Brand Extensions

This past weekend before the latest snowstorm hit on Sunday, I braved the cold weather and ventured somewhere new for dinner, LTK, also known as Legal Test Kitchen, in the up and coming Seaport District. LTK is an extension of the Legal Sea Foods restaurant chain, one of the better chains in my opinion since they actually serve decent food. You can get delectably fresh fish and probably one of the best crab cakes I’ve ever consumed. I know my crab cakes; I grew up in Maryland, home of the MD crab cake, so trust me on this one.

Now LTK is a bit of a different story. With a name like Legal Test Kitchen I expected exactly what a name like that would convey, a Legal restaurant with the same atmosphere, but some sort of rotating menu where they might pilot new dishes that would perhaps rotate in on the specials menu if they fared well in the test kitchen. Obviously I didn’t do my research, or any research before going to LTK, because my assumptions of what the restaurant would be like were completely incorrect.

LTK is a flat out brand extension of Legal Sea Foods if you ask me. If you didn’t have the Legal part in the LTK, the Legal logo appearing every so often, and a few of the same/similar menu items and concepts, then you’d never guess that the two restaurants were related. At least I wouldn’t have.

It seems that LTK aims to target a different, younger and more hip, demographic. First, off the décor was completely different. While the Legal restaurants tend to be bathed in blues and rich wood colors, LTK had bright reds, oranges, sliver, and black. Hipper colors if you ask me. Next, we have the menu. While it does rotate every few weeks, I don’t think any of the items are actually “tested” for market in Legal Sea Foods restaurants.

The menu also seemed to consist of foods that a younger audience, 20s and early 30s might consume, and there were a few slightly lower priced items. These foods ranged from a tuna burger, to fried pickles, to a steamed edamame app, to a lack of swordfish, and the only vegetable side being sautéed spinach. This last factor here, and the lack of swordfish on the menu, deterred me from ordering the wood grilled fish with two sides, a typical favorite of mine. Two fried sides weren’t what I was going for, and how many people really eat sautéed spinach?

So, the atmosphere is ‘hip’ and the food is ‘hip’, however the service and the dish I ended up ordering left something to be desired. I ended up ordering hoisin glazed Atlantic salmon with vegetable lo mein. Sounds delicious, but that wasn’t the case. The fish was okay, but the glaze was a little salty, and the noodles were a gloppy disaster. I don’t recall there being so many vegetables amongst the lo mein noodles that were cut up into bite sized pieces.

Now the restaurant was a zoo, and the servers and food runners had to walk through the bar/entry area to wait on the tables, not smart from a restaurant design standpoint. This might account for the lack of terrific service, but our fried banana spilt dessert took 20 minutes to get to our table. It had obviously been sitting in the back waiting to be brought to us, as a straw would have worked better than the spoons we were provided with. Dessert, even with all of it’s ice cream soup factor, and the blueberry Stoli and soda I started the meal out with were the highlights of the experience.

While my experience at LTK wasn’t the best, I can’t say that this is a bad brand extension. Its actual relation to Legal Sea Foods seems minimal. I can’t see a bad experience harming the brand name, but there is enough of a brand relationship to draw the usual Legal goers for a one time go around. The concept of a rotating menu with some staples seems a like an ingenious way to bring customers back time and time again. Overall, I think Legal Sea Foods/ LTK is successfully targeting a different demo. They’ve been around since 2005, so something they are doing must be working. As for me, the food and service would have to improve before I’d venture back to LTK, but I’ll eat a crab cake at the real Legal any day.