Staying on trend in the club market

Having weathered the storm of Covid, the club market is now facing fresh challenges of inflated wages and cost of goods, and the consequent upward pressure on menu prices. We spoke to three club industry veterans for their take on the current state of play.

Paul Rifkin spent 17 years as executive chef at Campbelltown Catholic Club, where he was actively involved in the design, construction and menus of eight new kitchens including a hotel, convention centre, restaurants and event spaces. Today he spends much of his time consulting to foodservice operations, including undertaking three day audits of venues such as clubs - see his website www.chefpaulrifkin.com.au for more details. 

“Over the past five years I’ve done audits for 70 club clients, and I go back on a regular basis to work with and mentor their teams – it’s always exciting to guide them from where they are to where they need to be. It’s also exciting going into new places and starting from scratch with a new team – my biggest problem is remembering everybody’s name!”

Paul points out the aftermath of Covid has brought fresh challenges to the club market – “wages have never been higher, cost of goods has never been higher, and clubs are recognising the need for focus on other things than Poker machines to generate revenue. They need to look at their whole business model – that means the days of losing money in the catering operation are well and truly at an end. But a lot of clubs are struggling to maintain profitability based on all these changing dynamics.”

He says the clubs which are doing best are those which are engaging with their local communities and “doing what the customer wants, not battling it out with another club on the race to the bottom, giving away as much as possible. If you’re selling a steak for $10 that costs $11 to plate and serving it to 100 people on a Wednesday night you’ll achieve nothing.

“The smart clubs have cost controls in place, they’re running programs like Cooking the Books so they have exact numbers of what they’re doing, the chefs can set pricing correctly and obviously the pricing needs to be able to be met by the demographic they’re serving.”

Customers want consistency

One problem Paul sees frequently is a reluctance to increase menu prices for fear of losing repeat business. “I went into one club which was losing eight per cent per year, and I said ‘When did you last change pricing?’ and they replied ‘We’re too scared to’. So I suggested they step up the members’ prices to that of the visitors’ prices, then put in a new higher visitors’ price. And they said ‘People will complain’ but they did it and at the end of serving 300 people that night I asked ‘Did anyone complain?’ And they said ‘Actually we had some comments that people had thought the old pricing was too cheap’!

“So the CEO was extremely happy because immediately the loss was gone, just by making a decision they’d been too scared to make. The point is that the quality has to be what your customers expect -  if you’re doing a good quality product and hitting the mark a price rise will be accepted, but if you’re doing a crap product the customers will arc up and leave.

“You may also want to do a more upmarket offering, but just be mindful that 80 per cent of customers will want the same comfort food they know. When I look back to my fine dining ays at the Manor House in Balmain, even though it was a high-end menu 80 per cent of the sales always came from the tried and true favourites. Even with the fanciest menus, the majority of customers just want something they know and they want it to be consistent. So all a club has to do is work out where they sit in the market and make sure they can offer consistent quality.

“A lot of times the staff might put something on the menu and say that worked really well tonight – but that’s because they had the A team on. But then when the B team come in they can’t replicate it. So I always argue, don’t make something that only three or four people out of the team can cook – the menu has to be reproducible, otherwise you’re going to get complaints because customers will say ‘I came in on Sunday and the food was good, today I ordered the same thing and it was crap’. That creates negativity and drives customers away. So you need to determine what your standard is and then build to that standard.”

Standing apart from the competition

Alex Patterson is Operations Manager at The Ary Toukley, a popular club on the NSW Central Coast which has built a strong reputation on the quality of its food and prior to Covid was enjoying a strong upwards spiral, then was hit hard by its effects. “We lost a few key staff as did a lot of other places so we had to streamline our offering. We introduced daily specials, promotions we hadn’t previously done and also reduced the size of the menu so we could run the kitchen with less staff,” Alex recalls.

“We’re now back to pre-Covid staffing levels and seeing growth again, but it’s been a journey – it’s taken a long time to get back to this point where we're comfortable again and if one person goes down we can pull on another, whereas we didn’t have that luxury for a while. But we’ve always been pretty good with staff, we try to be flexible and accommodate a good work-life balance. So we've rebuilt the team back to full strength and the last 3-4 months especially have been really positive, not just on the restaurant side but the whole club – in fact we’ve got higher staff levels now than we did pre-Covid.”

