Stephen A. Kalil, senior product development chef
Brinker International
Dallas, Tex.

Category: casual dining

Menu hits: We have pita sandwiches that do very well, but we don't use the traditional pocket pita. We fold it. We do a chicken Caesar pita, a Caribbean chicken pita and a fajita pita. They've been signatures on the menu for some time.

What's new: Recently we rolled out tomato-basil chicken pasta. It was our first tomato pasta in quite a while. We only had cream-sauce pasta. It has done very well and captured a pretty good audience. Introducing fresh basil into the restaurant was a big step in introducing Mediterranean flavors. We see the value in fresh products and want that to translate to the experience for our guests.

What's next: We're getting ready to roll out a citrus balsamic vinaigrette. It would be on one featured salad and also a new dressing choice for our dinner salads. Marinated swordfish kebabs could fit in nicely right now. I would use traditional harissa, although I might not want to scare the consumer away by calling it harissa. I might call it a Mediterranean chili sauce. [At the CIA's Worlds of Flavor conference] we did lemon- and garlic-marinated swordfish kebabs with orange harissa butter sauce. I'd love to get a gyro fajita on the menu. Greek is still one of those ethnic cuisines that people make a special trip to a Greek restaurant for. Whereas it's expected that Italian food will succeed on the casual dining level, there are not a lot of Greek-themed casual dining restaurants out there. Stuffed grape leaves would be a stretch. They would be difficult to have produced or to make in the back of the house.

Future potential: I see a fit in the future for Greek salads, but feta has had a limited audience in the past. That doesn't mean I'm going to preclude it from future development. We've tested salads with shaved fennel, oranges and fresh basil and that had a limited audience.

The whole Mediterranean rim is the next big flavor profile. I see more olives and sun-dried tomatoes and feta cheese making their way into casual dining rather soon. Couscous has a lot of potential as a health-conscious, guiltless offering. I don't see it happening within the next year, but certainly within the next five years. I could introduce it now and capture an audience, but when you look at Chili's with 720 restaurants, you could have one restaurant sell 20 orders a day in one region and another restaurant that doesn't sell any. So you're doing .1 orders per guest.

I'm looking for an opportunity to put lamb on the menu at Chili's. I'm very pleased to see the flexibility it has within Mediterranean cuisine, and I'm just waiting for the day that enough of our consumers are interested in lamb as a center-of-the-plate protein.