Chefs are creative individuals and I'm continually blown away by what these professionals can do when challenged to explore their passion. But a restaurant needs some marketing sensibility if it going to thrive, especially in a hotel or urban capacity where there are numerous other independent and more agile operations to compete with.

While some executive chefs are themselves tremendous impresarios or, dare I say, celebrity chefs, many others need to be reined in so that the menus are in stride with what the market wants and so that they fit with the dining outlet's theme for an easily digestible brand narrative. One aspect of this is whether or not to replace the most popular dish, something I recently encountered at a property for which I was asset manager.

The argument in favour of this substitution was that a new season called for a whole new menu in order to truthfully advertise it as such. And as political as any other organization, most of the senior team at the resort did not want to besmirch their camaraderie with the executive chef by testing his ego. But even though it may not be the chef's favourite, if it's the guests' favourite then isn't that what counts?

This is where I had to step in and apply some marketing wisdom as well as some statistics. The item deemed most popular was corroborated against POS sales data and a myriad of anecdotal evidence scraped from online reviews to verify it as a bona fide 'signature dish' (although if we had a social media aggregating platform this could likely have been used as well).

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