Daphne's Greek Café
San Diego, California
Kim Menzies is director of food and beverage for Daphne's, a fast-casual Greek chain that debuted in Southern California in 1991. Customers love the Mediterranean flavor profile, and Daphne's works hard to demystify the menu for Greek-food novices. View Daphne's menu here.
The concept
It's contemporary Greek cuisine in a warm and friendly atmosphere. It started with George Katakalidis. He and his family are from Greece, and he was a professional soccer player in the U.S. But he became injured and started thinking about opening a restaurant. He developed a lot of the recipes from his mom and his family, but our consumers are not typically Greek. We have 67 units now, in California and Arizona. Where there's a Starbucks and a Pick Up Stix, that's basically where we are. There are no Greek chains that we really compete with.
The look
It's very contemporary, very inviting, with light, warm colors like beige and teal—very airy and open. There are no tablecloths. The guests stand in line and order, then we bring food out to them and serve it on plates with silverware. We bus the tables. There are approximately 50 seats in every unit.
Menu highlights
Our gyros. They're made traditionally, on gyro cookers that we shave. They're 20 percent lamb, 80 percent beef. Americans don't eat as much lamb (as Greeks do), and it's a little more polarizing. The meat goes into pita sandwiches and on a gyro plate with salad and rice. And our Greek chicken: a split chicken marinated with Greek seasonings like oregano, olive oil and garlic, then roasted and served with rice and salad. Our rice is long-grain parboiled rice with a Greek seasoning blend. Our salad is a Greek salad with a Greek vinaigrette, kalamata olives, grape tomatoes and feta.
One great idea
Our Fire Feta. It's a spicy feta mixture with Tabasco, chili peppers and different proprietary seasonings.
On introducing ethnic flavors
On the back of the menu, we have a section on how to "speak Daphanese." It defines some of the more different items we carry, like tzatziki sauce and gyro, and spells them out phonetically so you can pronounce them. We also do a sampling program: we'll serve bite-size portions of falafel with tahini sauce while guests are in line. We give them a handout card that explains what they're eating; and there's sometimes a discount associated with that so we do get trials. We're trying to help first-timers through the menu.
What's ahead
I'm looking to expand our pita line with more flavorful, bold options. We have a honey chicken pita, but I want to make it more "wow" and more flavorful, with more Greek flavors. We underutilize some flavors. In my opinion, we could focus in on some more of the garlic and olive flavors to make dishes pop and be more flavorful.
We're trying to get more flavors through sauce options—one sauce that encompasses several different Mediterranean ingredients that can deliver on that "wow" flavor. By utilizing a sauce, we minimize the number of SKUs coming in the back of the house. If I can portray the flavors without hurting operations, that's my goal.