What's For Dinner?

Restaurants = Food.  If you don’t have an appealing menu, customers will never come in, or at the very least never come back.  In order to be truly appealing, your menu items have to be appetizing and for a fair price. 

Creating the Balance between Cost and Taste

Anyone who is planning on going to the French Laundry in California knows that they’re going to drop quite a bit of money for Thomas Keller’s prix fixe menu.  On the very opposite end of the spectrum, an elderly couple going out for their weekly Sunday breakfast at the corner diner are not expecting to spend more than $20 including tip.  When deciding on your restaurant concept, you need to decide where on the scale of price points you want to fall.  Then you can tell your chef (or yourself if that’s you) that all the wonderful dishes you want to sell need to fall inside that price range.  If you want to sell a dish that costs too much to make you will either have to sell it for much more than the rest of your menu items, which will make customers angry, or sell it for a loss, which will make your wallet angry.  One thing I have learned to do in this situation: make this superb dish a special.  Try selling it for a price that will make you a FAIR amount of money, and see if anyone actually buys it.  The beauty of a special: you’re allowed to sell out.  Normally, people get angry when you run out of an item on your main menu; but with a special dish, you can order the minimum amount to keep cost down, and not be afraid that you will run out.  Run out.  It actually makes the dish more appealing because people will suddenly want what they can’t have.  It’s kind of a sick mind game to play on people, but it will get them talking about your restaurant.  And then who knows, maybe through a few of these specials, you can build a new niche market; people who liked your restaurant before (when the prices were reasonable) but love it now that it’s got some “classier” aka more expensive menu items.