Tomatoes, onions, chile and cilantro… all well and good for a salsa, but this versatile, flavorful ingredient can be so much more.

Part sauce, part relish, even part salad, salsa has moved out beyond the standard-issue chip accessory to become a signature-making menu component. Just take a look at the following examples by way of proof.

• Three salsas offered at Dos Caminos, in New York City: Roasted Tomato-Arbol Salsa; Pasilla de Oaxaca Salsa; Tres Chiles Salsa
• The Blue Room, Boston: Big, Huge, Giant Grilled Shrimp with Scotch Bonnet Salsa
• McCormick & Schmick’s: Coconut Fried Shrimp with horseradish marmalade and tropical fruit salsa; Mako Shark, blackened, roast corn salsa and fried chili onion rings
• Down Under, Waves, N.C. :  Down Under Tartlet (Flaky crust filled with sausage and egg, topped with cheese, baked and finished with crab salsa)
• Pittypat’s Porch, Atlanta: Black-eyed Pea Cakes with Southern peach salsa
• Métisse French Bistro, New York City: Traditional orange crème brûlée, with rose strawberry salsa, homemade biscuit
• Tortilla Flats, Soquel, Calif.:  Pollo con Pina y Nopalitos (Grilled chicken strips with fresh pineapple and nopalito salsa, served on a bed of fresh greens)
• Ubuntu, Napa, Calif.: Bitter Green Beignets with carrot top salsa verde, ‘pac man’ broccoli

Carrot top salsa? Yes, indeed. Remembering that salsa is just another word for sauce helps open up the field for all kinds of inspirations, ingredients, utilizations and techniques. It’s also not just for Mexican menus.

• Use your favorite salsa to dress up straightforward proteins such as grilled fish, chicken or pork
• Add it to vinaigrette dressings to bring added texture and color to salads, or to mayonnaise, sour cream, softened goat cheese, or hummus to create a sandwich condiment or dip
• Turn a freebie into an item you can charge for by menuing several different salsas with chips and crudités
• Experiment with different chiles beyond the familiar jalapeno or chipotles; there are a wide variety of fresh and dried chiles, as well as chile pastes and other products, from easy-to-work-with serranos to incendiary habaneros, and more-exotic peppers like Peru’s aji amarillo
• Remember that salsa represents a great utilization for produce, such as overripe or bruised fruits, a “bumper crop” of zucchini or lots of prime-season tomatoes
• Speaking of seasonal, salsa is a perfect means for reflecting what’s freshest from the farm at any given time of year
• Salsa ingredients don’t need to be raw; even standard salsa components like tomatoes, onions and chiles can be smoked, roasted, grilled, charred, pickled and more to bring a different flavor profile and texture to the finished recipe
• Seafood salsa are becoming more popular, and a great utilization for items like broken shrimp or a batch of crabmeat that needs to be used up quickly; when in doubt, start with a seafood salad recipe and adjust it to create a salsa
• Take inspiration from ethnic cuisine; for instance, the ingredients in pesto can be more roughly chopped to create a salsa with the fresh tastes of basil and garlic
• In a similar vein, use the concept of a salsa to make ingredients more accessible to customers; can the Sicilian eggplant relish known as caponata be recast as Sicilian olive and eggplant salsa?
• Remember to look at contrasting and complementary textures and colors when creating a salsa; you can always add texture with raw vegetables or even nuts
• Fruit salsas can be used with desserts, especially if the fruits are sweetened, caramelized through roasting, and/or paired with additions like cinnamon or shredded coconut

At Synergy Consultants, we can help you develop menu selections to create “WOW” flavors and visual appeal, balanced with targeted food cost, profit contribution and an eye for consistent execution.

With the fast casual boom and rising popularity of Mexican menu items (think tacos), there’s been an interesting new finding in a recent market intelligence report from Technomic.

They found that while chicken and beef are still the main ingredients in tacos, the amount of fish tacos on restaurant menus was up 22.5 percent in a one year (2009-2010).

