Flavor Trailblazer: Gabe Caliendo

At Lazy Dog Restaurants, Gabe Caliendo has spent the last two decades building a menu strategy around what he calls “approachable innovation”—using familiar dishes as a foundation for unexpected ingredients, global flavors and serious culinary technique. It’s an approach that has helped shape the brand since its first location opened in 2003. Caliendo, co-founder and VP of food and beverage and R&D, estimates that roughly 75 percent of the menu falls into that approachable-innovation sweet spot—still leaving room for more adventurous dishes that invite guests to explore. Across the menu, scratch cooking provides the foundation.

Today, Caliendo is pushing that philosophy forward while responding to a changing restaurant landscape. He’s exploring Persian and Peruvian flavors, balancing value with quality, expanding Lazy Dog’s already robust nonalcoholic beverage program and thinking more deliberately about how dishes show up visually in a social media–driven world.

Here, he shares how he keeps innovation approachable without playing it safe, what value means to today’s guest and why curiosity continues to drive his menu development more than two decades into Lazy Dog’s successful run.

Katie Ayoub: How do you define “approachable innovation” at Lazy Dog?
Gabe Caliendo: I’d say probably 75 percent of the menu falls under approachable innovation. And then there’s about 20 percent of it that is the next level up—think of the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s customer, the Food Network watcher. And then about 5 percent of the menu is something you might find in the coolest little restaurant in Austin or Miami or Portland. That 5 percent is designed to give our guests who want a menu adventure an affordable way to do something they probably couldn’t normally do.

Approachable innovation for us is best illustrated through our meatloaf. Pulling from our Jackson Hole, Wyo., roots, we use Wyoming-based Durham Ranch bison in lieu of beef. It’s taking the familiar—meatloaf—and adding something a little more interesting—bison—to make the BBQ Bison Meatloaf. Another example: People may know edamame, but they don’t necessarily know togarashi. So our Togarashi Edamame Beans, our BBQ Bison Meatloaf—that approach is threaded throughout the bar program and the whole menu. Everything has that kind of story.

KA: Value is such an important issue today. How has the definition changed over Lazy Dog’s 23-year history?
GC: From day one, our goal with Lazy Dog was that it was always going to be an innovative concept in the upscale casual-dining category. It would fall above casual dining in terms of what we offered and the price point and maybe just below the Houston’s of the world. Each menu section will have something that’s approachable and something that’s a little more elevated. For pastas, the Fettuccine Alfredo is going to be the least expensive item and the Burrata Spring Pea Pasta is going to be more expensive—there’s a barbell within each category. Then there’s also value for what you’re getting, and not even necessarily in the quantity, but in the quality of the ingredients. When we opened all those years ago, size did matter. Now, quality is more important to our guests.

KA: How are you addressing the heightened price sensitivity of the last few years?
GC: We rolled out our Fireside Favorites last year, where guests get a choice of an entrée and a dessert for $15. It’s been very successful, I think, because it provides price certainty. It’s value from a dollar standpoint, as well as a quality and experience standpoint. You can actually sit down with a linen napkin and silverware and have an experience.

KA: What are a few of the dishes that have endured on the menu and really represent Lazy Dog?
GC: Our Ginger Soy Salmon has been on the menu since day one. It’s a beautiful piece of grilled salmon that’s brushed with a glaze and topped with sesame seeds and green onions, served with wok-fired stir-fried veggies and steamed rice with housemade ponzu sauce drizzled over it. Another favorite is our Braised Pot Roast. It’s a traditional French-style braised beef that I learned from French chefs during my days at the Ritz-Carlton. We sear it really hard, caramelize it until you get the flavorful fond in the tilting skillet, then hit it with vegetables and roast those until they’re brown, add tomato paste and fresh thyme and deglaze it with red wine, pour in the beef broth, and simmer it for five hours until it’s falling apart. When you say “pot roast,” I think that’s understating what we’re doing. I would put it up against a braised short rib from a high-end restaurant.

KA: And there’s a cocktail you’d put in that group, too?
GC: Our Smoked Maple Bacon Old Fashioned is one of those 5-percent menu items I mentioned earlier. We torch the wood and smoke the glass, and we add a garnish of spicy bacon candy, which we make in-house, atop the rim. The cocktail itself is bacon-washed, too: We take our bacon fat, clarify it, put it into the bourbon, mix it, put it in the freezer where it separates and the fat comes off. When a guest gets the whole picture—smoking the glass, the large ice cube, the housemade bacon candy, the bacon-washed bourbon—it’s legitimate.

