MenuMasters 2013: Cooper's Hawk Winery & Restaurants

At Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants the culinary research and development team holds a secret weapon: members of the chain’s Wine Club who meet for exclusive special events to help test some of the chain’s newest menu items.

One such special wine dinner, dubbed For the Love of Pork, gave life to the 12-unit chain’s ultra-popular, and now MenuMasters-Award winning, Asian BBQ Pork Belly Nachos. Introduced last September, the dish quickly became the chain’s top-selling appetizer and now ranks among its top five items sold, according to Matt McMillin, director of culinary and beverage operations at Cooper’s Hawk.

“I’ve had people stop me in the dining room and say, ‘That’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever put in my mouth,’” McMillin said. “That’s exciting to hear. It makes what we do worth it.”

The dish centers on Chinese-style red braised pork belly served atop 4-inch circular tortilla “nachos” that are then garnished with avocado, scallions, sesame seeds, cilantro, radish and sweet chile-barbecue sauce. The cross-cultural collaboration of cooking techniques and flavors is priced at $8.99 per serving.

According to McMillin, the pork belly is slow braised for an extended period on the stove top in a mixture of hoisin sauce — a Chinese dipping sauce — Chinese cinnamon, star anise, rice-wine vinegar, soy sauce and yellow rock sugar. Once tender, the belly is set aside, and the remaining liquid is “reduced to lava, which is where you get that beautiful lacquered look on the belly,” McMillin said.

“It’s a very back-to-basics way of cooking based on techniques that are probably a thousand years old,” he noted.

With the preparation time and the pricing, the final yield on the pork-belly menu item is 50 percent, McMillin said.

Cooper’s Hawk’s executive chef of research and development, Randall Sabado, worked to refine the dish and marshal itthrough at least seven iterations.

“We broke it down to getting the pork belly right, the nachos right, then the sauces and the presentation,” Sabado said.

Replicating the dish

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Once the chain was happy with the appetizer’s flavor and look, “we worked on making sure it was easy to produce on the line and still looked beautiful and clean,” he said.

In terms of presentation, a total of 3.5 ounces of belly is distributed onto each of three tortillas. Generous mounds of garnishes finish the dish.

To make the appetizer, McMillin had to add hoisin, star anise and the custom-made tortilla to his ingredient inventory. While he’s not cross-utilizing those ingredients now, he said there may be opportunities in the future.

It is Cooper’s Hawk’s special dinners for Wine Club members that allow the culinary team to work from a blank slate, making the creative process enjoyable and one that strengthens collaboration.

“It’s a lot of back and forth, tasting and talking and trying new ideas, and I like that,” Sabado said. “Sometimes it just starts with random ideas, or we’ll get some suggestions from the owners, and then we do a lot of cooking and a lot of trial and error. It’s a discovery process.”

McMillin, who was the chef and founding partner of the Big Bowl Noodles chain, said his work with that concept “turned me into a nut about systems and being able to replicate the concept.” That meant that before the pork-belly nachos appetizer was introduced to Cooper’s Hawk’s other restaurants he first trained his kitchen operations team and all area managers to ensure front- and back-of-the-house teams were well-acquainted with it. Cooper’s Hawk restaurants are located in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida.

To help the team’s education, videos of the appetizer’s preparation were shot, and the recipe was uploaded to a database accessible to crews at every restaurant.

Darren Tristano, executive vice president at Chicago-based market research firm Technomic Inc., said such structure, discipline and attention to detail have helped Cooper’s Hawk. It has grown steadily from a successful single unit to a small chain with a secure position at the premium end of the casual-dining spectrum, he said.

“Frankly, the polished-casual dining segment is struggling because it’s not being innovative like this. This restaurant’s peers can’t deliver it, can’t pull it off,” Tristano said. “What [Cooper’s Hawk] has done is upscaled a very simple dish with ingredients that consumers recognize and want to see more of.”

Tristano said the nachos successfully address Americans’ growing love of Asian and Mexican cuisines and cleverly fuse those flavors to create something novel.

“The dish is right on trend,” he said. McMillin said the appetizer’s popularity wasn’t boosted by any clever marketing or advertising. It was added to the menu, servers worked to sell it, and restaurant regulars loved it and started spreading the news about it.

“We don’t have a Taco Bell ad budget or any ‘Chili’s Baby Back Ribs’ jingles,” he said. “Honestly, our Wine Club drives our business model, and that’s our advertising. When something’s getting good buzz with them, it sells well.”