Findings from the research in this report also show an increase in sales by 2.7 for limited service Mexican restaurants which is impressive considering the 3.2 contraction for the industry during the same period.

Now more than ever, consumers seeking convenience, affordability and ethnic dining experience — the Mexican fast casual model has proven to satisfy these needs.

By Joan Lang

This time, it almost sounds like a joke. Beverages under 25 calories. Air-popped popcorn for celebrations, instead of cake. No French fries, ever. So say new “guidelines” for employees of New York City’s Department of Health, an organization that has already distinguished itself as the ultimate mouthpiece of the nanny state. With the city’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, on a crusade to reduce New Yorkers’ consumption of salt, fat and alcohol—not to mention cigarettes—you have to wonder if the next proscription for the City that Never Sleeps will be caffeine.

Bloomberg and New York City have been way ahead of the curve on the issue of restaurants posting calorie counts, and the industry has been watching closely to judge the impact of the move, which became effective just about exactly three years ago, on April 21, 2008.

Early studies indicated that customers were not about to change their habits, and now, on the eve of new FDA rules that will affect chain restaurants nationwide, the results are no more compelling. Why, then, all the kerfuffle?

The restaurant industry is nothing if not responsive to its customer base, and customers have been insisting with increasing vigor that they want healthier options at restaurants, even if they don’t actually order them when they get there.

A number of chains have actually been quite enthusiastic about offering so-called better-for-you choices, among them Wendy’s push for salads, Hardee’s new under 500-calorie turkey burgers, and Applebee’s longstanding commitment to both Weight Watchers and a growing roster of choices containing fewer than 550 calories.

Interestingly, a new study from NPD also indicates that customers who ordered these kinds of options spent less when ordering off a menu with calories displayed–$6.20 versus $6.40 on average, although this could be the result of ordering smaller portion sizes. All of which again points to the need for the foodservice industry to just roll with it.

By Joan Lang

Over the years the idea of fusion food has sometimes gotten a bad rep—remember all the jokes about “con-fusion”?—but the news that Houston’s co-founder Vic Branstetter is planning to develop a South African restaurant concept is a reminder that cross-cultural cuisine has a long and logical history in the world.

Take, for example, Vietnam, whose cuisine is becoming increasingly popular in the United States. Two of its most iconic and well-received foods, phở noodle soup and banh mi sandwiches—have roots in French colonialism. The French taught the Vietnamese to make both crusty bread and forcemeat mixtures like pate, both of which figure prominently in the banh mi sandwich; in fact, the word banh loosely translates as “bread” or “cake.” The existence in the sandwich of mayonnaise is also a clue to its origin, probably as a picnic food in the French countryside.

As for phở, the name may be a corruption of the French word feu, pronounced like the famous pot au feu (“pot on the fire”), which also owes its flavor to the step of browning the onions aggressively in the pot before continuing to build the broth. The abundant use of fresh herbs in both pho and the banh mi—indeed, in much of Vietnamese cuisine—is also a legacy of its French heritage.

Ever wonder about the origin of tiradito, the signature Peruvian appetizer of raw fish garnished with chile, ginger and lime? Again, think of immigration. Millions of Italian immigrants came to Latin America when the area gained independence in the 1810s–1820s, while the Japanese began arriving in the late 1800s to seek better lives for themselves.

Whether tiradito was a homesick attempt to recreate crudo, carpaccio or sashimi is the subject of much debate, but it seems certain that tiradito came about as much “fusion” foods do: new arrivals turning their beloved techniques and flavors to the ingredients of their new homes. (The Italians, by the way, are also said to have invented the tango.)

Which brings us back to the subject of 10 Degrees South and its South African menu . Like many places that have been shaped by Colonialism, South Africa also reflects its history of arrivals by Portuguese, French, Dutch, and German settlers, as well as Indians and Malaysians—themselves the product of an intensely polyglot culture. No wonder that South African food is often called the “rainbow cuisine.” Bobotie, a kind of curry, is of Malaysian descent; sosaties are beef skewers that owe their origin to satays. Boerewors sausage is based on a traditional Dutch recipe. And South Africa’s famous peri-peri sauce is derived from the piri piri chile beloved by the Portuguese. Mr. Branstetter may be on to something.

