Four services. Each has a fixed shape, a stated length and a number we agree to be judged on before it starts.
The work is arithmetic before it is anything else. We cost every plate against the invoices you actually paid last quarter — not the price list, not last year’s spec — then set contribution margin against real sales mix from your POS. What comes out is a four-way sort that most operators know by reputation and few have ever seen for their own menu.
| Quadrant | What it means | Usual action |
|---|---|---|
| High margin, high volume | Carrying the restaurant | Protect it; do not redesign the plate |
| Low margin, high volume | Popular and barely paying | Re-cost, re-portion or move it down the page |
| High margin, low volume | Good plate, badly placed or badly described | Menu position, wording, server briefing |
| Low margin, low volume | Occupying prep time and cooler space | Remove, and reclaim the prep hours |
The last row is where the money is, and it is the row operators resist. A dish that sells four covers a week still occupies a mise en place slot, a purchase line, a page position and thirty seconds of every server’s attention.
Measured on the line, during service. We stand in the kitchen with a clipboard and a timer for three to five services, and we time tickets by station rather than reconstructing them from a POS export afterwards. The export tells you the ticket took nineteen minutes. It does not tell you that eleven of them were the plate sitting in the window.
From signed lease to first cover. The point of this engagement is that the equipment schedule and the menu are decided together — a menu written after the hoods are set is a menu built around somebody else’s kitchen.
| Stage | Weeks before opening | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Concept to menu skeleton | 20–16 | Draft menu, target food cost, prep load estimate |
| Equipment and layout | 16–12 | Equipment schedule tied to the menu, station plan |
| Costing and purchasing | 12–8 | Recipe cards, purveyor comparison, opening pars |
| Brigade and training | 8–3 | Staffing model, station training plan, prep lists |
| Friends and family, then open | 3–0 | Ticket-time targets, day-one par corrections |
Two-day station training delivered in your kitchen with your equipment, aimed at consistency rather than technique: the same plate leaving the pass at 11pm as at 6pm. Includes a written station manual photographed with your plates, which stays with you and which your team maintains.
We do not run front-of-house service training and will refer that elsewhere. Doing one thing properly is the reason people call us back.