The menu is also back to its former size and the club prides itself on making everything fresh inhouse. “From when we originally opened our club restaurant we always wanted to make as much inhouse as we possibly could. We’re baking fresh bread everyday again which we had to stop during Covid – we’re making our own focaccias, all our pizza dough, all our sauces and stocks.

“Our menu structure is pretty comprehensive – starters, breads, entrees, classics, pastas, burgers, chef’s choices, desserts, kids’ meals and pizzas. As we only have one food venue in the club we try to meet everyone’s needs and the chefs do a really good job. We run daily specials – it could be a pasta of the day, pizza of the day, we do fresh market fish a couple of days a week.”

Alex adds the club has also benefited from the arrival of a new executive chef who started up some six weeks ago. “He spent his first four weeks identifying any issues and from there he started to restructure the kitchen. When you have strong leadership in the kitchen it ensures the consistency is where it needs to be to keep the standard high.

“Currently he’s working on a new menu for release at the start of September and we’re all pretty keen to see what he’ll have on offer. Certainly all his specials so far have been very well received and he has an extensive pizza and pasta background so I expect we’ll up the ante a bit more in some of those areas.”

Alex says The Ary Toukley is competing against three or four venues with water views, “so we’ve got to offer a point of difference, and that’s the product we put on the plate and the service we provide. We’re not right on the water, so we focus on making sure our product is really good and that’s why we don’t buy in readymade stuff. A lot of the other venues do and most people know that – so if we can put up a product that isn’t, it really stands out.

“It might just be a chicken schnitzel, but we make it all ourselves – we’re not just pulling something out of a box and deep frying it. I think it’s well known in the area that we do put a lot of love into our food and set our sights a bit higher.”

That this approach is paying off is evidenced by the club being named Central Coast Regional Winner of Clubs NSW’s Perfect Plate Award for its Slow-Cooked Pork Cheeks. “We’ve been regional winners every year for the past three years, which is as long as the award’s been running,” Alex says proudly. “The customers get to vote and you have to be putting out a consistent product to win. It’s a great acknowledgment – I think everyone knows chefs do it pretty tough and bust their arses, so it’s good for them to see a reward at the end of it.”

Cheaper midweek meal options are paying off

Steve Sidd is managing director of Catering HQ which runs the food offerings in seven clubs across Sydney metro and the NSW Central Coast, and has just secured a contract with its eighth – Cronulla RSL.

He says the market has seen a slight downturn in customer demand – “People are still eating out, but with inflation and the interest rate rises they’re being more dollar conscious. So I think clubs have to focus on ensuring we provide a value proposition to our customers. Currently we’re running cheaper midweek options - different theme night specials for dinner Monday to Thursday – and offering our normal menus on weekends, which makes up 70 per cent of our turnover anyway.

“We’re also saying to our teams that if we want customers to come dine with us, we have to give them the best level of customer service and food quality so if they are spending their last $50 they know it’s $50 well spent. You can’t afford to give a mediocre experience, in fact you have to try to exceed customer expectations.”

Acknowledging food costs are on the rise, Steve adds “We’ve had to put some of our prices up, but in other cases we’ve re-engineered our menus to make them more affordable. Although we came out of Covid strong, we’re dealing with a lot of issues right now, so you have to be really smart about your approach – making sure you’re continually monitoring and managing costs.

“Labour is fine, we have plenty of people available to work in the local market, but the business space we’re in today is just not how it used to be. Margins are getting tighter and tighter and in fact the current circumstances are probably more tough than what Covid was. But what Covid has taught us is resilience and adaptivity – so if we see a downturn we know we need to make changes quickly and we can.

“Our midweek pricepoints for lunch are around the $17 mark, the portions are slightly smaller than dinner so we can keep them affordable. Dinner is around the $25 mark and we offer a decent-sized meal – and I think that approach has helped us get through the early part of the week, because weekends you’re busy by default. It’s all about ensuring a food value proposition and that’s 100 per cent what we’ve been focusing on.”