If you’re running two local restaurants like Kelly Manning, owner of Tavern in the Village and Tavern at Mission Farms, every dish at both locations needs to taste its finest without being too complicated to make.

“If it’s got 25 different ingredients or it takes too long to prepare, it’s going to suffer from time to time,” Manning said. “So we try to keep it as simple as possible, but still as adventurous as possible. That’s kind of the conundrum, I guess.”

The edible pieces of Manning’s two-restaurant puzzle fit best, he said, when consistency is meticulously maintained—whether between lunch and dinner menus at each location or between the similar menus at both locations.

“I’ve always said, ‘If you’re great on Tuesday and bad on Friday, you’re just bad,’” Manning said. “If people have our Santa Fe Chicken Salad, which was the salad that we had on our original menu, and they differ in quality or taste or size—between the two places, lunch or dinner, Monday versus Wednesday—people notice those things.”