Five Restaurant Menu Twists Reshape Familiar Dishes

An 85-year-old Houston institution has moved the birria taco trend into an enchilada format: Maira Avalos, kitchen manager at one of Molinas Cantina’s three locations, developed birria enchiladas to give the menu some variation.

Bret Thorn, senior food and beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality, framed the approach: “You don’t always need to go crazy to develop a compelling new menu item.” His five examples change a format, ingredients, a sauce or a drink build.

Five targeted menu changes

• Birria enchiladas at Molinas Cantina, Houston. Avalos took a trend the 85-year-old restaurant had already embraced and changed the format from taco to enchilada. The concept extends one item rather than rebuilding the menu; the report provides no price, cost or sales figure for it.
• Steamed clams at Marisi, La Jolla. Chef Kaitlyn Smith cooks them in a traditional fashion, then adds calamansi vinegar and sea urchin butter. The preparation keeps the recognizable clam base while introducing two distinct ingredients.
• Fried catfish at Inman Social, Tennessee. Chef Wesley True updates a dish already familiar in Tennessee with a variation on gribiche sauce. He swaps smoked trout roe for the hard-boiled eggs used in that sauce.
• Hamachi at Anzu, San Francisco. Chef Jason Francisco replaces the fish in the leche de tigre for his hamachi dish with pineapple. He balances the brighter result with pickled melon, altering the sauce’s central ingredient.
• Martini at Ferguson’s Country, Brooklyn, New York. At the new Southern restaurant, bartender Galen Maclennan makes two changes: he fat-washes the vodka with corn and uses sake instead of vermouth.

What does this change for operators?

The practical lesson is to modify one recognizable menu lever at a time. Avalos changes the format; Smith adds calamansi vinegar and sea urchin butter; True substitutes the egg; Francisco rebuilds a hamachi sauce around pineapple; Maclennan changes the vodka treatment and mixer.

None of the five examples comes with a check average, ingredient cost, labor percentage, gross margin or sales result. The report therefore does not show whether a remake lowers cost of goods, raises contribution margin or produces more orders. Operators cannot treat any of these changes as a proven financial winner without those figures.

The sourcing decisions are specific: calamansi vinegar, sea urchin butter, smoked trout roe, pickled melon, pineapple, corn and sake. The report names no suppliers, purchase prices or availability, so it cannot calculate recipe cost or determine whether a substitute is cheaper than the ingredient it replaces.

Pricing is likewise absent. The report does not say whether Ferguson’s Country charges more for its altered Martini, whether the seafood additions carry premiums, or whether the enchiladas use a separate check average from the birria tacos. It also does not identify ownership groups or company-operated versus franchised status for the five restaurants.

Molinas Cantina’s three locations provide the only unit count in the report, which does not say whether Avalos’s enchiladas are available at all three or whether those sites are company-operated or franchised. The report gives no location counts for the other four restaurants, making chain-level comparisons impossible.

Reporting credentials

Thorn reports food and beverage trends across the country for both publications. His expertise includes restaurant operations, service trends, French cuisine, Asian cuisines generally and Thailand specifically. He co-hosts the “Menu Talk with Pat and Bret” podcast, which interviews chefs, food and beverage authorities and foodservice operations experts.

From 2005 to 2008, Thorn wrote the “Kitchen Dish” column for The New York Sun, covering New York City restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after about five years in Thailand, where he wrote on business, banking and finance, as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and the Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality in 2016 while retaining his NRN position.

Thorn graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in history and is a Phi Beta Kappa member. He earned a Cértificat Elémentaire in traditional French cooking from Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris in 1986.

He spent his junior year in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University in fall 1988 and Peking University in spring 1989. During the 1989 protests and the crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square, he worked as an ABC News runner.

His monthly NRN column won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column. He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council in 2005 and was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

He wrote the comfort-food entry in the 2012 second edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America and a history of plated desserts in the 2015 Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. A Colorado native from Denver, he lives in Brooklyn.

The five concepts offer clear menu-engineering experiments, not published business results. Their commercial test comes next: whether customers order the revised dishes repeatedly and whether their food costs and margins outperform the originals. The report provides no such follow-up data.