Forget range: restaurants should focus on getting one thing right

Some of my favourite meals have been of the Henry Ford variety. “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants,” he said of his production-line motor vehicles in 1909, “so long as it is black.”

There was a truly great meal at Union Farm, the roadside stall of a chicken farm in Singapore, where you could have any food you liked, as long as it was chicken. And any chicken you liked, as long as it was chee pao kai – marinated, wrapped in paper, and deep-fried. You unwrapped it, burnt your fingers, ate the sticky, fragrant, caramelised meat within, and left. Perfect.

Then there was the lobster roll from a lobster shack in New York that did lobster rolls and nothing else. Oysters from an oyster bar in Bordeaux that just did oysters. Mary’s laksa stall at Parap markets in Darwin, to which you go when you want laksa, not when you want grilled lamb chops, mashed potato and peas. All of these people have refined what they do down to one thing, and do it very well.

It’s time we waved goodbye to the big menu that name-checks multiple ingredients and cooking methods. They’re too expensive to produce, too unsustainable to manage, and too overwhelming to choose from.

It’s time we waved goodbye to the big menu that name-checks multiple ingredients and cooking methods. They’re too expensive to produce, too unsustainable to manage, and too overwhelming to choose from. Henry Ford wouldn’t stand for it. Reduce the menu and you reduce the hours of food preparation, the labour costs – and the waste.

Loading

As it happens, chefs and restaurateurs are having a hard think about how to take things back to basics. You can see it already, in Sydney chef Josh Niland’s imminent takeaway fish shop in Rose Bay. Inspired by the success of the single-focus charcoal chicken joint, Charcoal Fish will concentrate on just one fish – the mighty Murray cod, sustainably farmed in Griffith, NSW – grilled over coals.

Melbourne has been a well-fed witness to one of the all-time great examples of doing one thing well, in Vlado’s Steakhouse in Richmond. When it opened in 1964, the typical meal started with sausage, went on to rump, fillet or porterhouse, and finished with strawberry pancakes. It still does.

There’s a special joy to be had in having no choices, and thereby making no decisions. I think that Mr Ford was on to something.