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Why Most Restaurants don't actually know their numbers.

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:59:52 GMT

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Why Most Restaurateurs Don’t Actually Know Their Numbers

After more than fifty years in kitchens and opening multiple restaurants, I can tell you something that most people don’t expect to hear.

Most restaurateurs don’t actually know their numbers.

They think they do.

They know what their food cost “should be.”
They know when payroll feels too high.
They know whether the restaurant was busy last weekend.

But none of that is the same as truly understanding the business.

Restaurants are not sustained by activity.

They’re sustained by margins.

And margins are built on numbers — real numbers — not assumptions.

The “We’re Busy” Trap

One of the most common things I hear is:

“We’re busy all the time, but we’re not making money.”

And right behind that usually comes:

“Volume cures all.”

There’s some truth to that.

But only if your structure is correct.

If your menu is engineered properly…
If your labor is controlled…
If your margins are right…

Then yes, volume can amplify profit.

But if those things are off, volume doesn’t fix anything.

It just makes you lose money faster.

That’s where most operators get stuck.

They focus on getting more people in the door instead of fixing what happens after they walk in.

It Starts With Prime Cost

If you want to understand your restaurant financially, you start with one number:

Prime cost.

Food cost plus labor cost.

That number has to stay under 60% of your total sales.

And realistically, you want it closer to 55–58% if you want to build something sustainable.

Because once you layer in everything else — utilities, supplies, rent, taxes — there’s not much room left.

If your prime cost is too high, the math simply doesn’t work.

It doesn’t matter how good the food is.
It doesn’t matter how busy you are.

You can’t outwork bad math.

Labor Is Where Most People Drift

Labor is one of the biggest areas where operators lose control.

And it’s usually because they treat it like a fixed number instead of something that needs to be managed throughout the day.

Labor isn’t static.

It’s a moving target.

If you’re using a system like Toast, you can see your labor cost against your sales in real time.

That means you should know, at any given moment:

Where your labor percentage is
Whether you’re overstaffed
Whether you need to adjust

But most people don’t manage labor that way.

They write a schedule… and then they react after the fact.

That’s too late.

Good operators are constantly adjusting.

They phase people in as business builds.

They phase people out as it slows down.

Labor is not a switch.

It’s a dial.

Scheduling Is About Patterns

One of the simplest things we used to do — and it still works today — is track patterns.

What day it is.
What the weather is doing.
Whether it’s a holiday weekend.

All of that matters.

Because business isn’t random.

It follows patterns.

And if you understand those patterns, you can schedule more accurately.

That’s how you avoid overstaffing slow periods and getting crushed during busy ones.

The Cost of Small Things

Another place where numbers quietly get away from people is controllable costs.

Everyone focuses on food and labor, but the small things add up fast.

Burners left running all day.
Fryers running longer than they need to.
Lights on in empty areas.
Linen usage out of control.

Then you add:

Disposable containers
To-go packaging
Supplies

None of these seem like big issues on their own.

But together, they move your controllable costs well beyond where they should be.

And once that happens, your margin starts shrinking without you even realizing it.

Why PMIX Matters More Than You Think

Another mistake I see all the time is operators looking at food cost without looking at menu mix.

They’ll say:

“My food cost is around 32%.”

But they don’t know why.

That’s where PMIX comes in.

You need to know what’s actually selling — and how much of it.

Because one item can throw everything off.

If you have a high-cost item that represents a large percentage of your sales, it will drag your entire food cost up.

Even if you have lower-cost items on the menu.

So it’s not just about what things cost.

It’s about what people are actually buying.

Costing Has to Reflect Reality

I’ve never believed in perfect, theoretical costing.

Because restaurants aren’t perfect environments.

Things get overcooked.
Food gets wasted.
Portions drift.

So I always build in what I call a buffer.

If your numbers only work on paper, they don’t work.

They have to work in real life.

Not All Dollars Are Equal

One thing that gets overlooked is the difference between percentage and actual profit.

Some items may have a higher food cost percentage but still generate more dollars to the bottom line.

Those are your real winners.

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is what actually goes into the bank.

Not just what looks good on a spreadsheet.

And Then There’s One More Thing

Even if all your numbers are right…

Even if your margins are perfect…

None of it matters if the guest doesn’t feel like it was worth it.

That’s what I call perceived value.

If someone pays for a dish and feels like they could have made it better at home, you’ve already lost them.

But if they feel like they got their money’s worth, they come back.

And repeat business is what makes the model work.

Final Thought

This business is not just about food.

It’s about math.

And it’s about discipline.

You have to know your numbers.

You have to understand what’s driving them.

And you have to manage them every single day.

Because at the end of it all:

Food brings people in the door.

