To most, Gabriel’s is an Italian restaurant in Highwood.
To some, Gabriel’s is a private kitchen staffed with professional cooks ready to whip up whatever their hungry hearts desire.
The menu? Mere suggestions.
Take one Gabriel’s customer, for example. He took one look at the menu and decided: Nah, I want a burger. Voila! A burger he had.
Other customers always order the cucumber salad with creme fraiche and Gorgonzola cheese. On the menu? No! Does the kitchen have the ingredients in-house? No! But they will send someone out to buy them.
Yet another customer makes so many special requests he is actually seated with a special menu printed just for him. Whose name is on the top? His, not Gabriel’s.
“We are a restaurant that will do just about anything for our customer,” said restaurant manager Yamandu Perez. “My policy is, if it’s within a few miles we will go get it.”
Ordering from the menu is so 2005. Today, it’s all about ordering off-menu as customers realize that restaurants are willing to do pretty much anything for them.
“Customers have a lot of choices regarding where to eat,” said Anna Mattila, associate professor at Pennsylvania State University’s School of Hospitality Management. “Making the guest feel special is one way to forge the loyalty bond.”
Things sure have changed since “Five Easy Pieces,” the 1970 movie famous for a scene in which Jack Nicholson’s character tries to order a side of toast at a roadside diner. The waitress tells him they don’t have side orders of toast. He ends up ordering a chicken salad sandwich on toast–but hold everything but the toast.
After all that, he never did get his toast.
Ordering off-menu is a way for guests to feel like an insider, like they are “in the know.”
Take Gayety’s Chocolates and Ice Cream Company in Lansing. Those not in the know order the hot fudge sundae or some other pedestrian concoction listed on the menu.
But those in the know order a more obscure treat, one that’s been around since the 1920s: The cantaloupe sundae.
“It’s a cantaloupe, cut in half with fresh pineapple in the bottom, vanilla bean ice cream on top then real whipped cream and chopped roasted almonds,” said Gayety’s owner Jim Flessor, who keeps a couple cantaloupes around just in case someone orders one.
Asked how people know about the secret sundae, Flessor said regulars remember it from Gayety’s original store in South Chicago, which closed in the mid-1980s. And new customers are intrigued when they see one, he said. “Once they see it, they want it too.”
At Hot Doug’s, that Avondale sausage Mecca, customers in the know order the menu’s “cheese Tater Tots.”
The potato nuggets do appear on the menu, though only as part of a kids’ plate and then only plain.
Customers “see Tater Tots and they ask, `Can I get Tater Tots?'” Hot Doug’s owner Doug Sohn said. “And then they ask, `Can I get cheese Tater Tots?'”
Sure, Sohn tells them. He drizzles them with a Cheddar cheese sauce he describes as being not unlike Cheese Whiz.
At ethnic restaurants, ordering off-menu is sometimes about getting authentic cuisine instead of Americanized dishes.
At Greek Islands, many Greek regulars have a whole other menu in mind than the one they’re handed when they sit down. They’ll ask for the cracked green olives, pickled onion spread or the fruit plate flavored with cinnamon and honey.
Exactly the kind of stuff you see a waiter balancing on a tray and, after searching through the menu, wondering, what the heck was that? I’m not seeing fruit plate here.
“There is a wild onion in Greece called volvos,” said Greek Islands general manager Louie Alexakis. “We bring over a couple of hundred pounds in barrels. And the customers who know, they ask, `Did [owner] Gus bring in any of those wild onions?’ If that is the case, we prepare a special dish for them. It is really delicious.”
The real question is how much should a person be charged for, say, that wild onion dish, said Pennsylvania State University hospitality professor David Cranage.
“Menus are costed out very carefully. So when you are doing it off the cuff, it is a little difficult,” Cranage said.
Charge too little and you’ll hurt your bottom line, Cranage said. Charge too much and you risk angering your wild onion-loving customer.
And if this onion addict comes in a few weeks later and wants the same thing, you better have a way to figure out how much you charged last time, he said.
Ordering off-menu is also de rigueur for those heading to a restaurant they adore for its atmosphere. For some, that means hanging out in a comfortable, stylish restaurant specializing in, say, Mexican food, but ordering spaghetti.
Or vice versa. Which brings us back to Gabriel’s.
Tom Wagner of Highland Park said Gabriel’s willingness to make just about anything for him is one reason he and his wife, Yvonne, visit the restaurant once or twice a week.
“It’s hard to get catered to like that,” said Wagner, who typically orders steak tartare or tomatoes baked with spices and cheese and olive oil–both not on the menu. And Yvonne? She orders the cucumber salad, also not on the menu.
Wagner said he and his wife are both good home cooks, and know what they like. With the baked tomato dish, he told them exactly how he wanted it made. How did they do?
“They made it exactly to order,” he said. “They would do it for anybody. A lot of people look at my plate and wonder what it is and they will order it too.”
A few weeks ago, cooks at that restaurant were busy preparing a vegetarian Mexican feast–stuffed peppers and enchiladas for the main course–for a regular customer who has also requested Thai and Moroccan food in the past.
In fact, Perez said he once received a call from the manager of a neighboring restaurant. His customer, he explained, really wanted a Gabriel’s “espressotini.”
Perez made the cocktail, placed the shaker and a martini glass on a tray and headed to the other restaurant.
“I shook it as violently as I could. I poured it tableside, and I walked away,” he said.
Perez said only four words to them: “We’ll see you later.”
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ttsouderos@tribune.com
Gabriel’s Restaurant, 310 Green Bay Rd., Highwood; 847-433-0031, www.egabriels.com.
Gayety’s Chocolates and Ice Cream Company, 3306 Ridge Rd., Lansing; 800-491-0755, www.gayetys.com.
Greek Islands, 200 S. Halsted St., 312-782-9855; www.greekislands.net.
Hot Doug’s, 3324 N. California Ave., 773-279-9550, www.hotdougs.com.
