I work at a fast food place where we have a lot of different menu items. There are some things that come around seasonally each year, but most of our new offerings are just recombining ingredients that we use anyway.
For a limited time earlier this year, ** KFC Japan** was selling “hamburger steak” sandwiches using patties made with ground beef and pork. No chicken in sight. :-))
I have a rule when it comes to pizza, and it’s served me well so far: I never buy pizza from a place that makes anything other than pizza. Pizza requires specialization. It can’t be just another thing on the menu, it has to be the *only *thing on the menu.
More importantly, with such a big menu, why isn’t the mcrib on it?
If I kept to such a rule I would never have eaten pizza, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pizza place that didn’t at least have a few pasta options.
I remember Taco Bell, back in the day, had literally six items on their menu.
Now I look at the drive-through (excuse me, drive thru) board and I get dizzy.
They fixed something that wasn’t broke.
mmm
Really? Because most pizza places here just sell pizza.
My rule is broader but less strict: it’s the core competency rule. I figure if a place has pizza in the name, but also sells burgers, their burgers are sitting in the walk-in freezer in a 2-year-old carton, waiting for that rare moron who walks through the pizzeria door hankering for a hamburger. I won’t order it. Similarly, the pizza on offer at a burger joint is going to be nasty frozen pizza.
If I go to a pizzeria but I’m kind of in the mood for a burger, I order the damn piza, because that’s the restaurant’s core competency. It’s better to get well-made food that I’m not exactly in the mood for than to get shitty food that superficially matches what I want.
A lot of the good ones here sell things like sandwiches and pasta dishes but I have no doubt there are some that only sell pizza. It used to be that national chains like Pizza Hutt, Domino’s, and Papa John’s only sold pizza (and in the case of Pizza Hutt included salad if you ate at the restaurant) but in the last two decades they’ve really added a lot of non-pizza items to their menu like chicken wings and sandwiches.
I used to order from a pizza joint within walking distance of my apartment in West Philadelphia long ago. It was a small, dirty Pop shop (No Ma &; just Pop). The owner/pizza tosser was a wiry Italian who always wore a sweat-stained wife beater shirt and smoked while tossing his product. There were always small fruit flies buzzing around, with many stuck on the pizza stones. There was one Formica table-for-two off to one side of the lobby, I guess for any adventurous couple wanting a romantic dining experience, but I never saw anyone ever sit at that table. This was a take out joint.
No one ever asked the proprietor to wipe the flies off the stone before he’d plop down the dough, because, well, for one thing, we’re pretty sure he was connected, and, for another thing, he didn’t appear to speak English. Actually, he didn’t appear to speak anything at all except, “whaddaya want?” when you were placing your order and “four bucks!” with his greasy hand extended, when you were checking out. Legend has it that someone did once ask him to wipe off the flies, but that guy left the neighborhood very quickly afterward without even saying goodbye.
Anyway, all this pizza guy sold was pizza, just pizza, and none of that crap with feta cheese or avocado bits—just pizza with manly toppings, like pepperoni and anchovies…anchovies as big as your fist. If you wanted something to drink, he had a coke machine next to the cash register (it didn’t work most of the time, but it gave one hope).
And on your walk back to the apartment with the warm pizza box in your hands, you’d wonder to yourself why you keep coming back to a place that sold pizza with flies stuck to them.
When you saw a black fleck or two stuck on the creamy,tangy hot mozzarella as it strung between the slice and your lips, you had to use your imagination and convince yourself they were just specs of pepper. And then as you swallowed, you remembered why you kept ordering pizzas with flies stuck to them—because his pizzas were just that damned good, that’s why.
Business must have been pretty good for that one-trick-pony pizzeria, because the pizza-tosser drove a cherry, top-of-the-line black Cadillac.
Really.
Granted, I’m living in China…but more specifically in Shanghai, where there are quite a large number of pizza chains and individual pizza restaurants.
And the situation was the same when I lived in England. Pizza places do 90% pizza and 10% “other”.
