FSR January 2023

NOW SERVING CHEFS & INGREDI ENT S

in the 24-unit brand’s journey. Bowls offered the opportunity to leverage ingredients the restaurant already had on hand in a fresh format, without need ing to source new supply chainmaterials. “You can expand your menu without having to expand your order, so you have more effective purchasing and can buy everything in larger quantities,” Law ton says. During the innovation process, Law ton’s culinary team tried to figure out which kind of tacos made sense in a bowl format. For example, fish and slaw didn’t work, he says, since you don’t want “cold coleslaw on top of hot rice with a long piece of fish in it.” On the other hand, the R&D team discovered that Korean rib eye with a sweet sesame-soy glaze mar inade and spicy kimchi worked great in bowl or taco formats. In another example of trial and error, Bartaco experimented with serving plat ters of chicken, steak, fish, and stacks of tortillas on wooden cutting boards. “But at the same time, that’s not why people were coming to Bartaco. We felt that was diluting what Bartaco was, which is this healthy lifestyle, high energy escape in a fun brand that’s not a typical Mexican restaurant,” Lawton says. “We thought a bowl of brown rice with proteins and veggies on top very much feeds into that bold, healthy life style that we were trying to capture.” Bartaco serves signature bowls ,including spiced chicken verde with a chile and herb marinade, ancho-crusted ahi tuna with Asian slaw, herb-mari nated and roasted wildmushrooms with roasted poblano chile sauce and queso fresco, and roasted duck with a tama rind glaze. Lawton credits bowls for helping ele vate the Bartaco menu, and he estimates such sales account for about 15–20 per cent of overall business. “It gives the menu a sense of having more options, looks a little more full, and gives people more choices,” he says. Like many restaurants, Bartaco heav ily relied on takeout and delivery dur ing the pandemic, but taco transport posed a problem—namely, they wilted

BOWLS ARE JUST AS IMPORTANT AS THE TACOS AT BARTACO.

BARTACO / MANNY VARGAS

yaki Quinoa Bowl are the top-sellers. The former features amix of brown rice, farro, and quinoa cooked with garlic, ginger, turmeric, and lemongrass, plus grilled portobello mushrooms, charred onions, snap peas, miso-glazed sweet potatoes topped with sesame seeds, sliced avocado, cilantro pesto, and garnished with hemp seeds. (One of the other benefits of bowls is the chance to fill it up with a myriad of creative ingredients.) “We tested several different bowl options and landed on offerings that were a mix of f lavors, textures, and spices,” Augustin says. “A few of our bowls are on the spicier side—Spicy Pan ang Curry and Korean Noodle Bowl— while the Ancient Grains and Teriyaki Quinoa Bowl include more grains and vegetables to keep you full and satisfied.” As a 46-unit health food concept with the goal to infuse meals with nutri ent-dense ingredients, bowls also offer True Food Kitchen the opportunity to add mindfully sourced protein options such as grass-fed steak, shrimp, grilled chicken, or tofu, Augustin says. “Bowls are a dish that people love because of the ability to include so many different ingredients, textures, and fla vors in one dish,” he adds.

from crunchy to soggy. To combat this issue and uphold brand quality stan dards, Bartaco would only deliver decon structed taco kits in bento-style boxes. That was also where the benefit of bowls became especially apparent. “A bowl will hold up better than a taco in delivery,” Lawton says. “If I’m order ing from anywhere else that’s not doing what we’re doing, I tend to get a bowl over a crispy taco, because I know it’s going to be soggy by the time we get it.” True Food Kitchens added bowls to the menu for the first time in 2017 when the brand noticed the carrier gain ing popularity. “We wanted to get ahead of the curve,” says Jon Augustin, vice president of food and beverage at True Food Kitchen. Now, bowls make up about 20–25 per cent of the restaurant’s total menu mix, and the Ancient Grains Bowl and Teri

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FSRMAGAZINE .COM

JANUARY 2023