5 Tips from Patrick Diessner, Culinary Director at Wingers Alehouse
Crafting a winning restaurant menu that includes both traditional and innovative fare, appeals to a variety of tastes, and is easy to execute with exceptional consistency is no small feat. But it’s a challenge that drives Patrick Diessner (above). As culinary director for the Wingers Alehouse franchise, Diessner loves creating unique recipes that can be easily and flawlessly replicated, offering those dishes alongside traditional favorites, and engaging with team members charged with their execution.
The family-friendly Wingers Alehouse is well known for its fresh, hand-breaded bone-in wings and boneless Sticky Fingers, which come with a choice of 16 different sauces or rubs including Wingers Original Amazing Sauce. The Salt Lake City-based brand, which is now in some 25 locations in the Mountain West and Midwest, also features 40 to 50 craft beers on tap, including regionally brewed favorites. The restaurant menu also includes a variety of burgers, pastas, Southwestern favorites, vegetarian and gluten-free options – and so much more.
Diessner joined Wingers Alehouse in 2018 after almost a lifetime of culinary experience starting when he was 14. “I just fell in love with the business. Restaurants involve controlled chaos, and I loved that.” After high school, he attended the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, served a couple of internships and embarked on a career that ranged from running his own intimate ski-resort restaurant to leading a small culinary staff serving up to 600 people at events ranging from weddings to corporate events.
Crafting a Winning Restaurant Menu
Although much of his work these days is behind a desk, Diessner enjoys working with staff as often as possible. His tips for a winning restaurant menu include:
1. Great Food, Simple Preparation
Each dish must be perfect each time in every Wingers Alehouse location, but that doesn’t mean it has to start with a simple idea. “I keep updated on what’s going on in the industry. I like to go to really small places. I love food trucks. I love innovation, where people are more willing to take risks,” Diessner says. “Then when I see something I’m really interested in, I like to figure out how can I turn it into something that’s not going to be difficult for our kitchens to execute and can be something that’s really fun.”
2. Food that Guests Can’t Make at Home
“We have a traditional restaurant menu, but I always want to do special things to make the food unique because that helps create the amazing experience that we want to give them,” he says. A bread pudding, for example, is elevated to become a churro cheesecake bread pudding.
3. Less is More
Wingers Alehouse co-founders and brothers Eric and Scott Slaymaker designed the restaurant franchise to be successful in smaller markets where the big chains can’t compete, and that’s worked. Coincidentally, they’ve found that a smaller restaurant menu is more appealing to guests and more economical, and research backs this up. “A lot of people have that fear of missing out. They’re thinking, ‘Man, I ordered this, but I wish I would’ve gotten this.’ So, we don’t have an enormous restaurant menu that’s like a book with so many options that make it hard for our guests to decide,” Diessner says.
4. Limited Time Offerings
Wingers Alehouse does three limited time offerings (LTOs) every year to keep the restaurant menu exciting, test new items, and see what clients really enjoy and what they don’t, Diessner says. “And it really surprises me sometimes. One we did last year was Korean tacos with Sticky Fingers, Korean Q sauce, avocado, cabbage, caramelized onions, chili aioli, green onions, and sesame seeds. It sold like crazy and became a regular restaurant menu item.”
5. Keep it Amazing for Everyone!
“We like to involve our staff in things, and so we did a crew-crafted restaurant menu,” says Diessner, who solicited recipes from all staff members at all stores. “I got hundreds of items submitted. We even had a maintenance guy who submitted a recipe for a hot honey whiskey sauce that did really well and there’s a good chance it’ll make it on our restaurant menu. Then I had to pick a few and make sure they were easily executable once we sent them out brand-wide.”
The crew-crafted restaurant menu was inserted into the regular restaurant menu with photos of staff members and their roles next to their recipes. “And we teach our staff to talk about it and make recommendations from it.”
Some of the most popular crew-crafted items were a Buffalo mac ‘n’ cheese with Buffalo and other hot sauces. “It has been huge and I definitely think it’s going to be on the menu,” Diessner says. “We also had a blackened chicken sandwich with caramelized cinnamon apples, which I love. You get that rich blackened chicken, and then you get that really nice, sweet, tangy apple, and then you add bacon because bacon is good on everything. It has so many flavors happening.
“And one of our cooks came up with Baja-style fish tacos. We use a fish called pangasius that tastes almost like lobster and it’s battered in our Winger Bros. Hazy Wheat beer batter. The dish is just real simple, relying on the flavor of the fish and a nice pico de gallo, fresh avocadoes, lime crema, then a little drizzle of chipotle sour cream,” Diessner says.
“The crew-crafted restaurant menu was a lot of work, but the staff takes so much pride in it. And if you can help especially the younger generation take pride in what they do, want to take their family to the restaurant because their friend made this dish or because they made that dish, then it’s really worth it.”
For more information about franchising with Wingers Alehouse, visit https://wingerbros.com/franchising-opportunities/.
