A casino resort does not have one menu. It has a steakhouse menu, a café menu, a pool menu, banquet menus and room service, all drawing on the same receiving dock, the same storerooms and often the same cooks. Each menu can look fine on its own and still cost the property money, because no one is looking at all of them together.
Chef Bryan Dillon has written and managed menus at that scale. At Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas he oversaw 17 food operations and 22 kitchens. Before that he ran menu development and standardization for the Bertolini’s division of Morton’s Restaurant Group. These are the rules he works from.
1. Plan menus across outlets, not one at a time
In a single restaurant, a new dish is a single decision. In a resort with many outlets, every new ingredient is a purchasing, storage and prep decision for the whole property. When each outlet writes its own menu, the same product gets bought in several forms, stored in several places and costed several ways.
Start with a property-wide view. List every ingredient on every menu and find the ones that appear only once. Each of those is a candidate to replace with something another outlet already uses. Fewer unique products means simpler ordering, less waste and faster prep, with no change the guest can see.
2. Give every outlet a clear job
Not every outlet has the same purpose. In a hotel, the high-end restaurant is usually open only for dinner and carries the property’s reputation. The café exists to drive capture: a good, fast, hot breakfast that keeps guests on property instead of sending them across the street.
A casino adds more outlets and more hours, but the principle holds. Decide what each outlet is for before you write a single item. A menu that tries to do everything does none of it well, and it costs more to run.
3. Write recipes any trained cook can execute on any shift
High-volume kitchens run around the clock with different teams on every shift. A dish that only one cook can make is a dish that will vary.
Bryan learned this discipline early. At the Ritz-Carlton Boston in 1979, the classical menu changed every day on a nine-week cycle, and cooks were expected to know every garnish and method of preparation by name. Later, at Morton’s, he developed standardized menus and recipes that could be executed the same way across multiple locations while the division opened six new restaurants in three years.
The tools are simple: a written recipe for every item, a portion standard, a plating guide and a plate cost. The habit is the hard part. Every new item gets the same treatment before it reaches the line.
4. Put the right item in the right place
Location and format can matter as much as the dish. When Bertolini’s operated at the base of the fountain in the Forum Shops at Caesars, around 40,000 people a day walked past. The restaurant added a gelato, sorbet and espresso counter right off the walkway. That counter alone earned enough to pay the rent on the building.
The lesson is not “add a gelato counter.” It is to look at where your guests actually walk, wait and linger, and to ask what they would buy there. In a casino, that includes the path from the parking garage, the gaming floor and the line outside the showroom.
5. Leave no dead space
Bryan has a pet peeve: a menu that a guest turns over to find a blank back. A menu is the property’s best sales tool, and every part of it should work. That does not mean clutter. It means every panel, every table card and every transition space either guides the guest toward something you want them to order or deliberately points their eye at something you want them to see.
The same thinking applies to the walk into the restaurant. The guest experience begins when they close their car door and start walking into the property. What do they pass on the way? What is offered to them along that route? Those moments shape what they order and how they feel about the price.
6. Treat food and beverage as a revenue center
For years, Las Vegas treated food and beverage as an amenity that was expected to lose money. The operators who changed the city learned that it could generate real revenue. When Bryan joined Station Casinos in 1999, it was in part because he came from hotels, where food and beverage had to make money.
A menu built on that view is engineered, not just written. Each item is judged on two questions: how well does it sell, and how much does it contribute? Items that do both get the best placement. Items that sell but earn little get repriced or reworked. Items that do neither come off. Then the sales mix is reviewed after launch and the menu is adjusted again.
Where to start
Pull the last month of sales by item for every outlet, plus your current plate costs. Put them side by side. Most properties find, within an hour, a handful of items that sell poorly, cost too much and require unique products. That list is your first round of menu engineering.
Bryan works with casino resorts, hotels and multi-unit groups on menu engineering, recipe costing and standardization. See how he approaches menu engineering and development and food and beverage financial performance, or schedule a consultation.