Desserts can be a tricky sell. Guests love them and they’re highly profitable, but it’s not always easy to convince customers to invest in the extra time, money, or calories.
One option is to make them drinkable.
Beverage consumption in general is surging as consumers turn to menu items that are fast, portable, customizable, and satisfying, especially in the growing afternoon daypart. Restaurant companies large and small have noticed, and are responding with an array of drinkable desserts.
Whether they’re milkshakes, dessert cocktails, coffee slushes or other options, these sweet, fun, and often textured drinks are striking a chord with guests.
Guard and Grace, a steakhouse concept that’s part of the TAG Restaurant Group and has one location each in Denver and Houston, recently added a cocktail list to its dessert menu.
“We’ve never really had a dessert cocktail menu before, and we wanted to give people what they didn’t know they wanted until they had it,” said the restaurant’s “bar liaison,” Jake Pike. He added that sometimes the dessert cocktails are ordered with dessert, and sometimes they are the dessert, especially after guests have had a full meal and “want a sweet libation to round it out.”