Q&A with Chef John Csukor

Insider advice on adding healthy new ingredients to your menu

With so much focus on health and wellness trends in foodservice, we spoke with Entegra’s Head of Culinary, Chef John Csukor, to give you a better understanding of how to affordably incorporate new and healthy ingredients and innovations as part of your menu.

How can foodservice operators add healthy menu items that customers will want to order?

“If I'm in a restaurant, working on my menu, the most intelligent approach I can take is to never forget the customer, right? Because you're open, you have an established clientele. Thinking about them is a really great start. So, working backward from, ‘Hey, I'm in the South, and I've got a lot of folks who love fried food or that like that rich kind of comfort food of the South. So, how do I offer something that's going to be meal worthy and satisfying enough but still be completely plant-forward?’”

How can you make these new items in an affordable way?

“I might interpret something that's vegetable-based but attach it to something they recognize that's on their table like chicken fried steak, a hot seller in the South. It's just tradition. Take something like a really great substrate that you can make with eggplant and legumes. I would give it a little bit of a Middle Eastern twist but breading that and frying it and calling it chicken fried vegetable or chicken fried vegetable patty or something along those lines. With the price of proteins these days, making a healthy swap can stretch your food budget, as well.”

What are some hot new food trends that operators should consider for their menus?

“When I think about food trends, I look to cultivars or cultivated varieties of plants that have been bred for specific traits. This is how we often get new ingredients to feature on menus. Produce cultivars are really cool because they've been incorporating new and unique flavors for about the last ten years. We've seen purple, bright yellow and bright green cauliflower. There's something called a grapefruit lime that has come out recently. It's very lime-like, but it has that beautiful grassy tartness of a lime. It also has the sweet bitterness of a grapefruit. And it's pink like a grapefruit. This is a really cool cultivar that can make its way into cocktails or make its way into something like a grapefruit lime pie. The flavor paradigm would be really unique.”

You recently showcased a vegan smoothie recipe for your guests at a conference exhibit. What was your guests’ reaction?

“The mango smoothie that we put together for the show used a vegan, coconut-based yogurt from General Mills. In a bit of serendipity, the product was almost an exact match to something that Indians drink, called a mango lassi. In a way, this is like the ‘chicken-fried’ example. Something familiar is spun into a healthy, alternate version that worked well for the crowd.”

How can the Entegra Performance Kitchen, and Entegra’s culinary services more broadly, help foodservice operators?

“The Entegra Performance Kitchen has a staff of culinarians who can give first-hand guidance for strategic menu ideation and direction as well as operational optimization. We provide new menu training, ingredient insights and reports on the latest food trends. Once a business decides to become an Entegra client, we really pour all our expertise into helping them as much as they need. Our goal is to help sustain your success.”

About John Csukor
Head of Culinary, North America

John has lived in the space between creating delicious food and developing cutting-edge marketing strategies for small businesses and global conglomerates for over 35 years.

Chef has influenced the breakfast, lunch and evening meals of millions of people around the world through product development, operational and marketing leadership. While classically trained at Johnson and Wales University, culinary education extends to The Culinary Institute of America and the United States Marine Corps School of Food Service.

Having owned a successful international marketing agency for 13 years, John brings a unique combination of strategic marketing experience, foodservice business acumen and product development to the Entegra team.