Andrew Schnipper: Startover, make menus more focused

menu focus – Andrew Schnipper, cofounder of Schnipper’s and Hamburger America, says the biggest lesson from opening more than 25 restaurants is simple: a broad menu sounds like a smart idea at the start, but customers increasingly want specialists—and large menus make it h

When Andrew Schnipper and his brother opened Schnipper’s in 2009, they believed variety would win. They were building around burgers, but the menu also included salads, sandwiches, and other comfort food.

They weren’t trying to be unpredictable. They were trying to make sense of a question they kept asking themselves: how many burgers can someone realistically eat every week?

Over time, Schnipper says, the answer changed—not because burgers stopped working, but because the appetite around restaurant choices shifted. Today’s customers, he argues, are looking for specialists. They want restaurants that do a few things extremely well. That idea became central to Hamburger America, where the menu stays intentionally narrow.

At Hamburger America, Schnipper says there are “a couple of burgers” and “a couple of sandwiches,” and that’s pretty much it. The focus isn’t just branding. It’s how they decide what to perfect.

There’s another reason he believes the menu has to be tight: removing items gets harder as a restaurant grows. Schnipper described one of the toughest realities of running a large menu—when there are many dishes. “almost everything sells to somebody.” Blockbuster items may draw most of the attention. but even the lower-volume dishes can build loyal customers. Once the menu gets too large, he says, taking anything off becomes difficult.

“Looking back, I probably would have built a more focused concept from the beginning,” he said.

Schnipper’s answer to that lesson is rooted in decades of building restaurants. He and his brother first entered the business in 1990 with Hale and Hearty, a soup concept in New York City. They eventually grew it to 18 locations before selling their interest in 2006.

Later, they launched Schnipper’s, and eventually partnered with George Motz to open Hamburger America. Schnipper said Motz spent decades documenting hamburger history through books, documentaries, and pop-ups. Motz, though, didn’t want to open a restaurant without experienced operators. Schnipper’s brother and he already had that background from building and running restaurants, which is why the partnership formed.

Schnipper said the partnership works because they split responsibilities. His brother trained as a chef and focuses heavily on the food and culinary side. Schnipper focuses more on operations and accounting and on building restaurants.

He links that division to trust. “We trust each other in our respective areas,” he said, adding that “that level of respect is critical in any partnership, especially a family business.”

The menu lesson lands differently now than it did in 2009, because the economic pressure on restaurants has intensified. Schnipper said food and labor costs have risen dramatically since he started, especially since the pandemic. He described how prices have increased “about double for meat compared with when we first opened our burger business. ” and how labor costs have also climbed.

For customers, the tradeoff is value. Schnipper said most restaurateurs want customers to feel like they got a good value, but rising ingredient and labor costs create a tight boundary—there’s only so much price increases you can pass along before customers start to push back.

The industry, he believes, is absorbing part of those increases. That means restaurateurs are making “a little less money than we used to.”

Even with those pressures, Schnipper says he still loves the business. He doesn’t romanticize the work—he asks his brother. “Why would anybody voluntarily do this for a living?” But then he watches customers come in and enjoy what they built. and that response pulls him back to the reason they started.

In the lunch business especially, he said, restaurants become part of someone’s day. People don’t just buy food; they return for the experience, and that gives him “a huge amount of satisfaction.”

His final belief is personal and blunt: you either have hospitality in your DNA or you don’t. He said if someone is doing this “just to make money,” it’s probably “a terrible idea.” To last, he argues, you have to love hospitality, love food, and enjoy making people happy.

For Schnipper, that’s the through-line that connects every decision—whether it was growing menus too wide in 2009, or tightening Hamburger America so the kitchen can do fewer things, better.

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