Top 400 Menu Trends Interview: Denny's Peter Gibbons-Building Better Burgers

Why would you put hash-brown casserole and a fried egg on a burger? Denny’s R&D chef knows the answer: Because it tastes great and because it sells.

By Scott Hume, Executive Managing Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 7/13/2007

Peter Gibbons knows burgers. Witness his two latest creations, served late-night-only by Spartanburg, S.C.-based Denny’s, which he joined two years ago as vice president of product development: the Slamburger is topped with cheesy has-brown casserole, a fried egg and cheese sauce and served on a sesame-seed bun; the Full House Burger has Cheddar cheese, red onion, cheese sauce, onion rings, yellow mustard and ketchup on a seasoned beef patty.

A graduate of The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., Gibbons earlier was senior vice president and director of innovation for Miami-based Burger King and has worked with Church’s Chicken and others. Executive Editor Scott Hume asked him about the limitations of burger innovation.

You’ve obviously created lots of different burgers in your career. How fun is it to dream up a new burger? Does anything go?

Yes and no. There are some fundamentals you have to get under control first. You have to have a good meat block, good range of pantry options and solid product-development infrastructure, but after that, yes, it really is a lot of fun.

Burgers are the common denominator. As long as you have those fundamentals under control, you can get very creative and inventive with the combinations that reside on top of it. About a year ago we redesigned Denny’s burgers from beginning to end because it was my impression that we could do better in the burger category.

Burgers are analogous to grocery stores’ produce sections. Supermarkets don’t really do a lot with that section but it’s a bellwether for the quality of the rest of the merchandise and the craft as a merchant.

With quality meat and pantry and understanding of what consumers want, it really can be fun.

What do consumers want? Judging by what’s on menus—at Denny’s and elsewhere—it seems they will try just about anything.

With a burger they will try just about anything. I’ll say, though, that when we do ideation sessions internally, the number of builds we come up with for chicken sandwiches is probably three or four times what it is for burgers because beef is more prominent a flavor, so it’s a little more constraining on what goes well with it. But by the same token, you have more license with what you can get away with for a burger.

Yet everyone has their own beliefs about what a burger should be, don’t they?

Burgers are so ubiquitous that people have these icons they want preserved. With the Full House (above) and Slamburger, we wanted to amp things up a notch, to have not necessarily everything but the kitchen sink, but if you were going to put everything you love on a burger, you’d have it personified in the Full House Burger. If you want a burger that’s a combination of all your favorite foods, you’d have the Slamburger.

Some of the constituents in there are purposely designed to reinforce the flavor. The Slamburger (below) doesn’t just have hash browns but hash-brown casserole with extra cheese. That makes it rich and accentuates all the umami flavors. The Slamburger, despite looking like a Salvador Dali burger, really was a premeditated amalgam of flavors.

How do you balance the flavors?

In palatable and cravable proportions. You want people say, ‘”Boy, I wouldn’t be able to do this at home.”

Do you create burgers with the idea of having broad consumer appeal?

It’s an American iconic food. There are styles. The Slamburger one happens to be a big juicy style, in comparison with [what] the QSRs offer. I think they would love to have a big juicy burger, but that’s not really what they’re about. They’re dedicated to speed.

Does it help you that Denny’s doesn’t need to worry about how well a burger can be eaten in a car?

Yes. At the end of the day, when you focus on things, speed is a cost-of-entry item. But for us speed is not the differentiator. It’s more hedonistic [for us]. We can take more time because guests are sitting down and relaxing while we’re preparing their products fresh.

The industry has been talking about providing bold flavor profiles for years now. Is that still an important consideration?

Absolutely.

But chipotle and cayenne and other bold flavors have been pretty well worked over. Are you running out of new ways to add punch?

Absolutely not! You’re only limited by your imagination. One of the items we looked at for the Full House Burger was a relish, sort of a backyard barbecue relish, that used chiles from South Africa. Would you want to make a big deal out of that in a chain that’s steeped in Americana? I don’t know, but flavors are a language all by themselves.

You can communicate [with guests] in new flavors as well as in words. I really think the only limitations are limitation of your craft—how good you are at it—and the limitation of your imagination.

Global, ethnic flavors also are popular. Are there still opportunities to incorporate these flavor profiles into burger creations?

There are. And sometimes you can take flavor combinations from other [restaurant] segments or other dayparts and get something with unexpected familiarity. So’ve got the common denominator in the burger and a cravable flavor in, say, crêpes suzette. Would you put it on top of a burger? Probably not. But if you were to do a savory crêpe and make it dual texture with sweet heat in it, then, OK, maybe. You maybe could do a raclette with beautiful European cheese and toast the cheese.

The point is, a lot of what you do has to do with knowing everything you can know about the box you’re playing in without getting caught inside.

What about traditional toppings? Do consumers still like tomato and lettuce?

The tomato is another bellwether for quality. If people see a fresh red tomato slice, they get the picture that the rest of what’s on the bun is going to be good quality. There’s the 80/20 rule that says people revert to what they’re familiar with 80% of the time, but if you’re working from a position of familiarity to begin with, you can use that as a license to springboard to new flavors.

So consumers are more likely to order something that’s different but also in some way familiar?

If you [say something has] South African peppers, only people who are interested in that or daring to begin with are going to try.

You build [a dish] like a pyramid, with strong foundation and add progressively smaller blocks on top of it and finally you reach the point where you’re differentiated and you have layers of advantage over your competition because you worked from core competencies, made the most of them and then differentiated from them.

Do you see any indication that Americans’ love for burgers is ebbing?

Not in my book.