Most menus are priced by looking at what the place down the road charges. It works until it does not, and the night you find out is the night you count the takings and cannot understand where they went.

What a plate costs

Take one dish. For every ingredient, divide what you paid by how much you bought, then multiply by how much goes on the plate. Add those up. That is your plate cost, and it takes about ten minutes a dish the first time.

Then add a few percent for the things nobody writes down: salt, oil, the butter on the bread, the lemon wedge, the portion that came back. Most kitchens land somewhere near five to ten percent on top. Pick a figure you believe and use the same one everywhere.

Turning cost into a price

Divide the plate cost by the food cost you are aiming for. A dish that costs you $3.50, at a thirty percent target, wants a menu price near $11.70. Full service usually aims around thirty to thirty-five percent, counter service lower.

Treat that number as the start of the argument. A dish nobody else in town has can carry more. A dish every menu has cannot.

The four corners

Cost alone will not tell you what to do. Put every dish against two things — how often it sells, and what it brings in after cost — and the menu sorts itself into four groups.

• Sells a lot, earns a lot. Protect it. Never let it go off, never let the quality drift.
• Sells a lot, earns little. The dangerous one. A small price move or a cheaper garnish changes your month.
• Sells rarely, earns a lot. Move it up the page, put a photo on it, teach the floor to mention it.
• Sells rarely, earns little. It has been taking up a line for a year. Cut it.

Where the numbers come from

The counting is the part that stops people. It needs sales per dish over enough nights to mean something, and hand-tallying tickets is a job nobody finishes twice.

If your orders come in digitally, the count is already sitting there. A menu performance chart puts every dish against how often it sold and what it earned, and the four corners are drawn for you. Then the ten minutes a dish is spent on the six dishes that matter instead of all forty.

You do not need to cost the whole menu this month. Cost the six dishes you sell most and you have found the money.