Today’s USA Today has an interesting article that talks about casual dining’s attempt to draw diners in through small plate offerings.  Great idea if it works, but we worry that these restaurants may not focus on the right metrics.  For example, the article quotes the percent of items chosen for the new small plates in a Houlihan’s test market.  It’s great that they are testing, but are they looking at:

• the incremental guest traffic attributable to the new items?
• whether some restaurants perform better than others, and why?
• what else small plates guests are ordering, and what items they are trading away from?
• whether small plates guests return with greater frequency?
• whether those returning guests trade up to larger sizes of the same thing?