KA: Tell us about the Mindful Meals menu section and what’s resonating with guests.
GC: Mindful Meals was born from this: Let’s get credit for what we’re already doing and pull all of the items that we have on the menu that either fit a certain calorie count or health parameter and put them in one section of the menu so people can recognize it and feel good about ordering from it. We recently added one new dish to the section, our Chilean Sea Bass. At first, we thought we’d go with a miso glaze, but we went with more of a Mediterranean style with crushed garlic croutons on top, basil oil, cauliflower purée, beautiful roasted green beans and roasted squash and carrots and citrus-caper cream. Both ends of the barbell within the Mindful Meals section are performing well. The Lemon Chicken, which we’ve had on the menu for a long time, is toward the bottom of the barbell in terms of price. Then the Chilean Sea Bass is at the top of the barbell—they both sell well. There’s that bifurcated economy out there where people have disposable income, but there are people who need price certainty. Both items offer great value.

KA: What’s the strategy behind your nonalcoholic beverage program?
GC: We’ve had a robust non-alc beverage menu since day one. We’ve never bought pre-made mixers. We don’t do that with anything in our food or bar. Today, I have our beverages broken into different categories of usage. You have dirty sodas—they’re going to be sugary, maybe younger-skewing, but with fun flavors you can add to your soda, like huckleberry or coconut cream. We have drinks that are more fruit-based—we call them refreshers—with ingredients like cucumber and thyme with lemon. We serve passion fruit tea, sweet tea in the South, flavored lemonades, and now we also have the Matcha Latte and the Salted Caramel Latte. Another category is on the mocktail side. I tried a variety of non-alc spirits and wasn’t happy with any of them, so now we make our own. I created one I call “fezcal,” a non-alc version of mezcal with notes of peppercorn and agave and a few other ingredients. It’s basically a flavored water, but when you put it in your drink with sweet and sour and fresh lime, it tastes like a margarita.

KA: What are some of the new fall menu items you’re particularly excited about?
GC: There’s so much fun stuff coming up on our fall menu. We are going after the Gen Z demographic with our Carolina Reaper Fried Chicken Sandwich with “ranchy” fries. The sandwich sits in a pool of Carolina Reaper sauce. It’s our play on a hot sizzling skillet of cheese with a burger, only done with fried chicken instead. On the drinks side, we are introducing a Paper Plane cocktail, served with a fun little paper plane that has a Lazy Dog doodle on it. Each plane has a message tucked inside, kind of like a fortune cookie. We have about 10 different messages, which is fun. Additional favorites include Crab Cakes with caper-chive remoulade, Spicy Sausage + Burrata Rigatoni, Wagyu Beef + Bison Chili with blue cornbread fries and a Hot Honey Black + Blue Flatbread.

QUICKFIRE

Source of inspiration:
Travel would be No. 1. I could give you dozens of examples of things we’ve launched on the menu based on travel—everything from coconut ceviche, inspired by a trip to Fiji, to Thai-style wings from when I went on a trip to Thailand. Whether that’s travel within the U.S. or anywhere—anytime I go to New Orleans, I come back and make 35 items. There’s so much good food there. And I still take a ton of inspiration from seasons and seasonality.

Something in your fridge that would surprise people:
Colatura would probably be surprising. I went fishing and had a bunch of fresh anchovies left over that I bought at the dock for bait, and I wasn’t going to throw them away. I took them home and fermented them.

Best bite you’ve had recently:
A tomato dish at the Rumi’s Kitchen location in Atlanta. It’s the craziest thing. They roast a tomato until it’s super gooey, and then they just hammer it with a ton of sumac. They take that and put it on steamed jasmine rice. When you break it up in rice, it’s just this crazy combination. And of course, you’ve got bread and a kebab and all the dipping sauces, so you get to build these little wraps that you’re eating.

Go-to late-night snack:
I do love cheese. I’d grab some Triscuits and pair them with the really cheesy-bad port wine cheese—the one that comes in a little tub. And I always yell at the kids because I’m very specific about how I use the Triscuit to level off the cheese in the container. I can tell when someone’s been in there because there are divots. I’m like, ‘=”No, you’ve got to level it as you go.” They’re like, ‘Dad’s being crazy again.’ Crackers and port wine cheese—the best.