Eddie Cerino owns and operates Eddie’s Pizzeria Cerino in Ohio. Open greater than a yr, Cerino’s unconventional cooking and menu choices show there’s extra to pizzerias than pies and pasta.
Q: Your menu gadgets use costly substances like San Marzano tomatoes, seafood and recent cheeses. How are you retaining meals prices down?
A: We run a 29-percent meals value, which is excessive for a typical pizzeria and low for a full service restaurant. Controlling meals value all the time begins together with your menu and quantity of stock gadgets, particularly perishable stock. We restrict our seafood to 2 gadgets on the menu shrimp and clams. Each come out of the freezer and don’t have any or little or no waste. We run one recent fish particular at a time and watch over it like a hawk to take care of correct par ranges. Portion management is essential. We portion all the pieces from all of our completely different pastas to sauces, proteins and breads. Lastly, we now have a really detailed system for warm prep that permits us to make many gadgets from scratch and nonetheless keep consistency in our taste profiles.
Q: Your weekly specials are creative! What’s your secret for duplicating these homestyle recipes in a industrial kitchen?
A: We’re an organization of techniques and recipes. We alter our specials each two weeks. We restrict them to 2 lunches and two dinners. We’ve make-cards for the road to make sure that everyone seems to be making ready them the identical. We are also very cautious that the particular fi ts our scorching line system. It can’t be too sophisticated, too many substances or take too lengthy to get out of the kitchen. It is rather vital that the standard of any particular be constant whether or not there are two checks hanging or 20 checks hanging. This takes cautious planning and monitoring.
Q: You make your individual desserts, and so they’re decadent like your Smores Cookie Pizzette and Chocolate Cassata Cake. Why not outsource these like so many different eating places?
A: I imagine that appetizers and desserts are two nice methods to distinguish you from the competitors. In case you are shopping for desserts out of your purveyor or from a neighborhood supplier, the restaurant throughout the road might be serving the identical merchandise. We do purchase a pair desserts from a neighborhood purveyor, however we make the remainder. We restrict the dessert menu and run month-to-month specials. This controls the quantity of prep and stock and permits us to benefit from seasonal gadgets.
Q: Your menu transcends pizza and spaghetti. How nicely do gadgets like cioppino & baked wild mushroom ravioli promote?
A: Promoting specials is all in regards to the buyer’s confidence in your kitchen. After we opened, it took about six months of aggressive in-house advertising and marketing and robust server suggestive promoting to get clients to attempt some unconventional specials. Unconventional for a pizzeria, that’s. Now our specials normally outsell most menu gadgets. As soon as once more, it’s all about differentiating you from the competitors. Providing specials like cioppino or wild mushroom ravioli and making ready them with high quality substances persistently offers you a leg up on the competitors and means that you can construct the vital “common” buyer base.
Q: You’ve been open greater than a yr now. What’s the one factor that has stunned you probably the most about this enterprise?
A: One of many adjustments I’ve seen over the past yr is buyer information of culinary substances and preparation. The plethora of meals and cooking applications on tv are making for a extra educated and adventurous eating public. Extra so now than at any time in my 30 years within the restaurant enterprise. You’ll be able to’t brown some floor meat, add it to your marinara sauce and name it Bolognese. This does put strain on operators to be artistic and truthful of their menus and specials. If you happen to don’t, the eating places down the road will, and take a few of your clients together with them.
