Before Prep

Sometimes, the next menu idea is already in the kitchen.

For Knots' Hot Honey Chicken, we started with ingredients they already had and explored how to bring them together into a dish that made sense in both flavor and ex*****on. The goal was to create something new without adding unnecessary complexity to the kitchen.

Menu development is as much about testing as it is about creating.

We taste, adjust, question, and compare until every dish earns its place. Not everything makes the final cut, but every trial helps shape what does.

A familiar comfort dish, pushed into a bolder direction through heat, acidity, and texture.

Steak & fries, reworked into bakmie.
Made specially for The Butter House, this Mi Keriting brings pepper corn butter, potato strings, creamy gravy, and slow cooked brisket. into a format Kelapa Gading already loves: noodles.
A familiar craving, in a different form.

Adding one more dish can look small on paper. Inside a working business, it rarely is.

The goal was never to make every dish compete. It was to make the whole menu work.

Every menu should support the main attraction.
For Knots, that meant developing savory dishes that work alongside their viennoiserie selection, giving guests more variety while keeping the experience unmistakably Knots.

A lot of the real work happens outside the recipe. We look at the decisions around the dish, because a menu has to work as part of a business, not just on a plate.

A little throwback to a Before Prep menu we developed for The Deli Bakes.

Some dishes stay memorable because the idea behind them is simple: take one ingredient, understand what it can do, and build the dish around it.

Sometimes the smartest menu addition isn’t another ingredient. It’s finding a new way to work with what you already have.