Puttshack’s menu revamp includes flatbread pizzas, nacho towers, wings and churros with a sweet dip. | Photos courtesy of Puttshack
Puttshack opened its first U.S. location five years ago, but the mini golf and dining concept hadn’t changed the menu since. Billy Caruso, director of food and beverage for the now 19-unit Chicago-based eatertainment chain, looked at the data and realized it was time for a major update.
“When I came on board last fall, there was lots of data from our guests telling us what they wanted, and they wanted change,” said Caruso. “The world had evolved and they wanted new things … there was a push toward nostalgia and food that’s a bit simpler. Our food was a little more ‘cheffy’ than it needed to be. We wanted to make sure everything was really approachable.”
The result was a focus on high-quality ingredients and a return to crowd favorites, reimagined with big flavor. “Instead of trying to do a lot of fancy things with a burger, let’s just make the best burger we can, looking at what we have in terms of equipment and our staffing model,” he added.
Back to basics
Caruso also wanted to make sure there was something for all of Puttshack’s key customers: Young adults, families and corporate parties. That meant a mix of healthier options, more fun shareables like wings and dips, well-crafted zero-proof cocktails and larger-format dishes.
The Tuna Poke Bowl was a surprise hit.
He played around with a number of items, with the goal of creating a good menu mix, and some of the results were surprising. “We did this health-centric grilled salmon bowl with an heirloom grain blend and a spicy tuna poke bowl, and both are doing phenomenally well,” he said. “Other ideas were kind of like a ‘Hail Mary,’ but all the items that we were unsure about landed in the top 20 of the menu mix.”
Although Puttshack is not a sports bar, Caruso knew he had to add some sports bar-style choices, especially in the shareables section. He started with nachos.
“I thought to myself, how can we make ours bigger, better and more fun?” he asked. “So we kind of went down a rabbit hole and did a bunch of R&D and came up with a nacho tower.” To build the towers, Caruso sourced stainless-steel branded buckets from overseas, tying into the buckets of golf balls you would get on a driving range. “The buckets are bottomless, so we built multi-layered chip towers inside, then revealed the nachos tableside,” Caruso explained.
The shareable Birria Nacho Tower features slow-braised shredded beef and white queso with toppings of roasted tomato salsa, pickled onion, cilantro, green onion, Cotija cheese, pico de gallo and jalapeños. Caruso designed it so the queso is distributed on all the chips and remains hot—two pet peeves of his. The item has been so successful, he had to order more buckets.
Wings are now available in five flavors.
Nacho variations are available too, including barbecue chicken and poke tuna, as well as shareable potstickers and shrimp skewers. And wing fans have five styles to choose from—Buffalo, Sweet BBQ, Garlic Parmesan, Korean Sweet Heat and Chipotle BBQ Dry Rub—with a choice of dips. The menu aims for a median price of $14 to $15 for shareables, but Caruso was intent on offering some options for a dollar or two less. And at Happy Hour, guests can order $1 wings and $3 draft beers.
A new shareable sweet is the Churro Dippers, an interactive dessert composed of cinnamon-sugared churros, fresh strawberries and blueberries, whipped cream and Mexican chocolate sauce.
Maximizing the equipment
Puttshack locations are equipped with “amazing” pizza ovens, but when Caruso arrived, the flatbread dough was turning out like saltine crackers. “I immediately put my foot down, saying we had to have awesome flatbreads,” he recalls. He found an incredible product that checked off that box.
“We literally tried hundreds of flatbreads, some par-baked, some frozen, others fresh … the whole gamut. This product is made by Italian immigrants in Wisconsin, and it’s the exact size we wanted, has a naturally sour flavor, and bakes up super crispy but airy and super light,” said Caruso.
The flatbread now appears as the base for five pizzas. These include Five Cheese, Pepperoni, Italian Sausage, Margherita and BBQ Chicken. Puttshack is also using the flatbread for its kids’ pizza and in the Handheld section of the menu, where it appears as a Roman-style Grilled Chicken Flatbread Foldover layered with seasoned chicken, Parmesan, baby arugula, roasted cherry tomatoes and lemon aioli. “The sandwich has been a huge fan favorite across the board,” said Caruso. “I’m going to play around with that pizza oven a lot more to see what other options can go on pizza and what else can be baked in the ovens, even desserts.”
The Signature Skirted Double Cheeseburger has an eye-catching build.
Also in the Handheld section is the new and improved burger, named the Signature Skirted Double Cheeseburger. It’s a build of two smashed beef patties, Cooper sharp white American cheese, lettuce, cheddar cheese, tomato, pickle, onion and burger sauce on a toasted brioche bun. The cheese forms a golden halo that makes for a dramatic presentation.
On the drinks side
In the menu’s previous iteration, Puttshack didn’t show much effort behind its non-alcoholic cocktails. Caruso wanted to put more emphasis into the selection; more than mixing together a few juices. The drinks are now poured into glassware to match that emphasis.
On offer now is a spirit-free section on the beverage menu, which includes a zero-proof Espresso Martini crafted with Lyre’s no-alcohol Dark Cane Spirit, cold brew, house-made Demerara syrup and lemon peel and a Spirit-Free Pineapple Hibiscus Mule with Lyre’s White Cane Spirit, pineapple syrup, lime juice, hibiscus ginger beer and lime. There’s also an N/A spritz and a Red Bull mocktail.
Popular cocktails like the Espresso Martini and Pineapple Hibiscus Mule come in spirit-free versions too.
For those who want a little buzz with their mini golf, there is a signature 1792 Puttshack Barrel Pick Old Fashioned featuring the concept’s exclusive bourbon, housemade Demerara syrup, Regans’ Orange Bitters, Angostura Bitters, cherry wood smoke and orange. The same combos in the Pineapple Hibiscus Mule and Espresso Martini can be ordered with a shot of vodka, and other popular drinks including a paloma, margarita, cosmo and sidecar are given a little Puttshack flair.
Simplification plus streamlining
Adding 50 items to the menu would seem to require a lot of new SKUs, but Caruso said that Puttshack locations are cross-utilizing more products—something that hadn’t been done before. “We had a lot of orphan SKUs which was affecting food costs and labor,” he said. “And we were losing products.”
He made it a goal to use the same product in multiple different dishes to make sure that the volume was high enough and nothing was getting thrown out. “We actually cut our SKUs by about half—from 350 down to 170,” Caruso said.
During the overhaul, there were some items that didn’t work out this go-around. Caruso had developed a recipe for crispy fried Brussels sprouts with a honey-serrano glaze. “It would have sold really well as a shareable, but Brussels sprouts were super scarce, really small in size and poor quality,” he said. “So we honestly nixed that idea.”
For those items that did make it to the menu, the team sometimes had to dig deep to find and combine several different purveyors to get the quantity, quality and price they were seeking.
Puttshack’s new menu launched in early April. As for what’s next, Caruso had this to say: “We’re definitely going to play around some more for fall, crafting some seasonal LTO cocktails, for instance. But now that we have only a little over a month under our belt, there’s still a lot of making sure everything is tightened up.” In his view, “it’s been a fantastic rollout.”
