“To this day, we still see customers coming in and out, ‘Oh, I heard about the secret menu,’” said Alan Liu, the owner of Salad King. The popular dish dates back to the restaurant’s early days when Liu’s parents made a noodle curry and decided to make it special. It was such a popular option that people kept asking for it even after it was no longer offered. Liu says the noodle dish is their second best-selling item. Alan Liu stands outside the Salad King restaurant in Toronto. (Angelina King/CBC) “People enjoy the fun of knowing the secret menu item. So it’s not really more complicated than that, it’s fun, people enjoy it and it still sells well,” Liu said. Off-menu items, or secret menu items, have become a popular trend in restaurants, with hype fueled further by social media influencers.
Creating influence
Matthew Philp, assistant professor of marketing at the Ted Rogers School of Business Management at Metropolitan University of Toronto, says it’s easy to see why people love it. “Here’s this secret menu item. Here’s this special thing that only I know about — or not a lot of people know about. And it makes you feel a little bit in the know. You feel good about yourself for knowing these things.” , said Philp. But it’s not just about knowing. Philp said the even bigger benefit is the ability to share the secret with friends, which is where social media and influencers come in. Matthew Philp is an assistant professor of marketing at the Ted Rogers School of Business Management at Metropolitan University of Toronto. (Submitted by Matthew Philp) “It provides some leverage,” Philp said. “If you can create a consumer experience that makes them feel exclusive, then they’re more likely to share it. So it just spreads [by] word-of-mouth and word-of-mouth is highly influential in consumer decision-making — much more influential than a typical ad.”
Butterbeer at Starbucks
Scroll down to Sabrina Tam from Montreal, who has used secret menu items to boost her TikTok account to hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of likes. Her secret reviews of menu items are the most popular videos on her account and this helps her land contracts with restaurants. He says he can make up to $15,000 a month working with restaurants, reviewing new items, but he says it’s the fast food chains that can make a lot of money out of it. “At the end of the day, it brings them sales and creates a buzz around them, 100 percent,” Tam said. Tam started these reviews as something to do at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when her morning routine included a trip through the Starbucks Drive-thru. She decided to take her TikTok followers with her. “I found these secret menu recipes on Pinterest or blogs and other people also started sharing recipes, so I started, like, going to Starbucks and trying them,” Tam said. The butterbeer frappuccino is one of the many secret items on the Starbucks menu. (Jennifer Dorozio/CBC) Now, when Tam stops into her local Starbucks, the employees there know who she is and what she wants. Tam doesn’t just do sneaky menu reviews. In one of her recent video reviewed a butter drinkbased on the Harry Potter drink, which he had heard had been created by a Starbucks in Quebec. He says in less than 24 hours the video had more than 30,000 views. “It creates, like, a desire in them. It comes and plays with their curiosity and really makes them want to try it,” Tam said.
Fried apple pies
Philp says it’s a fine line for businesses to walk. These stores want to keep people in on the mystery of the secret menu and drop hints, but blatantly saying you have a secret menu makes it not so secret. McDonalds held an internal competition where it asked its employees to submit their candidates for the fast food chain’s secret menu. Some of the more unique ideas included apple pie fries or toasted Big Mac buns. But a full tour of your secret menu isn’t the way to go, says Philp. “It’s not like a binary thing to tell consumers about it or not. There’s some gray area,” Philp said. Lui says Thai Islamic Noodles will be off the menu because it’s “more fun” that way, but people can still order it. (Angelina King/CBC) For Salad King, Liu said it wasn’t his parent’s intention to create buzz around a secret menu item, though it worked well. It had more to do with Liu’s father and his ability to update the menu. “My dad didn’t know how to work the printing program used to make the menu, so he could never figure out how to put it in, and that’s the honest reason it’s not on the menu,” Liu said. Now, Liu is able to update the menu, but says they’ve kept the best-selling dish off the menu anyway. “To be honest, if you look at it from a financial standpoint, we’ll probably sell more by putting it on the menu than by leaving it out, but it’s just more fun that way.” Produced by Danielle Nerman.
