Thoughts into words or better put....How not to stumble and break that last crain bell.
Costs, whether it be item or menu, seem to be held to two standards of measure. Theoretical and actual.
So you sit down and work out the theoretical. This to me is a perfect world scenario but, the investors/bankers/owners want this. Sucks because usually they hold it over your head like it a friggen tablet of stone.
Okay so now you open the doors and you have menu mix to contend with. All menus are created with items that generate sales but have a poor cost % and items that are "gravy" and dirt cheap to prepare but have a great %. Ideally I would love to have a menu that sold nothing but these or would I.
All business need some sort of sales boost. Something to help with the ying and yang of their whole world. To me these "high dollar" items, for example a 40 dollar steak, sell 10 of these and you cover labor for a small kitchen for almost a shift. But a 12 dollar pasta you have to sell almost 4 times the amount to cover the same.
Even stephen mentions some very good points and a sound mentality towards costs. I admit though that judging by what he considers as acceptable is way outta line from when I did the steak thing. Not that I consider it un-acceptable but the owners I have been around sure did. (Goes back to that theoretical/actual thing again.) Anyway I was expected to run a 37% (at the highest) in a higher end steak house with a mix or 65% steaks. Luckily we did about a 55/45 mix because of some of my seafood offerings but I still ran a 37%. Mainly because beef and seafood are commodities and since the price change almost daily I was always chasing the menu price.
Before this turns into a Tolstoy novel (too late) I guess that for a full service, white table cloth restaurant the most profitable item on the menu could be almost anything. especially if the Chef/buyer bought the main ingredient in a bulk purchase or brokered a cheaper price. But if you don't have that ability then it would be a pasta or veg dish most of the time. It would have your greatest contribution to the bottome line but wouldn't contribute much to the sales for the day.
Jeeeezus I sure hope this made sense!