But numbers keep the doors open.

— Chef Joseph Chouinard
The Hospitality Doctor

When a restaurant menu stops making sense

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:23:52 GMT

When a restaurant menu stops making sense

When a Restaurant Menu Stops Making Sense

After more than fifty years in kitchens and opening multiple restaurants, I’ve learned that some of the biggest problems in this business are not complicated.

They’re actually very simple.

Sometimes the menu just doesn’t make sense.

And when that happens, the entire concept starts to break down — whether the operator realizes it or not.

I ran into this twice recently, back to back.

The first time was with my brother.

We walked into a restaurant that was sitting right next to a Hooters that was absolutely packed. You couldn’t even get a seat there. So we figured we’d try the place next door.

We walked in — and it was almost empty.

That alone should tell you something.

We sat down, opened the menu, and spent a few minutes trying to figure out what we were going to eat.

Nothing really jumped out.

Nothing felt like it belonged.

Nothing matched what we expected based on the type of place we were sitting in.

After a few minutes of going back and forth, it became obvious — the menu wasn’t the reason to stay there.

And when the menu isn’t the reason to stay, the restaurant has already lost.

A couple weeks later, I had almost the exact same experience again.

This time I was by myself, watching the Patriots playoff game at a sports bar.

Again, the place was mostly empty. A few tables of fans watching the game, but plenty of open seats.

And again, the menu told the story.

When you walk into a sports bar, you expect certain things.

Not just wings.

You expect solid bar sandwiches.
You expect comfort food you can eat while watching a game.
You expect items that fit the environment.

Philly cheesesteaks.
Burgers.
Flatbreads.
Maybe a few strong salads.

Instead, the menu was mostly wings and a handful of appetizers that didn’t even feel connected to the concept.

No real sandwiches.
No lunch comfort options.

I sat there and realized something very simple.

There was nothing on that menu I actually wanted to eat.

And when that happens, it doesn’t matter how nice the space is, how good the service is, or how many TVs are on the wall.

The menu failed.

A Menu Has to Match the Concept

A menu is not just a list of food.

It’s the clearest expression of the concept.

When a guest walks into your restaurant, they already have an expectation in their mind of what they’re going to see.

If it’s Italian, they expect certain anchors.

Pasta.
Italian subs.
Lasagna.
Pizza.
Tiramisu.

If it’s Chinese or Asian, they expect:

Egg rolls.
Wonton soup.
Fried rice.
Beef and broccoli.

These aren’t clichés.

They’re signals.

They tell the guest:

“You’re in the right place.”

When those signals are missing, the menu starts to feel disconnected.

And when it feels disconnected, the guest hesitates.

And hesitation rarely turns into a strong sale.

The Problem with “Mishmash” Menus

One of the biggest issues I see today is what I call the mishmash menu.

This happens when items are added without discipline.

An owner sees something somewhere and wants it on their menu.

A chef wants to try something creative.

A marketing idea pushes a trendy dish.

None of those things are wrong on their own.

But when they start stacking without a clear direction, the menu loses its identity.

Instead of reinforcing the concept, it starts pulling in different directions.

And the guest feels that immediately.

They may not say it out loud, but they feel it.

They look at the menu and think:

“This doesn’t really make sense.”

And once that thought enters their head, you’ve already created friction.

The Missing Piece: Demographics

There’s another layer to this that a lot of operators miss.

Demographics.

What works in one market does not always work in another.

For example, in New York, you can put a veal parmesan sandwich on almost any Italian menu and it will sell.

It’s part of the culture.

Take that same item to other parts of the country, and it may barely move.

That doesn’t mean the dish is wrong.

It means it’s wrong for the market.

A strong menu connects three things:

The concept
The guest expectation
The local demographic

If any one of those is off, the menu starts to drift.

Menu Flow Is What Makes It Work

A good menu has flow.

The proteins make sense.
The comfort items make sense.
The lighter options make sense.

The guest should never feel like they walked into the wrong restaurant.

When the menu is built correctly, ordering feels natural.

When it isn’t, it feels like work.

And no one wants to work to figure out what to eat.

The Hospitality Doctor’s Question

Whenever I look at a menu, I ask one simple question:

Does this menu actually make sense for the concept and the demographic it’s trying to serve?

Not just operationally.

Logically.

Because when a menu makes sense, the restaurant feels right.

When it doesn’t, the dining room starts to look like the two places I walked into recently.

Almost empty.

Final Thought

Concept first.

Menu second.

Everything else follows.

If the menu doesn’t align with the concept and the market, nothing else will fix it.

— Chef Joseph Chouinard
The Hospitality Doctor

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If you’re opening a restaurant, reworking a menu, or trying to correct operational issues, this always starts with structure — not guesswork.