Recently we saw a menu that offered, among other things, Ciopino and Shitake & Artichoke Dumplings. Granted, even the correct spelling of shiitake mushroom is regrettable, and there are more egregious ways to misspell cioppino (it’s even been spotted phonetically: chapino), but that’s no excuse for misspellings in menu copy.

In our rush to engineer menus and find the paper that offers the best matrix of value and quality, we often overlook an important step: copyediting the document. Whether you use a dictionary, spell-check or an actual copyeditor, it should be a given that there are no errors in spelling or grammar on a menu.

It’s not just a matter of professionalism; in our self-appointed role of educating consumers about different cuts of meat, ethnic culinary traditions or where our food comes from, we also owe it to our patrons to spell things correctly.

And while we’ve got the bully pulpit, here are a few food terms that have become so widely misspelled as to almost have become institutionalized—or maybe they’re just pet peeves of ours.

• Mesculin (or even mescalin) Salad – You may have fiddled with something like this in college, but functioning members of adult society eat mesclun.
• Carmelized Onions – Sautéing sweet onions slowly to produce a Maillard Reaction is just too tasty a process not to acknowledge that they’re caramelized.
• Artesianal Cheese – That’s cheese made in a well, folks. The correct spelling (and pronunciation) is artisanal; just say “artisan” and add the a-l.*

So get out those blue pencils and use them on your menu, then use them again. Buy the Food Lover’s Companion, or check out any of the good online sources, including the one at Epicurious. Load up your computer with customized spelling specific to the beautiful language of food. And you should be showing your menu to as many other people as possible anyway; while you’re at it, show it someone who’s a little anal-retentive about words.

*Just to prove that you learn something new every day, spell-checking this article turned up the fact that artesanal, with an e, is also an acceptable spelling—albeit seldom seen.

We have the pleasure of working with a wonderful Italian restaurant, Old Venice. The Synergy team has been hard at work assisting Old Venice with making new improvements to their current menu. We were featured in NEM360.com’s article regarding our recent visits:

“By early summer, Old Venice Pizza Co. hopes to roll out a new menu at its four locations in Tupelo, Oxford, Starkville and Memphis.

Read the full story.

The statistics are staggering — more than one-third of children and two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. With typical diets loaded with sugar, saturated fats and countless of calories, it is no surprise that without intervention, the statistics will only increase and our nation will be even more at risk for ailments like diabetes and heart disease.

As a result, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced the release of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, aimed to promote healthy eating habits that can decrease risks associated with obesity.

So what are some of the recommendations? A little common sense with the following recommendations can assist in transforming your eating habits:

• Eat more fruits and vegetables (especially dark green vegetables)
• Avoid sugary drinks – try water instead
• Read nutrition labels! Avoid high in sodium foods
• Stay away from oversized portions
• Drink low-fat or skim milk

See the official press release for full guidelines.

Even restaurants are taking charge and changing their menus to include healthy items. Furthermore, federal mandates for restaurants to post nutritional information has encouraged restaurants to re-think the foods they offer to their customers. This includes anything from offering fruit as a side dish for kids’ meals, fries seasoned with sea salt, or serving oatmeal and fruit for breakfast. The bottom line is that nutrition is key for living a healthy life. Consumers are finally realizing this importance and restaurants need to take notice! If you own a restaurant, the Synergy consulting team can offer a free consultation for menu development and nutritional labeling.

As much as organic eating has become a new way of living, sustainability is also a hot topic these days. The demand for sustainable products, whether it is produce at the market or a spaghetti dish at a restaurant, is growing immensely. This increase in popularity has a lot to do with the green movement – after all, sustainability generally refers to the ability for our ecosystem to sustain itself for an indefinite period without damaging the environment, or without depleting resources (think “renewable”).

