Is salmon the new twofer?

Forget sliders, bundled meals and mini desserts. The hook for restaurant bargain hunters is being re-baited with the likes of lobster, crab and salmon.

Those are among the lures Ruby Tuesday is flycasting with its much-publicized new menu (the bill of fare landed lengthy features from The New York Times and AOL). The dinnerhouse chain added a lobster tail in late summer. Now it’s mixed the pricey protein into several dishes, including a classic surf and turf platter. Two tails share the plate with a seven-ounce sirloin, vegetables and a potato. This isn’t your two-dinners-for-$20 draw.

Nor is the new lump-meat crab cake, or the just-added Salmon Florentine platter. The chain is betting that a special-occasion dinner priced at an everyday rate—relatively speaking—will still be taken as a deal by consumers obsessed with economy.

It’s the credo being followed with considerable success by Panera Bread Co. Not coincidentally, the bakery-café chain has also used lobster as a draw, albeit a regional one. This summer units in the New England area offered a half-pound lobster salad sandwich for about $17 (at least in my area). CEO Ron Shaich explained at the time that the chain was focusing on the 90% of consumers who were employed, not the 10% that lost or couldn’t find a job.

Now, Shaich told investors last month, the chain is adding salmon, both as a sandwich and salad ingredient. He noted that the addition will boost profits while presenting customers with another high-quality choice.

Salmon is already on the menu of Panera’s arch-competitor (and Shaich’s former charge), the Au Bon Pain bakery-café chain. It recently added a sandwich of smoked salmon, egg and guacamole. Already on the menu was a breakfast sandwich of smoked salmon and wasabi, served on an onion dill bagel.

Touting quality in a pitch for deal hunters is a risky strategy, as Cheesecake Factory can attest. It’s a casual-dining leader in quality and portion size, yet it had to re-engineer the tome it calls a menu to include more straightforward bargains. Virtually every other casual chain has done the same, to varying degrees.

But there are signs the approach can work. Ruby Tuesday’s lobster tails, for instant, were generating 3% of a typical restaurant’s sales at the end of August, according to CEO Sandy Beall. That’s at a price falling between $17 and $19, he noted to financial analysts a few weeks ago.

He noted at the time that the chain’s emphasis on quality was helping to boost check averages, the Holy Grail for an industry limping through a steep drop off in customers.

Panera told the Wall Street Journal for a mid-August feature that its hefty lobster sandwich was selling well, but balked at disclosing the specifics.

Will it work? Well, there’s a reason chains have to give away new menu items to get them tasted. A quality item for a reasonable price has its appeal. But the absolute dollars are still going to be a yellow light for those of us who no longer find ourselves in a position to dine out regularly.

No way this'll stay in Vegas

When the Hawaiian shirt of trend forecasting’s grey-suit world says he’s about to be “turned loose on Vegas restaurants for 24 hours with a camera following me—some real crazy stuff,” you realize the importance of having the mayor’s office on speed dial. Hearing Andy Ford warn of crazy stuff is like having Lady Gaga snipe that your get-up is freaky. The city might want to relocate the elderly and at least Siegfried, if not Roy, too.

Andy has a very adult job—chief insights officer for Noble, a Springfield, Mo., company that runs a foodservice trends-tracking business and a food-focused website, FoodChannel.com. His job is to detect anomalies in consumer preferences and discern a pattern before the incremental shifts harden into a mainstream trend.

He goes about it with the elan of an impish kid taking a road trip to Six Flags with a lax uncle. Who says you can’t take a bath in the motel pool if the sun is shining?

That tepid regard for the rules was evident when Andy told me about his mission to Sin City. For 24 hours, he’d be hitting some of the town’s offbeat eating places—not just restaurants, but any joint where the subcultures of a pulp novelist’s favorite town might grab a bite. Did I have any suggestions?

Well, yeah, but most of them are either closed to the public or likely to test the extent of an uninvited guest’s emergency-room health coverage. I wouldn’t just barge into some of the insider haunts in a town like that.

Great! Could I shoot him some suggestions ASAP?

