People imagine menu development as inspiration striking a chef. It's more like a courtroom: dishes are tried, evidence is weighed, most are convicted of not being good enough. Here's the actual process.
Where it starts
A menu starts with the suppliers, not the kitchen. Six weeks before a season changes, we get the lists: what's coming off, what's peaking, what this year's weather did to it. The menu is written around what the farms have, not around what we feel like cooking.
The six weeks
Candidate dishes get cooked for the team first — everyone eats, everyone votes, nobody's polite. Survivors go to a staff tasting, then to a soft trial as specials. A dish that runs a week of services and still gets ordered twice by the same table graduates to the menu.
What gets rejected
Last season's reject pile included a brilliant celeriac dish nobody ordered, a dessert that photographed beautifully and ate boringly, and a sauce that took three hours to make for a ninety-second plate. Killing dishes is most of the job. For every plate that reaches the menu, seven died in the test kitchen.
First service
Opening night of a new menu is the only honest test. A dish can survive six weeks of development and fail in ten minutes of real service — too slow at the pass, too fragile under the heat lamp. Those ones get rebuilt or replaced within the week. The menu you see tonight is the version that survived.
