Friday, August 29, 1997

A gourmet chef's challenge: Spicing up Chili's fare

By LOUISE LEE / The Wall Street Journal

Letting the chips fall where they may isn't an option for Brian Kolodziej, the head chef working on a menu overhaul at Chili's Grill & Bar.

When he proposed a seemingly simple appetizer for the chain, Chili's executives loved the dish, a heated skillet of chili queso and black bean dip set on a plate full of tortilla chips. Unfortunately, when busy waitresses whisked the plates through restaurants, the chips went flying.

Kolodziej put the chips in a separate basket -- just one lesson he learned in a high-stakes quest to spice up the fare at Chili's. After watching sales and profits slide, Dallas-based Brinker International Inc. decided three years ago that the menu had gone stale at its 400-unit Chili's casual-dining chain, which accounts for about 70 percent of overall sales. Fried catfish and carrot cake had languished for years and the menu was too heavy on burgers, ribs and shakes, says Ronald McDougall, Brinker chief executive. "Our target audience has gotten more sophisticated," he adds.

But the food technicians who had overseen Chili's menu weren't quite up to inventing the newer, spicier dishes that customers were demanding. So Brinker put Kolodziej, an energetic 34-year-old, on the job.

He had been executive chef at a Dallas Sheraton and, before that, a chef at Dallas's ritzy Mansion on Turtle Creek hotel. Chili's doesn't have the prestige of a gourmet restaurant, but Kolodziej was tired of his late hours. "It was an opportunity to work a regular work week and still create new foods," he says.

He quickly learned that highbrow fare wasn't going to carry the day at Chili's. The new dishes had to taste good and be eye-catching, but prices had to be similar to those on the old menu, where the highest price was $10. Dishes had to be made with ingredients that left the restaurant with a profit margin of 70 percent or more. They also had to be simple enough for thousands of ordinary cooks to make and easy for an army of waiters and waitresses to carry on a busy Friday night.

Kolodziej turned to a painstaking process of experimentation and testing. Some dishes take months just to make it out of Kolodziej's Dallas test kitchen, a spotless, chrome-filled affair built above a parking lot at Chili's headquarters.

Clad in a chef's coat and sneakers one recent afternoon, he blanched carrot strips and string beans to test on a grill. Then he moved onto another venture using a particularly cheap and fashionable ingredient: grilled marinated portobello mushroo"It's a great time to be working with portobellos," he said, briskly swirling together a marinade of olive oil, molasses and balsamic vinegar.

Proposed items get their first test in the adjacent conference room, where they must tickle the taste buds of top Chili's executives. Some ideas, like Cajun swordfish, have died on the spot. "I like my swordfish a little straighter, with not a lot of seasoning," explains McDougall, the chief executive, who helped nix that one.

Dishes that pass the taste test go to two restaurants in Texas, where customers rate them on comment cards. Then they move on to another 10 restaurants around the country, where items have to draw more than 3 percent of each restaurant's overall sales to make it to a national rollout.

Throughout the 12-week testing process, some creative dishes get rejected outright-like the barbecued buffalo sandwich, which some women found too messy. Test items can be a hard sell. "A lot of people are nervous about trying something that everyone else hasn't tried," says Shannon Krueger, a waitress at a Houston test restaurant, who tries to tempt customers with vivid descriptions of new items.

More helpful are customers like Geoffrey Acker, a 30-year-old trainer at a Houston office-equipment company who polished off a Cajun chicken sandwich on a recent day. "It tasted good, but I wasn't impressed with the heat," said Acker. Such comments persuaded Chili's to add more spices.

In the past two years, Kolodziej has pushed the chain to change about 60 percent of its menu, spicing it up with items like Margarita Grilled Chicken and Guiltless Veggie Skewers. McDougall credits the revamped Chili's menu with helping to perk up Brinker's sales, which rose 24 percent to $370.2 million in the fiscal fourth quarter ended June 25.

Because of higher ingredient costs, net income only rose by about 3.6 percent, to $19.1 million. Brinker says it is trying to boost customer volume to compensate.

Kolodziej has managed to push the limits. Believing Chili's needed a high-quality steak for customers celebrating special occasions, he pitched an eight-ounce beef tenderloin filet. Because of the meat's high price tag, he had to fend off cost-conscious managers who wanted him to try cheaper, smaller cuts of meat. Chili's added the $12.99 dish, dubbed the "Ranch Hand Filet," to the menu last year, and sales have exceeded expectations.

To ensure that the new dishes aren't ruined in restaurant kitchens, Chili's has changed how it trains new cooks, who used to get a how-to videotape that ended with the message "Good luck." Now, managers and head cooks from test restaurants are brought to Dallas for two days of training under Kolodziej. They in turn train other managers and cooks to prepare new dishes.

Accustomed to making beef and chicken, a few of the staff cooks at the Houston test restaurant had trouble learning to grill delicate salmon fillets. With all the menu changes, store manager Steve Sula still tries to inspect each test dish as its emerges from the kitchen. He sends back those that don't look right.

At lunchtime recently, Sula ordered a test dish of blackened catfish, which is supposed to be artistically topped with diagonal ripples of chipotle dressing. Although the fish itself arrived in fine form, the dressing had been applied in vertical ripples. "I've got to work with them on this," he said, digging in.