It is interesting, then, that a recent online study of 2,000 adults (84 percent of which claimed to regularly buy green/sustainable food and drink) showed that many were confused about what actually makes a product “sustainable.” Claims on packaging such as “eco-friendly” and “green” are well known to consumers but descriptive terms such as “solar/wind energy usage” or “fair trade,” aren’t easily understood by consumers to equate to sustainability, according to a senior analyst at Mintel.

– 32% of those surveyed never heard of “solar/wind energy” claims

– 34% said they didn’t understand what “fair trade” meant

– 45% said they purchased sustainable food thinking that it was of better quality

– 43% stated their reason for purchasing sustainable food was for environmental concerns

– 42% cited food safety as a reason for buying sustainable foods

Restaurant owners and food producers need to recognize the varying reasons and depth of knowledge consumers have when it comes to marketing sustainable food products. It is wise to ensure that eco-benefits are clearly and concisely expressed on menus and/or packaging in an easy to understand manner.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just granted 5 jurisdictions, Los Angeles County, Broome and Schectedy counties in New York, New York City, Shawnee County in Kansas, and Shasta County in California, $1.9 million for sodium-reducing initiatives in foodservice establishments, including restaurants, school, grocery stores and food suppliers. The goal of this 3 year grant is to raise awareness of the health dangers and effects of foods prepared with large amounts of sodium and to initiate at least one major sodium-reduction policy in each region.

For example, Los Angeles County is planning to launch a program to monitor the compliance of restaurants with federal menu labeling mandates, which requires restaurant chains of 20 or more to post nutritional information, like sodium and calories. The case for regulating our salt intake has been a hot issue in the past decade as many Americans have suffered illnesses and death from heart-related conditions that may derive from high sodium diets. Many diners these days are seeking out restaurants that can cater to a healthy lifestyle. At Synergy, we are experts are reverse-engineering menu items to accommodate specific nutritional guidelines. If you feel your restaurant requires a nutritional menu update, please contact our offices for a complimentary evaluation.

We love blogging about healthy trends in restaurants like those that cook and serve locally grown foods and ones who center on vegetarian and organic options. More and more people are getting smart and choosing healthy meals when eating out. What fast-food restaurants come to your mind when you want a nutritious, figure-friendly meal? You’ll be surprised at some menu items at your favorite restaurant that you think are healthy.

Subway’s famous slogan is, “Eat Fresh,” with commercials featuring top athletes endorsing their favorite sandwiches. But did you know, in order to make the best healthy choice at this popular franchise, you have to do your research. A hot seller on the regular menu at Subway, the 6″ Spicy Italian sub actually has almost as much fat and calories (28 grams of fat, 520 calories) than a Big Mac at McDonald’s (30 grams of fat, 560 calories). And when comparing the two in terms of sodium — the sub contains way more sodium (1830 versus 1010 mg) than the latter!

Think a salad is the best option for watching your weight? Think again! Wendy’s BLT Cobb Salad has 47 grams of fat and 670 calories! Needless to say, looks can be deceiving.

If you’re unsure about what’s the best menu option for a healthy meal, consider the basics. Cheese, a common add-on to sandwiches and hamburgers, contains a lot of fat and unnecessary calories. The same goes with mayonnaise and many dressings. Instead of a breaded chicken wrap, which is often fried, go for the grilled option. Skip the salad dressing and request a side of lemon or ask for a low-fat alternative. And if you’re still not sure, ask a server for a nutrition menu or check out the restaurant’s website before ordering.

Need some more help? Here’s a list of the nation’s top 5 healthiest fast food restaurants according to a recent survey conducted.

1) Panera

2) Jason’s Deli

3)Au Bon Pain

4) Noodles and Company

5) Corner Bakery Café

Wouldn’t you like to see your restaurant listed here? If you need assistance developing healthy menu items, please contact Synergy today.