Learn more here:

When Marketing Departments Start Writing Restaurant Menus

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:25:30 GMT

When Marketing Departments Start Writing Restaurant Menus

Over the past decade I’ve noticed something in the restaurant industry that honestly surprises me.

More and more often, the people writing the menus aren’t chefs.

They’re marketing departments.

Now before anyone misunderstands what I’m saying, marketing absolutely has a role in restaurants. Branding matters. Menu descriptions matter. The way a dish is communicated to the guest matters.

But there’s a big difference between helping describe a dish and designing the dish itself.

And lately, I’m seeing marketing departments doing exactly that.

They’re creating menu items based on what they believe will trend well, photograph well, or fit a particular campaign.

From a branding standpoint, that may sound logical.

From an operational standpoint, it can create serious problems.

Where Menu Development Is Supposed to Start

In a properly engineered restaurant, the menu doesn’t begin with marketing. It begins in the kitchen.

Menus should grow out of fully developed recipes. Those recipes determine nearly every operational system in the restaurant.

A single dish dictates:

the ingredients required
the inventory that must be carried
the equipment needed to execute it
the prep time required
the labor structure in the kitchen
the timing of service

Multiply that by an entire menu and you begin to understand why the chef and the kitchen team must lead menu development.

When dishes are created first for marketing reasons and the kitchen is asked to “make it work,” the operation ends up forcing execution into a structure that was never designed for it.

That’s when the real problems begin.

What Happens When Marketing Drives the Menu

When menu development starts outside the kitchen, a few patterns show up almost immediately.

The first is ingredient sprawl.

Marketing-driven dishes often introduce ingredients that don’t cross-utilize with the rest of the menu. Suddenly the restaurant is carrying additional products that serve only one item.

That drives up inventory and increases the chance of waste.

The second issue is prep complexity.

A dish that looks beautiful in a marketing meeting may require steps that are difficult to execute on a busy line during service. Extra components, delicate plating, or specialty ingredients slow the kitchen down.

The third issue is execution inconsistency.

When a dish hasn’t been designed around the actual flow of the kitchen, it becomes harder for cooks to reproduce it consistently during a rush.

Guests may love the concept of the dish, but if the kitchen cannot execute it cleanly every time, the experience becomes unreliable.

And in restaurants, inconsistency is one of the fastest ways to lose trust with guests.

The Role Marketing Should Play

None of this means marketing should be removed from the process.

Quite the opposite.

Marketing should absolutely be involved in shaping how the menu connects with guests.

Once the chef and kitchen team have engineered dishes that work operationally, marketing can help refine the presentation of those dishes.

They can help tell the story.

They can help shape the language.

They can help position the menu so it resonates with the audience the restaurant wants to attract.

But the operational structure of the menu must begin in the kitchen.

That’s where execution lives.

Restaurants Run on Systems

Restaurants are not sustained by trends.

They are sustained by systems.

A dish that looks great on social media might attract attention once. But if the kitchen struggles to execute it during service, the long-term cost is far greater than the marketing benefit.

Great restaurants balance creativity with structure.

The chef designs dishes that work operationally.

Marketing helps translate those dishes into language and imagery that bring guests through the door.

When that balance is respected, both sides of the operation support each other.

When it isn’t, restaurants often find themselves chasing trends instead of building systems.

And systems are what make restaurants profitable.

— Chef Joseph Chouinard
The Hospitality Doctor

Stop Building Your Restaurant Half-Ass Backwards

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:46:27 GMT

Stop Building Your Restaurant Half-Ass Backwards

After more than five decades in professional kitchens and opening multiple restaurants, I can tell you that most operational problems begin long before the doors ever open.

They begin during design.

One of the biggest mistakes I see operators make is building the kitchen before they fully engineer the menu. It happens all the time. Someone has a concept — Italian, French, a steakhouse, a dessert shop — and the next step is calling an equipment supplier, bringing in an architect, and laying out a kitchen.

But the menu hasn’t been properly developed yet.

That’s backwards.

The menu is not decoration. It is the operational blueprint of the entire restaurant.

Before anything else happens, two things need to be decided.

First, the concept.
Italian, Chinese, French, seafood, bakery, dessert shop — whatever it is.

Second, the service model.
Quick service. Casual dining. Fine dining.

Once those two pieces are established, the next step is menu engineering, followed by fully detailed recipe development.

And when I say recipes, I’m not talking about a simple cook’s card.

A real development recipe should include:

• Every ingredient
• Every preparation step
• Every piece of equipment required
• Every small ware needed
• The full execution process

Those recipes become the data source for everything else in the operation.

