Mistakes I Made While Consulting on the Menu for a Samgyetang Restaurant in Busan

Last summer, I got a call from the owner of a samgyetang (Korean ginseng chicken soup) restaurant tucked away in a back alley of Haeundae. Reviews on a delivery app had started filling up with comments like, "You call this health food, so why is there zero nutritional information?" He wanted to add some nutrition-related text to his menu. The restaurant had been in the same spot for over 20 years. I gladly accepted the job, and it turned out to be the project where I learned the most, and got the most things wrong, in my entire consulting career.

I vividly remember the first time I visited the restaurant. It was around two in the afternoon, just after the lunch rush. The owner greeted me while wiping sweat from his brow, in the middle of prepping chickens for the next day. It was a small place with eight tables. The menu had just four items: samgyetang, half-samgyetang, mung bean samgyetang, and abalone samgyetang. I opened my laptop and started writing down the recipe for each dish.

Obsessing Over Calorie Numbers

My first suggestion was to list the calories and key nutrient content on the menu. It was the same approach used in hospital meal services and franchise restaurants. To calculate the calories in a single bowl of samgyetang, I proposed standardising everything: the weight of the chicken, the amount of glutinous rice, even the size of the ginseng root.

The owner's expression immediately hardened. "The chickens are different every day." An obvious point, and I should have seen it coming. This restaurant received its chickens from the market every morning, and the sizes varied with the seasons. The glutinous rice was added by hand, and the amount of abalone fluctuated depending on the quality of that day's delivery. This wasn't a franchise kitchen measuring ingredients down to the gram. I knew all of this and still pushed ahead, insisting that "we can at least come up with an average."

We prepared each menu item five times and calculated the average calorie count. The problem was that those numbers were inevitably going to differ quite a bit from what customers actually received. The owner said, "If these numbers are wrong, doesn't that make me a liar?" He was right. Presenting numbers that can't be accurate as though they are isn't providing information. It's closer to deception. If I could do it over, instead of calorie counts, I would have built the menu descriptions around key ingredients and cooking methods. One whole chicken, glutinous rice, Korean ginseng, jujubes, chestnuts. That list of ingredients is already sufficient nutritional information in itself.

The Trap of the "Health Food" Framing

The second mistake was more fundamental. I tried to craft copy that positioned samgyetang as "health food." Since samgyetang is widely known as a restorative dish, I figured backing that up with modern nutritional terminology would help with marketing. I put phrases like "a high-protein, low-carb meal" and "a collagen-rich restorative dish" in the draft.

The owner looked it over and shook his head. "Our customers don't come here to be healthy. They come because it's delicious. They come with their families on boknal." That single remark dismantled my entire approach.

I had been looking at the food solely through a nutritionist's lens. How many grams of protein, the sodium content, talk of collagen. But for the customers of this restaurant, samgyetang wasn't a combination of nutrients. It was an experience. The sizzling stone pot arriving at the table, blowing on the broth to cool it down, adding salt and pepper to taste. That process itself was the value of the food. Slapping "42g of protein" onto it was meaningless.

And honestly, the "health food" label was a liability. The moment you market something as health food, people start judging it by that standard. The sodium is high, there's too much oil, what about the carbs in the glutinous rice. It would be like putting a restaurant that had built its reputation on flavour for 20 years on trial before a nutritional tribunal.

If I could do it over, I'd drop the "health food" framing entirely. I would have emphasised where the ingredients come from and the care put into the cooking process. Chickens sourced fresh from the market every day, glutinous rice soaked by hand, broth simmered for hours. Those stories carry far more weight than nutrient numbers.

Treating Delivery and Dine-In Menus the Same

The third mistake came from a lack of operational awareness. I suggested listing the same nutritional information for both the delivery menu and the dine-in menu. It's the same food, so of course it should be the same. Or so I thought.

In reality, they weren't the same food at all. Samgyetang served in the restaurant comes out in a stone pot, bubbling hot. Delivery samgyetang arrives in a takeout container and isn't opened for another 20 to 30 minutes. In that time, the glutinous rice absorbs all the broth. The texture is different, and the eating experience is different. The owner told me he actually uses slightly less glutinous rice and adds a bit more broth for delivery orders. I had no idea.

This was an embarrassing blind spot for a nutritionist. I knew intellectually that food isn't determined by its recipe alone, yet in practice I had been looking at nothing but the recipe. How food changes in a delivery setting, the effect of the packaging, the state of the food at the moment the customer actually eats it. Discussing nutritional information without considering any of this was only half the job.

If I could do it over, I would have approached the delivery menu as something entirely separate. For the menu descriptions on the delivery app, practical guidance like "The broth may reduce during delivery, so please add the enclosed extra stock" would have been far more useful than nutritional information.

Avoiding the Conversation About Pricing

Lastly, I deliberately avoided talking about pricing throughout the entire consulting engagement. I thought it wasn't a nutritionist's domain. But that was ignoring reality.

The menu item the owner agonised over most during the redesign process was the half-samgyetang. It was a dish created for solo diners, but it had a high cost ratio. The more he sold, the more his margins shrank. He worried that if nutritional information were added to the half-samgyetang, customers would perceive it as the best value for money and order nothing else.

This was entirely a business judgement call, but I realised far too late that the menu copy I was creating had a direct impact on that judgement. Listing nutritional information is not a neutral act. Depending on what information you attach to which menu item, you change customers' ordering patterns, and that changes the revenue structure. A nutritionist doesn't need to become a business consultant, but I should have at least had an honest conversation with the owner about how my work might affect the restaurant's bottom line.

What ultimately ended up on the menu was very different from my initial proposal. Ingredient descriptions replaced calorie counts, all "health food" copy was removed, and cooking tips were added to the delivery menu. Looking back, the fact that the owner rejected my suggestions one by one is exactly what led to a decent outcome. If we'd gone with the plan I originally brought in, that restaurant's menu would have ended up looking like a hospital meal chart.

What a 20-year-old samgyetang restaurant needed wasn't a nutritionist's analytical framework. It was language that better showcased what the restaurant was already doing well. It took me three months to learn that lesson, and the tuition was the owner's patience.