That was a week ago. Tomorrow is D (V?) Day. Starting at 7 o’clock Vegas time, Andy will be on a blitz of eating places that only a city like Glitter Gulch might harbor. Along the way he’ll interview people on and off the Strip about the unusual places where they might eat. This probably won’t be a project that wins Chamber of Commerce approval.

But chances are high that it’ll be a jaw-dropper. I’m going to follow Andy via his Twitter feeds and blog posts. You can get the distillation via my own tweets, via twitter.com/peterromeo, or follow Andy directly via @aford. Or look for the hashtags #vegas and #iraves.

And if you know of any bail bondsmen in the area, drop me a note. Just in case.

News roundup for a Special Edition day

Today’s definitely a high point in the news cycle. The business day is only a few hours old, yet we’ve already seen…

The startling announcement that OSI Restaurant Partners, the troubled parent of Outback Steakhouse and four other casual-dining chains, has reached outside the business to tap the president of Avon as its new CEO. Yes, that’s Avon, as in “ding-dong, Avon calling.” The new hire, Liz Smith, has worked in the food business, but on the grocery side, serving as the president of Kraft Food’s U.S. operations.

Smith will succeed Bill Allen, who will continue as chairman after his retirement from the corner office on Nov. 15. Allen is one of the gems of the business, so its fortunate he’ll still be involved, albeit somewhat at arm’s length.

After nearly two years of trying, and showing how shrewd of a tactician he can be, Tilman Fertitta has succeeded in getting Landry’s Restaurans to let him take it private.

Fertitta, the company’s founder and CEO, already owned 55% of Landry’s stock, so you’d think it would have been a cakewalk. But he’s repeatedly run into complications, including a refusal by the board he chairs to disclose information it regarded as confidential. By that time, the board had accepted one of his offers. But rather than divulge inside stuff about the company’s dealings with lenders, the directors changed their mind in January 2009 and told Fertitta the deal was off.

Throughout the gyrations, the crafty suitor was buying shares on the open market. The combination of those purchases and the slide in restaurant stock prices have enabled him to trim his bid to $14.75 a share, compared with the $23.50 he’d originally offered back in January 2008.

Fertitta also bought a sizeable minority stake in McCormick & Schmick’s, a competitor to Landry’s namesake brand.

Today brought news that two of Chicago’s fine-dining pioneers will be firing down their stoves for the last time. Nick’s Fishmarket, a fixture of the Loop for more than 30 years, couldn’t survive the times. Owner Lee Suckow told the Chicago Sun-Times that business was off 30% from a year ago.

Even longer in the tooth was Don Roth’s Blackhawk, in the suburb of Wheeling. Don Roth, who opened the landmark in 1969, had been the Wolfgang Puck of his time, imbuing the place with a showmanship that made it the place to copy. Roth’s widow, Ann, is still involved in the business at age 90.

In announcing the restaurant’s closing, she noted that none of their children are interested in taking control of the business.

The restaurant will serve its last prime rib on New Year’s Eve.

Ugh I

Ruth’s Chris ran a promotion through the summer called Ruth’s Classics, built on several of the steakhouse chain’s most familiar specialties. The signatures were offered in specially priced meals that were intended to turn the heads of bargain hunters, but the chain decided to cut costs by holding back on advertising for the deals. “By and large the promotion was not seen as new to our customers,” acknowledged CEO Mike O’Donnell. All they saw were staples of the menu grouped together.

To make matters worse, O’Donnell added, competitors stepped up their promotions during the same timeframe, dealing Ruth’s “a slight setback” in market share.

During a conference call with investors, officials of the chain disclosed that six units are testing a Bistro menu consisting of items priced from $9 to $19. The limited menu is being offered in the test stores’ bars.

Ugh II

Tim Hortons is an institution in Canada, but the donut and coffee chain has had a tough time cracking the U.S. market. And it doesn’t look as if a deal with Cold Stone Creamery is going to be the inbound ticket investors had envisioned.

Hortons and Cold Stone’s franchisor, Kahala Corp., struck a deal to put their concepts on the same sites in dozens of locations both north and south of the U.S.-Canada border. At present, about 63 Tims, mostly in Canada, have been outfitted with a Cold Stone station featuring the chain’s signature mix-in ice cream. But only two Cold Stones in the U.S. have bolted a Hortons section to their operations.

