What Restaurant Chains Can Learn from Haggis

It may be the most maligned food on the planet - and the least marketed: haggis, a strictly Scottish dish made of minced sheep organs and suet mixed with spices, bound together with oats and stuffed back into the stomach of the hapless ovine.

This offal-filled orb (which looks as if it might burst open at any moment to reveal a screeching baby Alien) is then boiled for three hours before being served.

To Americans, haggis is as foreign as food gets. Fish and chips, corned beef, bangers and mash, shepherd’s pie — we can get any of these British imports at the “authentic” English pub in town. But Haggis? Not so much.

Recently, a restaurant marketing colleague of mine took a trip to Scotland. Naturally, everyone wanted to know if she was planning to try haggis. Not wanting to be labeled a culinary coward, she vowed that she would.

Still, everyone was jut a little surprised when she returned and said that she had, indeed, tried haggis at The Dome restaurant in Edinburgh. We were ever more surprised when she said that it was actually pretty good.

She counted off three things that made for that successful experience: 1) The Dome offers haggis as an appetizer-sized (i.e., “safe”) portion; 2) the restaurant presents this appetizer in a fabulous golden-crispy phyllo shell; 3) they accompany it with an amazing whiskey sauce.

For my colleague, this was a culinary triple play. Without taking a huge risk, she discovered a tasty, “not at all grody” new dish. The Dome’s chef had made it easy for her to be adventurous.

Which brings us to the problem with floundering casual American restaurants.

Right now, they’re playing it too safe in their marketing and promotion strategies, having decided that Americans only want “familiar and comfortable” in a down economy. But this is true only to a point.

Even in belt-tightening times, most middle class Americans want to feel just a little more cosmopolitan than the schlub next door. They’re willing to take risks on new flavors — just not wild, expensive ones.

Instead, they’ll try familiar dishes with a fresh take on the flavor profile or a new style of presentation, interesting new appetizers that allow adventuring on a budget, new sauces or sides that update an entrée without reinventing it from scratch. This is exactly what the Dome did with haggis. And for them, it was an easy win.

For the casual American restaurant, incremental changes allow freshening of the menu without an expensive overhaul. They give customers a reason to sit up and take new interest. They get word of mouth promotion going. And they send a subtle message to all that this *&^%$#@ recession can’t go on forever.

Elevating the American Palate

Just as the American population has always been a melting pot of nationalities, so has the American food scene been a simmering stew of flavors, ingredients and cooking methods.

Initially, our palates were shaped by immigration from the British Isles and Germany, which gave us solid, hearty fare such as sausages, porridge and pot roast with potatoes. Eventually, Italian newcomers brought their spicy tomato sauces and pastas … and pizza, now the most popular food in America

Waves of Chinese immigration in the second half of the 1800s added Americanized Asian cuisine. Chinese ex-railway workers opened “chop suey houses,” where diners could find cheap, filling fare. American movies of the depression era are peppered with references to chop suey shops.

But the real push to incorporate new flavors and approaches to foods can be pegged to the 1960’s, when Boomer hippies rejected the meatloaf-and-Jell-o traditions of their parents in favor of exotic cuisines discovered during a global quest for peace, love and brownies flavored with a Middle-Eastern herb known as hash.

Boomers’ jones for the new and undiscovered was conveniently accommodated by new waves of refugee immigration from war-torn and economically distressed countries such as Vietnam, Somalia, Ethiopia … and of course the ever-increasing numbers of immigrants from a country much closer to home — Mexico.

America’s food horizons were further expanded by the introduction of more open trade agreements and more efficient and cost-effective shipping methods in the 80s and 90s. These two factors allowed even mainstream restaurateurs and groceries to stock previously unheard of ingredients — kiwi fruit, guava, sweet tamarind, wasabi, daikon, and lichis, to name a few, as well as additional varieties of already familiar fruits, vegetables and seasonings.

Subsequent generations have embraced the global palate, encouraged by their Boomer parents and an explosion of global information on the Internet. Today, Gen Y (or Millennials, as they’re also termed) boasts a sophisticated palate and an infinite appetite for the new and different.

Given the huge size and increasing earning power of the Millennial generation, restaurants have no choice but to continually introduce different and unexpected flavors. Ten years ago, who’d heard of chai? (Actually, “chai” is just the Indian word for tea; it’s the masala spice that separates it from your English Breakfast “cuppa”.) Today, chai can be found on the menu at McDonald’s.

As a marketing group catering to the restaurant industry, IdeaStudio has seen continuing innovation from our restaurant clients. The most successful have done well not necessarily by overhauling their menus, but instead by updating familiar foods with more strongly flavored ingredients such as aioli, asiago cheese and garam masala, or with those previously considered “upscale,” such as balsamic reductions, prosciutto and Portobello mushrooms.

In a world where cosmopolitan is now commonplace, “the usual” has become “the passé.” Restaurants must remain alert to keep their flavor profiles trend-driven and interesting. As the globe continues to shrink and cuisines continue to overlap and meld, the successful restaurateurs will be those who are first to adopt new flavors and most innovative in finding ways to introduce them to the American palate.