Food costs are a big stressor for many restaurant operators. Your menu cost is a very basic and fundamental part of your expenses that goes into your bottom line and how much profit the restaurant makes, no matter how hard people are working.
At Emerald Coast Restaurant Brokers and Consultants, we help clients to stay on top of menu costing with specific industry best practices and core frameworks that control the money that you spend on inventory. Your food costs are vitally important!
Portioning Systems
Obviously, a kitchen is a fast-paced environment. It’s not going to be up to the executive chef or front-line people to work out consistent portioning on the fly. Having a system behind the scenes creates that consistency and universal plating that you need to both understand food costs and control them, and have a consistent presentation. Both of those help a kitchen to operate at peak accuracy, and that’s going to show when it’s time to order or go over the books. It’s not a minor detail.
A Par System
The par system is standard practice when related to restaurant food ordering. When you have a par system set up, you know how to reconcile a particular ingredient’s demand according to table service, and how to make additional inventory requests. If you don’t, the food side of your business can evolve into chaos.
Recipe Cards and Photos
There’s a visual side to coordinating the food ordering that goes on in the off hours, and the frenetic plating that goes on during a busy breakfast, lunch, or dinner service.
One of our consulting standards is for clients to set up recipe cards that spell out the ingredient portions and take photos that show plating, offering a consistent picture to everyone working in the restaurant.
Menu costing is just one small part of what we do for our restaurant clients. We are a full-service consulting company helping with zoning, health inspections, liquor licenses, and more. We also hope to broker deals between restaurant buyers and sellers. Take a look at our website for more on how we work with restaurant owners to keep a business operating in the black. In some ways, a restaurant is a data-driven business, even though chefs aren’t sitting back in the kitchen with a computer. They’re working on a decidedly analog set of equipment, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t benefit from the best technology on the back end. We can help put those ordering systems in place that actually make a restaurant a more harmonious and profitable place to work.