Gastronomy
Menu engineering is margin work
A menu is a commercial document. Most are written as a creative one.
Author
TEX Gastronomy
Four categories, one grid
Every dish sits somewhere on a grid of popularity against contribution margin. High on both: keep and protect. Popular but thin: re-cost or re-portion. Profitable but ignored: move it and describe it better. Low on both: remove it. The grid is simple. The discipline of acting on it every quarter is what most kitchens lack.
Cost the recipe, not the ingredient
Food cost calculated from invoice prices understates reality. Yield after trim, waste, staff meals and over-portioning all sit between the invoice and the plate. Costing at recipe level, with yields measured in your own kitchen, usually moves reported food cost by several points and changes which dishes look profitable.
Design the menu to be read
Guests do not read a menu top to bottom. They scan, and their eye lands in predictable places. Section length, position, boxing and description length all move what gets ordered — often more than price does. A shorter menu that highlights the right eight dishes outperforms a long one that treats every dish equally.
Fewer items, better executed
Long menus increase stockholding, waste, prep time and the chance of an inconsistent plate on a busy service. Cutting a menu is usually resisted on the grounds of choice, but guests judge consistency more than breadth. A kitchen that does twenty dishes well beats one that does forty unevenly.
