California Pizza Kitchen: Portobello Pizza

Nation's Restaurant News, May 18, 1998 by Gary Beauregard

Gary Beauregard, vice president of research and development

With just a year under its belt, Portobello Pizza is already I California Pizza Kitchens fourth best-selling pizza. The product's fast ascendancy up the menu ladder earned CPK the 1998 Nation's Restaurant News MenuMasters Award for Best Menu/Lint Extension.

As with every other product offered at CPK, cochairmen Larry Flax and Rick Rosenfield played a major role in developing the Portobello Pizza.

"We got into this business because we loved to cook," Flax says. Nothing goes on the menu that we haven't worked on.'

Flax and Rosenfield always arc thinking about food. "When we were young attorneys, we couldn't afford to go out to restaurants," Flax explains. "So we used to cook at home when we were entertaining lady friends."

lie and Rosenfield were law partners when they launched CPK in 1985. In its early days the menu veered sharply from what some of the more recognizable restaurateurs like Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters were doing with pizza.

"They treated pizza more as a vehicle to create new tastes, Flax says. 'We decided to be more taste-oriented -- to put things in our pizza that people were familiar with like BLT pizza or Southwestern pizza."

Portobello Pizza is a direct descendant of that philosophy, When it began appearing pre-packaged in grocery store bins, the CPK leaders took note.

Flax and Rosenfield look upon supermarkets as a great indicator of American taste. "When you see items prepackaged and presliced in bins, you know its something the public wants," they say.

"Rick and I had been cooking with portobello mushrooms for years." Flax adds. "But seeing it in the stores told us that Americans were having a love affair with these mushrooms. It was time for a new-style pizza using a new type of mushroom."

According to Flax, most pizza parlors put fresh rather than precooked mushrooms into their pizzas. But portobellos have to really he pre-cooked to get them tender."

Flax and Rosenfield work closely on new products with their vice president of research and development, Gary Beauregard, who joined CPK two months after it opened. "He's been our right arm in food development" Flax says.

Portobello Pizza went through numerous changes. It was originally introduced both as a mixed mushroom pasta and as a pizza, but it worked better as pizza. Also, the Portobello Pizza started with four different kinds of mushrooms in addition to portobello. "We quickly realized that people just wanted portobello," Rosenfield adds.

The typical product development process at CPK has Flax and Rosenfield initiating new product ideas and turning them over to Beauregard for development.

Rosenfield adds that "we generally test things in two or three restaurants here in Southern California, where we can watch over the process. However, our best and quickest response comes from our servers. If they're behind it, They'll promote it."

"They're like your sales force," Flax adds. "If they don't like it, it wont get sold even if we think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread."

With 80 units in 22 states and $175 million in revenue in 1997, CPK has sold a lot of pizzas since it was founded 13 years ago in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Today CPK has earned a reputation for crafting offbeat, eclectic, multiethnic and fusion recipes of pizzas, pastas and salads. "It's only offbeat until the people taste the food and say, 'You're right on the beat,' " Flax says.

Portobello Pizza feat ores portobello mush- rooms, fresh thyme, and roasted garlic. At $7.95, it fits comfortably into CPK's pizza range of $6.95 to $10.95.

Looking to the future. Rosenfield says, "We're always working on new things. Our customers expect it from us, and we like doing it. It's exciting to create food that millions of people will eat."

If menus are the heart of the foodservice business, then research and development is the soul. But while the average consumer certainly has heard of the Big Mac or the Bloomin' Onion or the Blizzard, how many diners know anything about the people who created those dishes?

Food and menus that score a hit with the public don't happen by accident. R&D departments toil endlessly supply hungry restaurant companies with the products that drive sales and help differentiate their concepts from those of the competition. And for every hit, you can bet there are as many misses as there are seasme seeds on a Big Mac bun.

To celebrate the unsung heroes of the test kitchen, Nation's Restaurant News has launched its inaugural MenuMasters Awards program. Through it NRN seeks to honor the Industry's outstanding achievements in research and development during calendar year 1997 as well as recognize the pioneers who have helped make the industry what it is today.

The winners were selected by an advisory board of industry leaders and NRN's editorial team headed by food editor Pam Parseghian. The selection process examined such criteria as innovation and creativity, quantifiable success based on test results or comparable-store sales gains, broad Impact on the industry and sustainable shelf life.