On 'Cue: What’s Cooking at Sticky Fingers?

Brian Kolodziej joined Mt. Pleasant, S.C.-based Sticky Fingers Rib House as culinary director in November 2006. His mandate is to refine and broaden the 20-unit chain’s menu as it prepares to expand beyond the Southeastern territory where it has operated since the first restaurant opened in 1992.

By Scott Hume, Editor-in-Chief -- Restaurants & Institutions, 2/26/2008

Brian Kolodziej joined Mt. Pleasant, S.C.-based Sticky Fingers Rib House as culinary director in November 2006. His mandate is to refine and broaden the 20-unit chain’s menu as it prepares to expand beyond the Southeastern territory where it has operated since the first restaurant opened in 1992.

Kolodziej brought with him a wealth of culinary expertise from the casual-dining segment. He joined Dallas-based Brinker International in 1992 as a corporate chef, moving up to corporate chef for Brinker’s Chili’s Grill & Bar concept two years later. He served as Brinker’s director of culinary operations from 1995 to 2005, when he joined Metromedia Restaurant Group in Plano, Texas, overseeing menu development for Bennigan’s and Steak and Ale.

Now Kolodziej is learning about barbecue and how to keep Sticky Fingers’ loyal customers while attracting new customers. He spoke with R&I Editor-in-Chief Scott Hume about the chain’s menu-development plans.

How are you adjusting to your new culinary world?

I never claimed to be a barbecue expert and I have a lot to learn. All the rules of thumb I learned in culinary school [Johnson & Wales University, ‘82] hold true: The quality of wood is critical; the slow-and-low rule for temperature and time with cooking applies; and rubs on the meats to add flavor are important as well. There aren’t a lot of shortcuts for the “authentic” barbecue house.

You’re doing Memphis-style, slow-cook barbecue in each unit?

Absolutely. Each of our restaurants has a couple of large barbecue pits and we employ people who specialize in those pits. Some work in the evening and load the meat that then cooks overnight, like pork shoulder. Others come in at 6 a.m. Just like a master baker getting all the dough prepared for the day, this person runs that pit throughout the shift to make sure we’re ready for lunch or dinner. So it’s a very different model than with the typical casual-dining operation that I’ve had experience with in the past.

Our food comes out faster [to guests] because it’s more assembly than cooking to order. Our foods are cooked throughout the day but sauced and plated when an order comes in. We think that’s a real advantage for our concept.

How do you envision Sticky Fingers’ menu changing?

It may be a perfect time for us to evolve and grow as consumers tire of the burger-and-beer segment and look for something a little more authentic. Certainly value and convenience still are important but we think we offer higher quality and a different experience.

Do you worry about changing too fast for your current customers?

We think about that a lot. We want to make sure we don’t get too close to that crowded casual-dining segment, but at the same we’ve got to broaden our menu beyond ribs and wings, which are our two anchors, and add enough interest through soup, salad, sides, burgers, sandwiches and desserts to get customers to come in more often than their 60-day-craving for ribs. We’ve got to get some repeat guests and some new customers who may drive right past us now.

Where do you start on broadening the menu?

Before we ‘start’ changing anything we start with dialog and discussion and make sure we’re all in agreement on brand direction. And that’s something we’ve had to stop and think about. What boundaries do we have to stay within to be unique, new and competitive but still interesting enough to customers? That was our first step: determining a brand direction and how far we could stray from meats that come out of the smoking pit.

Now that we’ve established that, it’s safe to say we will always cautiously err on the side of providing authentic barbecue. I’d never say never, but Asian pear salads are nowhere near our development board. That kind of thing that others may have tried to broaden their positioning isn’t of interest to us.

We take our roots—smoked ribs, barbecued pork shoulder, chicken wings, the things that we do well and with pride—and see how we can add variety to the menu using those products. And then we look at menu categories. We certainly want to participate in sandwiches and salads because there’s a critical lunch customer that we miss if we don’t. But the flavors of those sandwiches and salads have to be complementary to the things Sticky Fingers already is known for.

We talk about those [restaurant] brands with 80-item booklet menus and we caution ourselves not to become that same style. We’ll be more limiting and more specialized in what we do.

How far afield will your customers let you go?

I think there’s still a whole world of flavors and ingredients that haven’t been thought of or touched that have huge potential for our brand. As a Southeastern barbecue chain, we’re primarily pork driven. So we recently introduced a smoked beef brisket. And to expand on that further, there are possibilities within turkey, sausage and other proteins that smoke very well and that fit within the barbecue theme that will continue to give us [menu] news. Seafood. Shrimp. We’ve tested salmon. Catfish, with our southern heritage has a fit. So there’s not a lot of limitation on proteins or sauces.

