California Pizza Kitchen: Portobello Pizza

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

"Always lurking in the back of Tanzer's mind was the question: 'How will the guests react to essentially being served a meal in a bag?' That was a totally different approach for us."

But he needn't have worried. The promotion ran for six weeks in the spring of 1997 and was so successful that Cracker Barrel followed with Campfire Beef for six weeks during the fall of 1997.

"Campfire Chicken and Campfire Beef aren't fancy," Tanzer explains. "They're very homestyle and compliment our menu."

Those days when folks cooked out under the night sky on a more regular basic than today were evoked in Cracker Barrel's marketing of the chicken and beef selections. The menu sets the mood: "Our newest recipe takes you back to the days of camping under the stars and cooking over an open fire."

For $7.99 customers receive a half chicken cut into pieces and wrapped in foil with fresh vegetables like corn-on-the-cob, tomatoes, onion wedges, carrots and red skin potatoes. These are all cooked together in their natural juices and served with biscuits or corn muffins. Campfire Beef is similar but substitutes beef for chicken.

Typically, the meals are served after 4 p.m., although some restaurants served them at lunch as well. "We developed a special Campfire Chicken Soup as a companion item," Tanzer adds.

Watch for a return engagement of Campfire Chicken and Campfire Beef this fall. It also may become a permanent menu item. "We're going to test that," Tanzer says, "but we may keep it as a promotion to create excitement."

Tanzer and Lutz have seen a lot of product introductions at Cracker Barrel, and this was one of the best. "I get excited when I see customers excited," Tanzer says. "When you see a pop in sales, that's energizing."

Legal Sea Foods. Children's Menu

Children get very few options when they eat out," Jasper White says. "I wanted to help them have a real restaurant experience."

That was the motivation behind the creation of the Legal Sea Foods Children's Menu, which earned the 1998 Nation's Restaurant News MenuMasters Award for Best Menu Revamp.

A consulting chef for Legal Sea Foods and a former restaurateur himself, White says the theory behind the menu is that "children don't have lesser palates than adults just because they're children. In fact, they have better palates, and their senses are very acute.

White's three young children, exposed early and often to seafood, are fish lovers. "I think most kids would be if they had it regularly," he added. "But they don't have any options."

"Most kids adore lobster," says White, father of a 9-, 7- and 4-year old. "But if their parents have to spend 10 minutes getting the meat out for them, it ruins the dinner for Mom and Dad. That's happened to me, and it's no fun"

At Legal Sea Foods this parent trap is history. The lobster is removed from the shell and diced and then placed back in the shell. "We stuff it back into the shell so the child can have the whole lobster experience," White explains. "The parent doesn't have to do anything."