how do restaurants calculate the prices of each dish? Do they accurately do it or just a rough estimate?
In: Economics
Our very basic rule of thumb was 25% of the cost is ingredients, so $5 worth of food in the dish, $20 roughly would be the menu price.
Obviously this doesn’t fit all situations, and was more of an average target overall, but for most main dishes it gave us a good starting point. Starters and small plates and labour intensive dishes might be more like 15-20%. Specials of course was just trying to clear out whatever crap we had too much of, so that would be like 33%.
You don’t want to price yourself out of the market, and you also don’t want customers to undervalue your food by making it too cheap, so you’d have to take this with a dose of common sense.
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