Case Study 1: The Great Menu Contraction

What American restaurants cut in 2020, what they put back, and what the difference revealed about menus that had been too long for years

Background

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic produced something the American restaurant industry had never experienced: a near-simultaneous, government-ordered closure of dining rooms across most of the country. This is documented public record, not a reconstruction. Within weeks, restaurants that had been full-service businesses were operating as takeout and delivery businesses, frequently with a fraction of their staff, unreliable supply, and no idea how long it would last.

Almost every operator did the same thing, independently and immediately: they cut the menu.

This was not a strategy. It was triage. But it produced, by accident, the largest natural experiment in menu size that the industry has ever run — tens of thousands of restaurants simultaneously discovering what happens when you remove a third or a half of your items overnight. And the most interesting part of the story is not what happened in 2020. It is what operators chose to put back in 2021 and 2022, and what they quietly left off.

The operating issue

Four forces pushed in the same direction at once, and it is worth separating them because they had different half-lives.

Labor collapsed. Restaurants were operating with skeleton crews — sometimes an owner and one cook. A 40-item menu is not executable by two people, and nobody needed a consultant to tell them so. This was the most immediate force and, in the beginning, the most absolute.

Supply became unreliable. Distributors were dealing with a demand shock in both directions: foodservice volume collapsed while grocery volume spiked, and product that had been routine became intermittently unavailable or substituted. A menu with forty ingredient families has forty opportunities to be short. A menu with twelve has twelve. Operators discovered the supply-risk argument for a short menu the hard way, in real time.

The channel changed. Off-premise is not a delivery mechanism for a dine-in menu; it is a different product. Items that arrive as intended after twenty minutes in a bag are a subset of items that leave a kitchen well, and the subset is smaller than most chefs expect. Fried food, delicate composed plates, anything that depends on temperature contrast, anything with a sauce that will soak something — all of it either travels badly or requires packaging that costs real money (Chapter 28 takes this apart properly).

Volume per item collapsed and then concentrated. With fewer covers, a 40-item menu means each item sells so rarely that prep becomes guesswork and spoilage becomes certain. Cutting to twelve items concentrated the same reduced volume into fewer lines, which made prep predictable again — a small mercy that mattered enormously to operators trying to survive on a fraction of their sales.

Note what those four forces have in common. Not one of them is about the food. Every single one is a throughput, purchasing, channel, or inventory argument — which is precisely the case §10.4 makes in a chapter that is nominally about cooking.

What it shows

The simplification was visible at every scale, including at chains large enough that their menu decisions were reported as news. Among the widely documented examples from 2020: McDonald's temporarily removed all-day breakfast from its US restaurants to simplify kitchen operations, and a number of large casual-dining and quick-service brands publicly described reducing item counts to speed service and stabilize supply. Independent restaurants did the same thing without press releases.

Three things about that are worth extracting.

First, the cuts were not random, and the pattern was consistent. What went first, almost everywhere, were the items that were slow to produce, unique in their ingredients, or dependent on a station that could not be staffed. What survived were the items that were fast, cross-utilized, and identified with the restaurant. Operators, under pressure, converged on exactly the three filters in §10.2 — concept fit, skill fit, equipment fit — without anyone naming them.

Second, ticket times and consistency improved. This was reported anecdotally by an enormous number of operators and it is mechanically unsurprising: fewer items means fewer stations under load, fewer components on the prep list, and more repetitions per cook per item. A cook who makes one dish forty times a shift makes it better than a cook who makes eight dishes five times each.

Third — and this is the part that matters for your menu — a large number of restaurants did not put everything back. Trade coverage through 2021 and 2022 documented widespread operator statements that menus had come back shorter than they went out, and that the shorter menu was a deliberate choice rather than a lingering constraint. Some brands framed it publicly as a permanent simplification.

A caution about precision. You will find many specific figures quoted for how much menus shrank — percentages of items cut, average item counts before and after. Treat them carefully. Different sources measured different populations over different windows, and the definition of an "item" varies by whoever is counting. The direction is well documented and the mechanism is clear. A specific national percentage is not something this book will assert.

Outcome

The honest summary is that the industry ran an experiment it did not design, got a result it did not expect, and partially kept it.

What was kept: shorter menus at many operators; a permanent awareness that a menu is a labor model; the practice of asking whether an item travels; and, in a great many kitchens, the removal of items that everyone had privately known were dead weight for years but that nobody had been willing to be the person to kill.

What came back: most of the variety, at most restaurants, over time. Guests do want choice, staff came back, supply stabilized, and a menu that is too short for a full-service dining room is its own problem — a \$46-check restaurant with nine items reads as unfinished rather than confident.

What the episode did not settle: where the right item count actually is. It is not the same number for a quick-service brand, a 68-seat neighborhood restaurant, and a diner, and 2020 did not produce an answer. What it produced was a widely shared demonstration that the number most operators had been running was too high, and that they had never known it because the costs of the excess were invisible.

The lesson

A menu had been carrying dead weight for years and nobody could see it, because the cost of an excess item does not appear on any report.

That is the chapter's argument, demonstrated at national scale by accident. The identifiable cost of one slow-selling item — the prep labor, the spoilage, the ordering, the training — never appears on a profit-and-loss statement as a line called "too many items." It appears as slightly high food cost, slightly high labor, slightly slow tickets, and a walk-in that is always full. It appears, in other words, as Chapter 1's cost drift.

Operators could not see it in 2019 because there was no counterfactual. In 2020 they were handed one.

The second lesson is harder and more useful. Nobody needed to wait for a pandemic. The three filters in §10.2 are available to any operator on any Tuesday afternoon, and the arithmetic in §10.4 takes twenty minutes on a spreadsheet. What the crisis supplied was not information. It was permission — the political cover to remove an item without being the person who removed it.

If you are running a restaurant right now, the useful question is not "what did the industry learn in 2020?" It is: which three items on my menu would I not put back, and why am I waiting for an emergency to remove them?

Discussion questions

  1. Four forces pushed menus shorter in 2020: labor, supply, channel, and per-item volume. Which of the four is permanent for a restaurant like Bellwether, and which were temporary? Does the answer change your view of what the right item count is?

  2. The chapter argues that operators converged on concept fit, skill fit, and equipment fit without naming them. Take a restaurant you know and predict which five items it would cut first under a staffing emergency. Then ask whether those items should be on the menu now.

  3. Off-premise forced operators to ask whether an item travels. Look at Bellwether's menu in Figure 10.2 and identify the three items that would suffer most in a bag after twenty minutes. What would you do about it — cut them, reformulate them, or exclude them from a takeout menu? Chapter 28 owns this question; give your answer now and check it later.

  4. Most restaurants put most of the variety back. Was that a failure of discipline or a correct response to what guests actually want? Argue both sides, and say what evidence would settle it.

  5. The case study says the crisis supplied permission rather than information. What does that suggest about how menu decisions actually get made in restaurants, and what would a manager have to build — culturally, not analytically — to make item removal a routine act rather than an emergency one? (Chapter 21 is relevant here.)

  6. This case study deliberately declines to quote a national percentage for menu contraction. Given Chapter 1's Case Study 1 on the ninety-percent failure myth, was that the right call? What would you need to see before you would be willing to put a number on it in your own business plan?