Menu Design and Costing

When it comes to portion control it’s time for you to be in control. As a base for computing your restaurant’s cost-effectiveness and profitability, portioning your product is critical to keeping your margins low, your flavours balanced and your plates consistent. Effective portion control is easier than you think and is a paramount way to correctly measure where your expenses will sit each month. Without a proper portion control method in place you end up gambling with these expectations, and in the restaurant industry, it’s often these kinds of expectations that can make or break you.

Do you know your food cost? In order to keep your profits and margins in line and have your prices affordable for your customers, each item on your restaurant menu should be priced to determine its food cost. (The actual amount it costs you to make the dish.) This doesn’t mean that the food items you purchase should be the cheapest accessible because quality is the most important facet of creating menu items, but you need to balance high and low food costs together in order to obtain an acceptable gross profit margin. Your menu should have an easy to read font & format. Hard to read font and too much text make it difficult for customers to read your menu. Keep your menu design simple and elude from using too much culinary terminology.