We want to be careful not make everything taste and look the same, so there’ll need to be some expansion of how we use rubs and seasonings and sauces. But that’s why we go to work every day. We’ve conducted consumer focus groups, and we’ll definitely use a blend of science with equal amount of gut feel and entrepreneurial inspiration to develop our menu and brand.

What do your customers tell you?

We met with some medium-to-heavy users recently and, frankly, we were anticipating low acceptance for things outside the normal Sticky Fingers box. But quite the contrary, they were very open, welcoming and appreciative of some of the new dishes we showed them.

So it gave us confidence we wouldn’t lose our customers if we broadened our menu. Quite the opposite, we believe it may open the doors to repeat visits for some of those non-core items and visits through different dayparts. For example, a customer who may not consider us for lunch because we don’t have salad or soup options, told us he would come in more often. As a result we’ve introduced two new salads and a new appetizer that we believe will attract more women customers and a lunch crowd that we may have been missing.

We’re taking small steps, still within the internal criteria we’ve determined and with an eye on not becoming an overly complex concept. But we’ve got to fill some menu gaps in a few categories. We believe the beef brisket fills a need with smoked beef. We’ve had countless customers coming in and asking for a steak or beef ribs. We believe brisket may be the best option to satisfy both those.

What are the new salads you’ve added?

The first, the Smokehouse Club Salad, I joking call “casual dining in a bottle” because the ingredients are primarily chicken, Cheddar cheese, bacon and honey-mustard dressing. And those flavors, my experience has shown, work whether they’re in a salad, a sandwich, an appetizer or a main entrée. Those are the flavors customers gravitate toward.

It was really developed based on a club sandwich, and we use our own smoked chickens with a Cheddar cheese, chopped applewood bacon, cherry tomatoes, hard-cooked egg quarters and honey mustard. It’s a flavor combination that’s been done over and over; it’s not really ground breaking. But it’s a solid anchor to our menu that, to this point, had been lacking in some salad news.

The second we call the Summertime Salad. In my opinion it’s going to satisfy the customer who’s looking for a good-for-you, fruit-and-nut, crunchy-sweet salad. We’ve seen concepts such as Panera Bread and Corner Bakery have success with this style. It starts with a grilled chicken breast, but we’ve added gala apples, blue cheese, sugared almonds, raisins, mandarin oranges and diced celery for crunch. It’s one of those salads that has an appeal for freshness and health. It’s not low fat, but in terms of what we offer now it’s better for you and it’s got that fresh appeal.

Here in the South, we believe these salads should be popular year-round.

Those are year-round flavors.

Exactly, and that’s where I can take advantage of my experience from casual dining and apply new ingredients to our bran. For me to introduce blue cheese, gala apples and sugared almonds to our concept is saying quite a bit. It says that we are open to new flavors and recognize that it’s important to expand our menu.

You’ve added an appetizer as well? How does it fit with barbecue?

Yes, Cheddar Fries. This is a tried-and-true item in the burger-and-beer restaurant segment, but we think it fits Sticky Fingers as we do it. We’re known for our fries—we have a proprietary seasoning-- and we brought in a white-Cheddar queso. So we take a portion of the seasoned fries with the queso, along with a customer’s choice of pulled pork, smoked chicken or the new brisket. It all gets melted and then topped with bacon, jalapeños and tomato. We serve it with a house-made bacon-ranch dressing.

So we’ve taken something that is very understandable and mainstream and twisted it with the Sticky Fingers flavors and our in-house meats and we’ve got an appetizer that customers can’t get enough of. It’s a great way to start a meal; it goes with cold beer or margaritas and we anticipate some great success.

Now that the queso is on the menu we’re looking ahead to doing stuffed baked potatoes and I anticipate some kind of beef-brisket-and-queso stuffed potato. There are nacho applications with barbecued meats, too, and it opens my doors much wider to future menu expansion.

Without going too wild?

The customer has to have a certain confidence that the restaurant that they’re in can execute the flavors they’re trying to sell. Believe me, our customer would look at us funny if we offered Malaysian or Moroccan flavors, but I believe they’ll allow us to spread into blue cheese or things that aren’t exactly trendsetting but still are a step up from basic barbecue cuisine. That’s where we think we can push our buttons.

Editor's note: Subsequent to the publication of this interview, Brian Kolodziej left Sticky Fingers Rib House. He can be contacted at briankolojay@comcast.net