DALLAS Nine months after taking the reins at Romano’s Macaroni Grill, chief executive Brad Blum has already left his mark on the casual-dining brand with a revamped menu that emphasizes heightened Italian-Mediterranean flavors, more healthful nutritional content and even costs less to create.
In an interview with Nation’s Restaurant News, Blum detailed the new 60-item menu, which is in the process of being rolled out to the chain’s 200-plus domestic outlets and had been in development since Macaroni Grill’s owner, Golden Gate Capital, hired Blum last December.
The new dinner menu features seven new dishes and 14 reformulated items.
Click here to see a slide show of some of the new menu items.
In addition to improving flavors through the use of fresher, higher quality ingredients, the new and revamped dishes contain fewer calories and less saturated fat and sodium. For example, the company said calories have been reduced by between 25 percent and 65 percent in the 14 improved recipes.
At the same time, the new dishes and reformulations cost less to make.
“We’ve taken the quality up and knocked the cost down,” said Blum, who previously served as chief executive at Burger King Corp. and vice chairman of Darden Restaurants Inc., where he earlier had been president of Olive Garden.
Blum said the new menu includes imported artisan pasta, higher quality tomatoes, colorful vegetables, fresh herbs, grilled meats and more seafood dishes. The food cost for the new menu has been reduced between 2 percent and 3 percent, he said.
Macaroni Grill had been suffering from declining sales for three years prior to being purchased from Brinker International Inc. in 2008 by Golden Gate — the private equity firm has not released results for 2009. However, Blum said that guest traffic as measured by KnappTrack had increased 9 percentage points over the past nine months.
Blum said that one previous problem for the chain was the lack of a chief executive, which Macaroni Grill had not had for 12 months prior to its sale by Brinker.
“It was very unfocused,” he said.
The brand also had taken several hits in the media over its food. For instance, the Today Show said the chain’s original scallop salad had the calorie equivalent “of six glazed donuts,” Blum recalled.
The improved seared scallops and wilted spinach salad selection contains 420 calories and 4 grams of saturated fat, as compared with the old recipe of 1,270 calories and 27 grams of saturated fat. Since changing the recipe, sales of the dish have risen 400 percent, he said.
Another improved dish is Mozzarella Alla Caprese, which includes vine ripened tomatoes, fresh basil, imported buffalo mozzarella, extra virgin olive oil and aged 9-year-old balsamic vinegar. The new recipe contains 330 calories and 9 grams of saturated fat compared with the previous recipe’s 440 calories and 12 grams of fat.
New recipes include Grilled Chicken Spiedini, Pollo Caprese and Lobster Spaghetti. Ten of the 21 new and improved items are priced under $10.
Blum said development time for menu items at Macaroni Grill has been shortened from 14 months to three months.
The 226-unit chain is about 10-percent franchised. The average unit volume is about $3 million. Brinker retains a 19.9-percent stake in the chain.
Contact Paul Frumkin at [email protected].
