A family-style meal at Lonesome Rose in Chicago
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By Ed Avis
When some groups of customers visit Lonesome Rose, a TexMex restaurant with locations in Chicago’s hip Logan Square and Andersonville neighborhoods, they don’t order individual menu items. Rather, they enjoy family-style platters of the restaurant’s signature dishes.
The family-style menu options, which Lonesome Rose began offering just over a year ago, offer benefits for those customers and the restaurant.
“It definitely works well for people who are celebrating a special occasion or birthdays or even corporate outings,” says Crystal Wells, assistant director of private events, catering and production for Land and Sea Dept., the parent company of Lonesome Rose. “Even a lot of our regular customers that come in weekly with smaller groups got excited once we started doing these.”
Big Servings for Customers
At its core, family-style dining means serving dishes in platters or bowls rather than individually plated, just like at a family Sunday dinner. And there is enough of each item that every member of the group can get a full serving. This differs from tapas, which often are shared but rarely offer more than a small bite for each customer in the party. Family-style dishes typically are popular menu items, just in substantially larger sizes.
At Lonesome Rose, family-style dining options are offered as multi-course packages for groups of from six to 24 people. That’s the sweet spot for this type of service, because smaller parties are better served from the regular menu and larger groups are big enough to order from the restaurant’s catering menu.
The Lonesome Rose family-style package begins with a Margarita or a spirit-free cocktail, accompanied by a chips-and-dips platter that includes fresh tortilla chips with two salsas — Tomatillo Crudo and Pineapple Habanero — plus Chile con Queso and California Avenue Street Corn.
“This is a great starter for the table,” Wells says. “You get all of our good dips and really start getting into it.”
A family-size bowl of salad follows. The salad changes with the season; at press time it was the Lonesome Wedge Salad — a mix of Little Gem lettuce, roasted peppers, radish, corn, black beans, red onion, pickled sweet peppers, queso fresco and cilantro topped with house-made green goddess dressing.
The main course is pre-ordered selection of three tacos from the restaurant’s six offerings: Fried Chicken, Baja Fish, Rodrigo’s Al Pastor, Tinga de Garbanzo, Carne Asada or El Dorado Supreme. The package includes three tacos per person.
Slices of Dulce de Leche Pie — made by Bang Bang Pie & Biscuits, an artisanal bakery located beside Lonesome Rose’s Logan Square location — finish off the meal for each customer.
The Mechanics
At Lonesome Rose, customers must pre-order the family-style packages at least 48 hours before they arrive. This helps the restaurant plan for the group and ensures that the tasty chips and dips arrive just as guests show up. As an added incentive to book the family deal in advance, the restaurant honors seating preferences.
“This guarantees the customers not only a fantastic meal, but it guarantees the reservation,” Wells explains. “If people want to be seated exclusively on our rooftop or on the patio, that's a guarantee that also comes along with these bookings. It kind of takes the guesswork out, especially if you're bringing a large group of people. It's about getting the group together so that you don't have to spend too much time over the menu. You don't have to choose at all, and you can just go right in to socializing. And it's also nice because the tables are preset, and it looks really cute. We print menus for it, so everyone gets to see the menu of what's to come.”
Wells explains that preparing a family-style dinner that has been pre-ordered is much easier for the kitchen than serving the same number of people ordering individually, especially given the expansive size of Lonesome Rose’s menu. And the timing of the meal is easier, too, because the kitchen and the server know approximately when people are arriving and when each course will be served. Naturally the restaurant is happy to accommodate special dietary needs of customers, and the pre-order process makes that easier, too.
As far as servingware, the restaurant had some large-format platters and bowls on-hand for catering orders, but ordered more to ensure they could provide a consistent look. They also created standard operating procedures for plating the family-style dinners to remove any guesswork from the back-of-the-house workers.
Big Advantages for Business
If six customers walk into your restaurant and order six cocktails and six entrees, that’s a probably a good check. So, would you risk diminishing that check if you offered a family-style package? Not if you set it up right.
For example, because Lonesome Rose offers a multi-course meal, they can comfortably charge $55 per person for the package, which is more than the average per-person check.
“Typically, people will come in, grab a couple of drinks and a few tacos. Maybe they’re not also ordering the salad, not also ordering the chips, not also ordering pie, right?” Wells says. “We find that this is more advantageous because we have a higher check average built in with the family-style dinner.”
Nevertheless, customers love the deal, Wells says. They recognize that they are getting a lot of food for a set price. And they get to try more menu items than they would on a normal visit to the restaurant. For example, rarely would a customer ordering off the regular menu choose chips with two salsas, queso and street corn, but that’s standard in the family-style meal. And the salads and the dessert in the package change regularly, so even customers who order the family-style dinner more than once get to try new things.
Tips for Restaurants
Wells offers two tips for restaurants seeking to add family-style options to their menus:
First, use items for your existing regular menu to create the family-style packages. Those are already tested items that your kitchen prepares well. “Maybe include items that you really love, but which aren’t seeing as much popularity as you’d like,” she says. “You can build a package around it and create a buzz.”
And second, use the packages as a way to incentivize larger groups. “You can build these to target the audiences and the types of diners that you’re looking for,” she says.
The bottom line is that a family-style program can make customers happy while generating more revenue for the restaurant. “It never really hurts to try it,” Wells says. “We've had really great success with it.”
Ed Avis is the publisher of el Restaurante