Brooks Broadhurst: Eat'n Park

Nation's Restaurant News,  Sept 10, 2007  by Bret Thorn

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Pittsburgh is not known for setting culinary trends but some restaurant operators in the area are well ahead of the curve. Eat'n Park, a 79-unit family-dining chain based there, rolled out espresso machines in 2003, shortly after improving the quality of its drip coffee. It switched to canola oil with zero grams of trans fat back in August 2005. When local produce is in season, some of it can be found on the salad bars of this chain, which has a check average of just $7. Eat'n Park started marketing the produce last year, but the company has been working to source local products for the past five.

"We have been lucky picking ideas that we think are pretty hot," says Brooks Broadhurst, senior vice president of food and beverage for Eat'n Park Hospitality Group.

But it's not all luck. The company doesn't just manage family-dining restaurants. It also operates Parkhurst Dining--45 on-site accounts in colleges, corporate dining, museums, etc.--and Cura Hospitality, which provides foodservice for retirement communities, senior living facilities and some small regional hospitals. The company also owns four diners and Six Penn Kitchen, a high-end casual restaurant in downtown Pittsburgh.

So Broadhurst is on top of what's happening with nearly every age group in nearly every segment in the country.

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He oversees purchasing and development companywide. In addition, the "culinary councils" in the Parkhurst and Cura arms report to him.

The chefs at the unit level are the driving forces behind those operations, while Eat'n Park is run more from the top down, with two chefs who report to Broadhurst taking responsibility for the menu throughout the system.

Of course, sometimes they try to make innovations trickle down too quickly, like when they tried to give family-dining customers a choice of light-roast or dark-roast coffees five years ago.

"We were a little ahead of ourselves," he admits, but he notes that part of the problem was that they were simultaneously testing espresso machines. That process took about a year and a half to figure out and was followed by a massive rollout in which, in just two months, they trained 4,000 servers to be baristas.

Teaching servers to make espresso drinks while also getting them to remember to ask customers how they liked their coffee roasted seemed to be too much.

"It was one of those things that operationally was a little bit of a struggle for us," he says. So after trying the two roasts in six stores, they pulled the plug.

That's part of the menu team's testing process. They start by showing ideas for new items to a menu committee of members from the marketing, operations and menu development teams. Then the potential menu items are developed and tested in five to 10 stores for about two weeks. The goal is to get at least 100 customer responses and to see if the new dishes work operationally.

About nine months ago they added a new step to the process: vetting their ideas online before presenting them to the committee. As a result, "we feel we spend less time spinning our wheels," Broadhurst says.

Now, instead of trying to add a new coffee blend, Eat'n Park works on gradually making its coffee better without shocking its customers.

"For a lot of our customers, any change is bad," Broadhurst says. So he doesn't want them to be disturbed by a new coffee. "We want our customers to say: 'Wow! This cup of coffee tastes great today,'" he says, without them knowing that it's a different blend.

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"We know that big, radical changes don't work because even though [the coffee] might be a better product to a quote-unquote 'coffee expert,' we don't have coffee experts coming to our restaurants, we have people who drink lots of coffee."

Eat'n Park serves only shade-grown coffee.

"It's not necessarily that it's better for the environment or anything else, it simply is better-tasting coffee," Broadhurst says. "Most of the time, we find that the best ingredients are produced by those folks who really care about what they're producing, be it bacon or a cup of coffee." Most of the caring coffee producers, he says, are growing their coffee in the shade. "That's what we've found. I'm not saying it's the gospel."

But the fact that it pleases environmentalists is a bonus and will likely be even more of one in years to come, he says.

Broadhurst sees the desire for local products as part of a broader green movement. "It's not something that's going to take over the world ... but I think it is something that is here to stay," he says, noting that the large quick-service restaurants and grocery stores also are examining ways to be more green.

Broadhurst says he started to get pressure to use more local items as early as six years ago, with much of the pressure coming from retirement communities in Philadelphia--perhaps more for reasons of flavor than of environmentalism.