since there is nothing else to make, the process can be very efficient.

for that reason places that do stuff like this are usually very cheap

>Portuguese
>original

Castella originates from Spain
hence the name "Castella" = Castile
at this point Japanese Castella is THE Castella

Majority of you pagans order the same exact 1 or 2 items off the dollar menu every time you go out. So your point is moot.

>that one Chinese place that only actually has like 12 ingredients
>140 menu item due to all the different permutations

They should just give a list to their customers with all the items and a "yes or no" box next to it.

>often an indicator of quality
Or pretentiousness I find. I've been to a few disgusting overpriced places with mediocre food, trying to be those high quality places but without the skill, and a whole lot of arrogance.

you want Chinese restaurants to become Chipotle?

no thanks

>you want Chinese restaurants to become Chipotle?
I dunno what that even means bro, we don't have Chipotle in my city.

the menu and ordering style you're describing is basically Chipotle

they do in fact have like 12 ingredients and you just pick what you want and they throw it in a bowl or burrito or whatever for you

Because restaurants are a business, and every picky faggot that walks in, browses for 5 minutes, and then walks out from not seeing something that catches his eye is lost revenue.

I know this because sometimes I'm that faggot, and when I go out to lunch I need to see if my first choice has my favorite soups in rotation before I fall back on the second.

>i'm dairy free, gluten free and i dont eat eggs or processed foods or oils. also what vegan wines do you have on your list?

>go to restaraunt
>look at menu
>only 3 entres
>nothing catches your eye
>leave

I think places like that could only exist in big city type environments. It's a lot easier to be niche in the city.

Yeah, it would have to be a big city type-a-thing for it to really work.

>Do you have any PF wines?
>PF?
>It means "preservative free"
>Then why didn't you say so, we have three different kinds
>Those are all too expensive. I'll have a bottle of the house cab sav