“We were supposed to have 50 Cold Stones with Tim Hortons in [them] by spring. We are now at two,” Jim Durran, the restaurant analyst for National Bank Financial, remarked to Horton execs during a conference call yesterday. “What's the problem with that side of the equation?”

It’s all a matter of location, location, location, explained Hortons CEO Don Schroeder.

Because Hortons stores typically generate higher sales than a Cold Stone shop, they can be developed in pricier locations with higher visibility and traffic, he said. The addition of ice cream is a ring of a bell.

Cold Stone’s locations are a different matter, he continued. Because concept’s sales per unit are lower, stores are often developed in “’B’ sites” that “are not as supportive of putting a Tim Hortons into that location,” Schroeder added.

In short, the ice cream shops don’t have the traffic to feed a secondary concept, which might even dilute the concept’s weaker per-store sales.

In contrast, Schroeder expressed satisfaction with the additional sales a Cold Stone component can deliver to a Hortons.

Under questioning, he also disclosed that Hortons has the exclusive rights to develop Cold Stone outlets in Canada. That extends to all types of stores, including freestanding branches that aren’t paired with a Tim Hortons, he acknowledged. But the donut chain has no plans to develop ice cream-only units, Schroeder stressed.

A candy dish of info treats

Panera Bread Co. is having a bang-up October, according to CEO Ron Shaich. He told investors yesterday that comp sales for company stores were running 6.9% above last year’s tally for the first 27 days of the month, and franchisees’ sales were tracking at a 6.3% rise.

Meanwhile, the bakery-café chain is busy plotting some significant menu changes. First on the list is the introduction of salmon, both as a sandwich ingredient and a salad component, said Shaich. That will be followed by the revamp of the concept’s panini sandwiches, which are currently pre-made, he said. New presses to be added around the middle of next year will enable units to make the grilled sandwiches to order because of their speed.

Nearer term, units will start merchandising holiday baked goods, from gingerbread men to Panatone to “holly cake,” at their registers.

Three days, three restaurant-chain bankrutpcy filings. Max & Erma’s efforts to secure Ch. 11 protection from creditors has been well-publicized. The bankruptcy of sister operation Damon’s International has been far less so. And largely unnoticed has been the Ch. 11 filing of Ham’s, operator-franchisor of a 20-unit namesake chain in North Carolina and Virginia.

More evidence that the Japanese fast-food market is whack-o: Authorities have reportedly concluded that the manager of a McDonald’s there worked herself to death by logging 20 hours a week of overtime. News reports say she’s one of about 150 people who work to the point of demise in Japan every year.

That news of course follows the introduction of a new Burger King Whopper that features seven beef patties, a tie-in with Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system. There are so many reasons for head-shaking over that one that it doesn’t pay to start.

Kerrii Anderson, the CEO of Wendy’s International during the chain’s final meltdown and subsequent sale, is being paid $175,000 a year to serve on the board of P.F. Chang’s. Anderson also serves on the board of Chiquita Brands International, the banana importer, where she’s paid at least $160,000 a year. And she was expected to make about $4.6 million from the company’s 2008 sale to Triarc, the parent of the once-rival Arby’s fast-food chain. In short, if you’re scheduled to have lunch with her in the near future, there’s no question of who’s paying.

Hotel unions have voted to strike at a handful of properties in both San Francisco and Chicago. It’s not clear whether its coincidental harrumphing or a concerted effort to prove that the union’s strength isn’t being undercut by the economy, as conventional wisdom holds.

Trends from U.S. chain menus, words from N.Y.

Fast-food, that most American of social constructs, is turning downright jingoistic in its sourcing.

Cock an ear to Wendy’s new ad campaign and you’ll hear the chain boast of using only North American beef in its square burgers. Fuddruckers, the chain that was fast-casual before fast-casual was cool, is more pointed in its nationalism. Units in Texas and New Mexico have switched to a proprietary grind called Fudds Prime, made exclusively with “All-American” prime beef from “select U.S. ranches,” the announcement sniffs. Chew on that gristle, Canada and Australia.

The rah-rah mentions of homefront ingredients are part of a larger struggle by the chain business to accommodate the public’s insistence that it be told the source of what it’s eating. Ideally, that point of origin would be a local one. Indeed, the demand for locally grown produce was forecast by chef-participants in a National Restaurant Association survey to be the Number One consumer trend of 2009.