And it makes sense IMO. If you want your restaurant to cater to groups, well, there’s often one person in the group who’s not quite as into pizza as the rest, and would appreciate another option. Even if that other option is some microwaved piece of crap because the chef super-specializes towards only pizza.
Here every Pizza place is either also an Italian Deli, Italian Restaurant or both. They will always sell Sub sandwiches and Italian food. At very least things like Chicken Parm and baked Ziti.
In fact I can’t think of one that doesn’t.
Here in the NE US, every pizza place I’ve ever been to offers at least salads, calzones, and a couple of pasta dishes.
If I think “nothing but pizza,” I think “maybe at places like Pizza Hut,” but I see now that I’m wrong about that.
I think it’s just a different way to get attention. The commercial for “Try our new Cheese-Z Bread with Bacon and Sriracha!” will get more attention than “Order our pepperoni pizza that you’ve probably had before!” A lot of people will see that commercial for the new Domino’s menu item, and think it sounds good or weird or disgusting, but it will be more memorable and stick out more than just a usual commercial for pepperoni pizza. And some of those people will then think about Domino’s the next time they want to order some food. Some might order the new menu item, but that doesn’t matter too much, as long as they are ordering from Domino’s.
I used to manage a Jack in the Box, and it was a pain in the butt - Jack likes to roll out a new menu item about once a month, and more often than not, it’ll include a new ingredient that employees have to learn how to prep and prepare with little notice. They do delete poorly-selling items from time to time, but the menu just gets larger and larger over time - when I left, we had three different sizes of hamburger patty, six kinds of chicken, ten different kinds of buns, two kinds of eggs, about two dozen different foods that cooked in the deep fryer, and all kinds of vegetables, salads, and setup bowls that had to be measured out in advance. I envied people who worked at places like In-n-Out or Dick’s where they only had to worry about two or three different things.
God love 'em, they are catering to our ADD tendencies, the fact that we are overfed and don’t really crave anything specific with much vigor, and to families with the type of children who pout because they only thing they’ll eat is a hamburger and the family just can’t stand another hamburger night.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the over-sized menus. I’d rather they do it the way Wendy’s used to do it back in the day where you ordered the basic burger - single, double, or triple - and then asked for whatever additional items you wanted a la carte. Kept the menu simple, yet still allowed for customization.
And I don’t need a big splashy menu board full of dozens of pictures of combo meals. Everyone knows what a combo meal is now. It’s a sandwich, fries and a drink, with sizing options. List your numbered combos with one picture, not 10 or 12 pictures.
In a way, those big menu boards intimidate me. With so much to choose from, I want to take my time and read the choices, which is so not appreciated by the umpteen cars in line behind me nor the bored teenager at the order microphone. So basically, held hostage by the giant menu, I choose the same thing ever time I go to one of the fast food places anyway. Yes, I fear the fast food megamenu. You may shame me now.
Indeed. A burger in its perfect form. 
Any publicly traded company is challenged to outperform previous years. One way to do that is through expansion, but in reality for a lot of established chains they’ve just about reached the point of saturation. Another way is to try and find that blockbuster item that will sell $zillions.
Sometimes it’s weird even walking through a grocery store nowadays. We survived many years with just one type of Oreo, now there are at least a dozen varieties. Same for wheat thins, same for m&ms, varieties of coke, even varieties of milk (dairy and otherwise).
Same in Texas, although I suspect that a lot of ours are either apeing the northeast originals, or were started by northeast transplants.
Most of them do make most of their money from pizza but they do usually offer other dishes- salads, some sort of baked pastas, and usually desserts.
Even the high-end pizza places have a few other things on the menu, even though they’re VPN certified (verace pizzeria napoletana, or something like that).
I know a woman who recently adopted two children from China. She and the rest of the family (husband and 4 biological children) ate at Pizza Hut because they are strict vegetarians, and knew they wouldn’t be eating meat by accident if they went there.