When the 90-year-old Harkins Theatre in North Phoenix was looking to transform into a more modern entertainment destination, The Culinary Edge (TCE) stepped up to make it happen.
TCE is a leading culinary innovation agency offering future-driven solutions for food and beverage brands with a focus on efficiency, scalability, and profitability. “We're here to help brands unlock growth through renovating what they already do or innovating new things that they can do,” said Graham Humphreys, president of The Culinary Edge.
The agency transformed Harkins Theatre into The Backlot, a Family Entertainment Center (FEC) designed to merge Hollywood-style storytelling with craveable, guest-centered dining—all led by TCE’s strategic development and culinary vision.
At the heart of The Backlot is Studio Canteen, a robust dining destination built to deliver elevated movie-inspired fare. Separately, The Culinary Edge collaborated on menu creation for Harkins’ dine-in theaters, ensuring consistency across platforms while meeting a wide range of guest occasions and preferences.
“We wanted to help them take 90 years of cinema magic and extend it into dining,” explains Humphreys. “By building on Harkins’ deep moviegoing legacy, we designed a destination where every menu item, every moment, and every detail invites guests into the magic behind the scenes.”
To make it happen, TCE had to combine three things, according to Humphreys, “You've got to have big brand storytelling, you've got to have operational discipline, and you've got to have hospitality-level food and beverage.”
Hospitality-Level Food & Beverage
The TCE team knew the entertainment factor would draw guests in, but it was the food and beverages that would keep them coming back. So they focused on creating a quality menu filled with desserts, shareables, premium burgers, fresh bowls and salads, pizzas named for iconic film characters, and innovative beverages like milkshakes, cocktails, mocktails, and shots.
“There's increasing pressure to make food remarkable, entertaining, and special because people are able to maybe go out for a meal half as much as they used to,” said Humphreys. “When they splurge, that splurge is really going to deliver a return on that investment of time. It's going to be very experiential. So increasingly, our clients are demanding that we entertain on the plate.”
Storytelling
Humphreys says beverages are especially important at getting customers to come back. The Backlot offers many different styles of drinks with creative names that are a call back to the age of Old Hollywood:
- TCB cocktail: a nod to Elvis that includes Baileys, crème de banana, peanut butter whiskey, and garnishes of Reese’s peanut butter cups, banana chips, and bacon
- B-52 shot: Kahula, Baileys, and Grand Marnier
- Blue Lagoon mocktail: blue curacao, grenadine, Sprite, sweet & sour mix, and lime
The Backlot also offers shareable cocktails for three or more people with options like large-format Moscow mules and margaritas as well as crafted choices like the Many Fish in the Sea with vodka, coconut rum, blue curaçao, and a variety of fruit juices.
Humphreys also highlighted the over-the-top milkshakes: Birthday Cake, Cookie Monster, and Strawberry Shortcake. Each milkshake features a decorated rim, garnishes like whole cake slices and cookies, and a colorful straw. The drinks look spectacular, are memorable, and lend themselves to sharing on social media.
“Beverages and entertainment go side by side,” said Humphreys, noting the portability that makes it easy to keep consuming a beverage while playing a game or watching a movie.
Operational Discipline & Scalability
“We build a menu that has got to be bold for the guest. It has to be exciting for the camera, it has to be fun to eat and interactive, and it has to feel like you're getting a lot of value, but it also has to be smart for operations,” says Humphreys. “It's about execution. You can create the most over-the-top drink, but if nobody can make it consistently, it doesn't matter.”
This is where the need for scalability and consistency comes into play. “When we design a menu, we make every effort to make every item as delicious as possible, but as simple to build as possible,” says Humphreys. “And we look to cross utilize ingredients as much as possible, so that you don't have a pantry of three million items.”
He gives the example of The Backlot’s carne asada ultimate nachos, which are built from a lot of the same items used across the tacos and fries items on the menu.
“It tends to be a little bit easier with beverages,” he says, which share the same base ingredients. “But we still have to make them craveable, fun, and fast to execute.”
Batching cocktails helps to speed up the execution side of things. “Increasingly, what we're looking at is, what about this cocktail can be batched? What is batchable? And then how can we make the finishing steps, the garnishing steps, to give it that extra fizz,” says Humphreys.
When creating entrees or beverages, TCE will have the least experienced staff member in mind and design it for that person. They also consider the challenges that will pop up, and what it takes to create at scale, asking questions like:
- Are we always going to be able to get the right ingredients from our suppliers without fail?
- Is this going to be trainable with the equipment that we have in our kitchens?
- How many hand touches to this?
- If we have got four of these on a ticket and then we've got 20 other orders coming in at the same time, are we going to be able to deliver it, or is it going to come out uneven?
“When we're designing a beverage item or a food item, we will iterate it 20 times or 30 times in our kitchen with different supply chain items, different pantry items, different heats, different processes, different equipment, different prep steps, and different build steps until we've got something that we feel is the simplest, the most bulletproof way to get to something delicious.”
Consistency is key in concepts like The Backlot, but so is innovation. Humphreys said, “Concepts which can continually renew and continue to provide something new over time, that's going to be necessary for concepts to continue to win.”
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