If you’ve been hanging out at the 443 for a while, you know we’ve gone through many menu iterations. As we’ve fine-tuned our business model, our menu has evolved too.
We don’t have a real kitchen, just a 4′ cold prep table behind the bar, along with some countertop pizza ovens and a couple of crockpots. After lots of trial and error, I think our current menu is the one that makes the most sense… both for our business model and the space we have available.
Our focus these days is on tapas and appetizer-type items to enjoy with cocktails. We offer a handful of flatbread pizzas, a loaded hummus platter, a charcuterie board and cheese board, plus warm mixed nuts, a chip and dip, and a rotating cookie selection. We do not have the space to make the flatbreads to order, so they are prepped during the day.
2023 has been a year of massive growth for us… we’ve been +55%-75% in sales all year, which is CRAZY. We’re selling out about 75% of our shows. We’ve expanded our team and our staff is larger than ever.
It’s been a heady year, but with all that growth comes growing pains.
Our room holds 75 people. We do our best to encourage everyone to arrive early when we send out our email show reminder through Eventbrite. Our Wine & Whiskey Happy Hour runs for an hour and a half before the show starts, and all wine, whiskey, and well drinks are $2 off. We also point out that you’ve got to arrive early if you want to park close to the door. All our parking is on the street, and if you arrive late you’ll likely be parked around the block.
Despite our best efforts, most of the room arrives between 6:30-7pm, so we’re scrambling to get food and drink orders in for 75 people in a very tight time frame. After a particularly brutal ass-kicking recently, we knew we had to make some changes.
We were using teardrop-shaped Naan flatbreads as a base for our pizzas.
They worked fine for a while, but they just aren’t practical now that we’re so busy. The Naan bread pizzas take 12-14 minutes to cook and tend to cook unevenly if you don’t babysit them and move them around in the oven. We can fit 6 Naan breads in the ovens at a time. If 37 people order a pizza around the same time, it will take well over an hour for the folks at the end of the line to get their food, and that’s NO BUENO. The customers end up annoyed and the staff stressed out, but there is nothing that can be done – there is no way to speed up the time and we can’t force people to stagger their arrival times.
We recently added 2 vegan pizza options to our menu, the Thai and Margherita, which are made the Notzarella vegan cheese from Syracuse’s own PMA Foods.
Naan bread is not vegan because it’s made with clarified butter, or “ghee”, so I ordered a different flatbread from the same company. We started playing around with them and discovered the rectangle flatbreads are more uniform in size, cook more consistently, and are done in exactly 7 minutes. We can still fit 6 in our ovens. So, in our scenario with 37 people ordering at once, the customers at the end of the line will wait 42 minutes. It’s not ideal, but it’s a heck of a lot better than 78 minutes for the Naan. Because it doesn’t have butter in it, the result is crispier and lighter, which I LOVE.
So, you’re probably wondering why this menu update warranted one of my long-winded blog posts, aren’t you?
Well, the new pizzas are significantly bigger than the old ones. The Naan bread is 6″x7″ to 6″x8″, and the new rectangles are 6″x12″ – 50% bigger. The Naan breads are personal-sized and the new flatbreads are better for sharing – they are cut into 8 squares. With the larger size comes a higher price, plus the flatbread itself is more expensive.
If you glance at our new menu and don’t realize we’ve changed the product completely, it looks like we raised the price of our pizzas by about 5 bucks.
YIKES! Has Julie lost her damn mind?!?
Stay with me…
The new pizzas are intended for two people. Our goal here is not only to cut down on the cooking time but to sell fewer pizzas. I know it sounds crazy, but we simply don’t have the space and equipment to have the personal-sized pizzas on our menu anymore. It’s likely going to hurt our overall sales a little bit but taking over an hour to send out food hurts us too. It changes our scenario of 37 people each ordering a personal-sized pizza and waiting an hour to 19 of the larger pizzas going out in under 25 minutes. Obviously, single attendees can still order them, and we’re happy to box up the extra pieces.
I would love to knock out a wall, tear down the bar and food area, and start over (and maybe I will someday… I have ideas!) but in the short term, this is a great solution. We rolled out the new menu yesterday, and so far the response has been excellent.
So there you have it… we hope you try our new and improved flatbreads on your next visit.