From those recipes you derive your entire system:

Food inventory
Ordering guides
Vendor relationships
Major equipment needs
Smallwares
Kitchen layout and flow
Staff training
Menu descriptions for service staff

Everything flows from the menu and the recipes.

If the kitchen is designed first, the menu ends up being forced into a structure that wasn’t built for it. That almost always creates inefficiencies that are very hard to fix later.

Now if the kitchen is already built, it doesn’t mean the operation is doomed. It simply means the process has to be reverse engineered. The menu and recipes must now be built around the limitations of the space.

With the right chef and collaborative thinking it can work.

But it will rarely be as efficient as building the operation in the proper order.

Chef Ego — And Why I Know This Personally

Let me say something that many chefs don’t like to admit.

Ego builds beautiful menus.
It does not build profitable restaurants.

At twenty-six I became one of the youngest Four-Star Mobile Travel Guide chefs in the country at Nikolai’s Roof in Atlanta.

Two years later I opened my first restaurant, Chouinard’s on Charleston — the only restaurant ever awarded four stars by The Post and Courier.

The recognition felt good.

But the reality of running a restaurant taught me something important very quickly.

My menus were ambitious. Technical. Complex. Built to impress.

They also created unnecessary cost and operational drag.

Too many ingredients.
Too many components.
Too much prep time.
Too many moving parts.

Those menus showcased the chef, but they didn’t protect the operation.

And that matters.

Ego driven menus often create:

Excess inventory
Long prep lists
Poor cross utilization
Execution inconsistency
Compressed margins

And the more ego involved, the harder it becomes to remove an item that isn’t working.

Because now it feels personal.

The truth is simple.

If the kitchen cannot execute a menu cleanly at scale, the margins will never support long term success.

After fifty-two years in kitchens, I can tell you something with certainty.

Talent builds reputation.

Discipline builds wealth and sustainability.

The “No Vote”

Restaurants rarely lose a table because the food is bad.

Sometimes they lose the table before the group ever walks through the door.

People don’t dine alone.

They go out in groups — two, four, six, sometimes eight people. And almost every group has one person with veto power.

I call that the “No Vote.”

It’s the guest who says:

“There’s nothing I can eat there.”

Maybe they’re gluten free. Maybe they’re vegetarian. Maybe they avoid red meat or are trying to eat lighter.

Whatever the reason, one person can redirect the entire group to another restaurant.

Most operators respond to this problem the wrong way.

They start adding items.

A vegetarian entrée.
A gluten free option.
A lighter dish.
Another protein.

And before long the menu starts to grow.

The problem is that expansion without structure leads directly to menu size creep.

And menu size creep destroys execution.

The goal is not to have something for everyone.

The goal is to design the menu intelligently so that no one feels excluded while the kitchen can still execute cleanly.

That takes discipline.

Not expansion.

Menu Size Creep

Let me be blunt.

If your restaurant has forty or fifty entrées, you probably already have a systems problem.

Every new item adds complexity.

More ingredients.
More prep time.
More storage pressure.
More training.
More chances for waste.

And most restaurants simply don’t have the margin to support that kind of inefficiency.

A disciplined, well engineered menu will almost always outperform a large scattered one.

Guests reward consistency.

Not volume.

Big menus don’t create security.

They create drag.

And drag destroys margins.

The Hospitality Doctor’s Rx

If you are building or rebuilding a restaurant, here is the prescription.

Define the concept.

Engineer the menu.

Develop fully detailed recipes.

Then derive everything else from those recipes.

Control ego.

Solve the No Vote intelligently.

Guard against menu size creep.

Restaurants rarely fail because the concept wasn’t exciting enough.

They fail because the foundation wasn’t engineered.

Stop building restaurants backwards.

Concept.
Menu.
Recipes.
Systems.

Everything else follows.

— Chef Joseph Chouinard
The Hospitality Doctor

The Industry Doesn’t Need Reinvention — It Needs Discipline

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:28:54 GMT

Hospitality has always been challenging.

What’s changed is tolerance for inefficiency.

Thin margins don’t forgive poor execution.
Rising costs expose weak systems faster.
Labor stress punishes bad leadership models.

The operators who will survive — and thrive — are the ones who stop chasing quick fixes and start building disciplined operations.

A Final Thought

The hospitality industry isn’t broken.

It’s mismanaged.

And mismanagement is not inevitable — it’s correctable.

When operators stop reacting and start diagnosing, performance stabilizes.

When systems replace chaos, profitability returns.

That’s not theory.

That’s operational reality.

If you’re ready to move beyond reactive management and address root causes inside your operation, learn more here:

Hospitality Consulting | The Hospitality Doctors