The menus of many independent restaurants show those respondents were dead-on. The shorter the distance from field to fork, the louder the establishment tends to crow about it in menu descriptors. Not that it’s obnoxious at all. Guests want that sort of horn blowing. Why not brag about the seasonal items you’re putting on the plate?

But it’s hard to serve up that kind of lingo when you’re a sprawling chain with a nationwide supply system. Their economics call for low-cost ingredients hyper-processed to the point of absolute consistency and cooking readiness. Just add heat, forget about seasonal freshness. It was a trend many figured they’d watch independent counterparts enjoy without challenge.

Wrong. It took awhile, but regional chains are clearly finding religion. And even the national ones are buying local ingredients in some spots—or at least spotlighting the instances where that’s been the practice. Outback Steakhouses in the Louisiana area have apparently always used shrimp harvested by the state’s Gulf shrimpers. It briefly changed its mind because imported shrimp was selling at a lower price, then opted in the eleventh hour to stay local. The news prompted Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to hold a press conference where he lauded the casual chain as the video cameras hummed.

Last month, New England-based Papa Gino’s Pizzeria and its sandwich-serving sister, D’Angelo’s, added a bunch of products that feature Cheddar cheese produced in Vermont. The chains were aiming for what one executive called “a distinctive New England flavor,” which you don’t usually associate with pizzas or subs. Yet “Vermont Cheddar” is included in all but one of the new products’ names (the exception, a Bruschetta, incorporates just “Cheddar”).

This summer, the New England outposts of Panera Bread Co. featured a lobster sandwich, a local favorite usually described as a lobster roll. It was priced at $16.99.

Units of the Smashburger fast-casual chain feature reginal riffs on burgers and hot dogs (i.e., Colorado units feature the popular local topping of green chilis), and the Kona Grill casual chain told investors that it'll introduce a menu next month that includes a section for local favorites from any given store's host area.

Then there’s the poster-concept of the localization movement among chains, the Pacific Northwest’s 38-unit Burgerville group. Right now the brand is featuring sweet potato fries made from local sweet potatoes, which are currently in season. It’s also featured Washington State cherries, in a Cherry Chipotle Pulled Pork Sandwich, and is currently touting a hotdog garnished with a slaw made of local apples.

The novelty of finding local ingredients on chains’ menus should start to wear off as several large-scale players start shopping closer to their stores. Chipotle Mexican Grill, for instance, has pledged to purchase 35% of at least one produce item per restaurant from local farmers.

With roughly 900 branches, Chipotle may be the largest chain to pursue seasonal fare. But it’s certainly not the first, nor the model example. Critics have noted that its so-called local fare may be drawn from a 250-mile radius, which certainly stretches the definition.

Contrast that with Eat’n Park, the Pittsburgh-based family dining chain. The company has a director of sourcing and sustainability who goes out to find farmers who can supply the chain. When local items like radishes are used by any of the brand’s 75 stores, notice is often given to customers via the chain’s blog.

Those early adapters are being joined by the likes of Darden Restaurants, best known as the parent of Red Lobster and Olive Garden. Its youngest brand, Seasons 52, features seasonal ingredients blended into entrees with fewer than 475 calories.

P.F. Chang’s, a strong competitor to Darden, has invested in a start-up concept called True Food Kitchen. Like Seasons 52, it features seasonal fare, but goes a step further to use local and organic foodstuffs.

Where chains can’t tout the use of local ingredients, they’re doing the next best thing of highlighting the source. Seasons 52, for instance, is currently featuring Colorado Buffalo Chili, Canadian Black Mussels Marinara and a Gulf Shrimp Cocktail.

Is there any doubt that the source-naming trend, and the local variant in particular, is going to continue?

Indeed, there’s one form in particular that we’re likely to see. It’s not widely known by the public, but outlets of the giant burger chains buy their buns from a network of regional or local bakeries set up by the home office. Those suppliers aren’t exactly mom-and-pop shops. But they do offer an opportunity for the behemoths of the business to tout a little localization. I bet we see that start to happen, sooner versus later.