Less is more for Chaz Olsen.

Olsen is the executive chef at Lake Wilderness Grill at Lake Wilderness Golf Course, which is owned by the city of Maple Valley. He has worked there overseeing the food and beverage operations since April 2009.

“When I first got here and since I’ve been here, the biggest concern has always been to take care of the customer,” Olsen said. “When I got here the menu was massive, it was four or five pages of different options, especially at dinner. It seemed rather overextended… it was trying to provide everything the customers wanted.”

What that created was waste. Too much food on a menu that was too large.

“They were trying so hard to take care of everybody,” Olsen said. “One of the first things I did was to start restructuring and reduce the size of the menu and still try to provide a good amount of product.”

He approached it with the idea that less is more by reducing the menu and raising the quality of the dishes that remained.

It also allowed Olsen to address the challenge of creating good food consistently.

“Sustainability is a good word, trying to make a menu that could sustain itself with the amount of patrons we had,” he said. “The question I asked myself after all that is we have this community asset that needs to provide for the community. So, how do I do that? How do I provide to the customer base and continue to provide the product that they’re looking for?”

In some ways, those are easy questions to answer, Olsen concluded.

At the beginning of this past summer, Olsen said, the staff started making significant changes.

Olsen, who grew up in the hospitality business due at his parent’s resort, has a degree from South Seattle Community College in hospitality and business management. He first started working in his father’s restaurant at the family resort when he was 12.

He was brought in by Premier Golf, the company who won the contract to run the golf course for the city in 2007, to oversee the food and beverage operations. Olsen explained his experience and education should allow him to help Premier and the city run the operation better.

When he first started in 2009 the golf course, and by extension the restaurant, were about to enter the busy season. This year was his opportunity to really try to start putting his own stamp on it as well as work to help bring it out of the red.

“This summer we started with what was really my first ‘me’ menu and it went over really, really well,” he said. “We really brought up the par of what we were providing and the customer feedback, for the most part, was really good.”

In working with the city, Premier and Olsen tried to identify the demographic the restaurant was serving and what they should be providing, settling on what the chef described as a sports bar and steak and chop house.

“Our weekends have always been pretty good,” Olsen said. “I think what a lot of people don’t see is that for a restaurant to sustain itself, it needs to be busy every night of the week. On the week days, it’s very difficult to have people in the dining room to continue to support the menu, the services that we’re providing.”

Olsen, however, was asked to shut down the dining room area of the full service restaurant after Maple Valley staff recommended the change to the City Council at its Dec. 6 meeting.

It is a cost cutting measure meant to stop the bleeding and Olsen said the changes had just recently taken effect.

“When people start looking at financials, why the numbers are the way they are, I have difficulties comparing other restaurants in Maple Valley to this restaurant, so I look outside of Maple Valley,” he said. “Take a chain restaurant of some sort, they have a dinner crowd every night of the week, they have that consistent business.”

What is consistent, especially in the summer, is the golfer crowd playing a round then having lunch.

But, in order to justify the restaurant dining area being open, to justify having servers working in the restaurant there has to be business every night and Olsen said the biggest challenge is drawing people in for that.

They’ve tried advertising and while people who golf at the course or live on it support it, the location of the course is a unique challenge, and “when you get really into it, location is huge.”

Being up on a hill tucked away behind a stand of trees, Olsen said, the drive in traffic just isn’t there because it’s “out of sight, out of mind.”

Over the past three years, the food and beverage operations have lost money and city staff projected losing more than $200,000 in 2011 if they kept the main dining area of Lake Wilderness Grill open during the winter months.

“We’ve made a number of reductions to make this place sustain itself,” Olsen said. “The way it is now, I just need a bartender and one cook and it’s sustainable.”

What they’re doing now is continuing to do what they’ve always done, he explained, and that’s take care of the customers. But the focus is taking care of the customers they already have who have patronized the bar consistently over the years.

The menu has changed from a full restaurant menu to what Olsen describes as “pub fare” with burgers, sandwiches and more finger foods to fit the sports bar feel. Olsen explained that during the summer weekend nights, the bar would be standing room only as patrons rocked out to live bands, something he hopes will continue.

And the 19th Hole cafe, which is located between the golf course pro shop and the restaurant dining area, has changed its menu, too. There’s breakfast being offered as well as a simplified lunch menu.

The idea is to assess reopening the main dining area of Lake Wilderness Grill in the spring.

“Currently, we’ve unfolded a plan to be very sustainable,” Olsen said. “What I hope to see, and I think that part’s been made clear, is that it’s going to be assessed once we get through the winter. We’ve been careful not to burn any bridges with the groups that play here.”

Olsen added that banquet operations have been scaled down and that’s something that will need to be re-evalulated at some point in the future.

There are four potential revenue outlets, he said, with the bar, the restaurant, the banquet facility and the cafe “that all require their own attention.”

Heading into spring it will be a clearer picture.

“We’ll be building from a more substantial base unlike the past two winters where we struggled to stay above water,” Olsen said. “Coming into spring of 2011, I think you’ll see a more revitalized atmosphere.”

Chaz Olsen, Lake Wilderness Golf Course chef.

Kris Hill, The Reporter