Inside True Food Kitchen’s Top-Performing LTO

For Matt Padilla, senior vice president of culinary and supply chain at True Food Kitchen, watermelon is particularly well suited to the brand’s focus on seasonal LTOs. “Watermelon is the perfect summer LTO item to build around because everyone loves watermelon,” Padilla says. “Those have been some of our top sellers every year that we put them on the menu.”

The watermelon mojito is the brand’s top-selling cocktail on its LTO menu “by a mile,” according to Padilla. But the watermelon salad demonstrates how operators can take the familiar fruit beyond beverages and traditional summer applications.

The salad was one of the first dishes Padilla added to the menu after joining True Food Kitchen. His goal was to transform watermelon into something guests could view as part of a meal rather than a standalone piece of fruit.

“I set out just trying to solve the puzzle of how to make watermelon craveable,” he says. “How do you make it something that actually feels like a dish rather than something relegated to the picnic table?” The original salad featured a mango vinaigrette, which has since evolved into a passion fruit-mango vinaigrette.

Today, watermelon is paired with Marcona almonds, avocado mousse, tomatoes, cucumber, and a house-made togarashi-style seasoning. True Food Kitchen added seared halloumi to the salad this summer, bringing another layer of flavor and texture to the dish.

“The sweetness from the watermelon, the acidity from the vinaigrette, and the saltiness from the cheese gives the dish perfect balance,” Padilla says. Heat has also played a role in different iterations.

The original version included Calabrian chiles, while the current vinaigrette incorporates Fresno chiles. Although the culinary team continues to experiment, Padilla says the basic platform has remained largely unchanged because customers love it. Watermelon’s possibilities don’t end with its flesh.

Earlier in his career at Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark, Padilla used pickled watermelon rind as a component of a seasonal vegetable salad. Later, he brought a similar approach to dishes at Michael Mina in San Francisco and The Little Nell in Aspen. “We would either cube or julienne it, then pickle it,” he says. “We didn’t waste any part of the watermelon.

We’d pickle it and put it on salads as a flavor and texture enhancer.” Techniques such as pickling can also give chefs another way to work with watermelon outside the summer season.

Padilla sees potential for preparations such as watermelon kimchi and other applications that lean into acidity when the fruit itself may not be at peak ripeness. For operators, that versatility creates opportunities to experiment with watermelon across more areas of the menu while finding additional uses for the product they already purchase.

True Food Kitchen, meanwhile, continues to find new ways to put watermelon to work. Padilla expects it to remain a fixture in beverages and savory dishes, with room to expand into desserts.

“I would love to see it elevated into every area of the menu,” he says. For chefs willing to look beyond watermelon’s familiar summer role, that leaves plenty of room to explore.

Visit watermelon.org to learn more about how restaurants are menuing watermelon.