The sign taped inside the window of the place on Belmont used to be a two page menu with a wine list on the back. On Saturday it was an index card. Six items, hand lettered, one of them just the word soup. I ordered the soup. It was the best thing I have eaten since March.
Half the restaurants I love in this city are running takeout only out of a kitchen with three people in it, and every one of them has done the same thing. Cut to what travels well in a paper box. Cut to what the walk-in can actually support with a supply chain this jumpy. Cut to what one cook can plate without a second cook.
Nobody did this to be clearer. They did it because the alternative was closing. Clarity was a side effect.
Constraint is the only positioning exercise that ever actually finishes, because it is the only one nobody in the room is able to veto.
I have run the voluntary version of this workshop more times than I want to admit. You put the offering on the wall, you ask what comes off, and the room goes quiet in a very specific way. Every line item has a defender. Somebody built it, somebody sold it, somebody has a bonus attached to it. So the deck ships with a priority tier and a secondary tier and a watch list, and eighteen months later the menu is longer than when you started.
Forced subtraction does three things a workshop cannot.
It ranks with real stakes. When keeping the item costs you a dish you like more, you find out what you actually believe. It exposes the cross-subsidy. Half the sprawl in most brands exists because one profitable thing has been quietly paying rent for four unprofitable things nobody wanted to name. And it makes the answer legible to the person doing the work. A line cook can hold six dishes in their head. So can a new hire writing your customer emails.
This is why the narrow ones win in a bad year. In-N-Out has been selling roughly the same short list since the forties. Trader Joe's carries a fraction of the items a normal grocery store does and gets loyalty a normal grocery store cannot buy. Patagonia keeps making fewer things on purpose and charging more for them.
Nobody did this to be clearer. They did it because the alternative was closing.
The question worth sitting with is which six items you would keep if somebody took the rest away this Friday. My karaoke book had hundreds of pages in it and I sang the same six songs for two years. The bar is closed and I miss it badly, and I notice I have not once missed the other pages.