What are you cooking tonight?

Are you trying to seduce me?

 

Haha, no, you're right. I was thinking about the negroni with the equal parts mix. Haven't been behind a bar in a few years... there's nothing to make in NH.

Do I have an opinion?

No, the guest is not getting a deal. The guest is getting gleefully screwed by the restaurant.

Holiday menus are a license to steal. I live for holiday menus. Holidays tend to be amateur hour. There's an entire market of people that only go to [insert name of "fancy" restaurant] on special occasions and holidays. They even have special outfits and shoes they only break out for Easter, Thanksgiving, and Mother's Day. You won't see them on a regular Friday or Saturday, but come a holiday they'll be there with 10 of their friends. So from a business standpoint, there's no reason not to take these people for all they have. Chicken parm is $18 on the menu? That'll be $27 on Easter. And filet mignon? Forget about it. There's still an entire generation of people that think filet mignon is a fancy, unattainable thing to order. That'll be $48. And they'll pay for it and thank me for the experience later. Granted, the meal will be excellent, but your typical holiday crowd has no idea how much things cost.

Also--and this is one of my super secret insider tips--holidays tend to draw large, extended families. And large, extended families that don't celebrate holidays at home tend to have a lot baggage and drama when everyone gets in a room together. They'd ditch family gatherings altogether, but, dammit, it's Thanksgiving and only dysfunctional families refuse to see each other on Thanksgiving. Hence, they go out to a public place in separate cars and put on their happy faces and pretend that everything is copacetic since, you know, nobody wants to feel dysfunctional, which makes them vulnerable in the ego department, and that's chum in the water in our business. These people almost always have money and will do anything to convince themselves that they're a normal, happy family. Our job is to give that to them by choreographing the evening and taking care of everything. They'll pay anything for that. Everyone wants to feel special. Or normal or sophisticated or valued or look like a big shot in front of their family/golf-buddies/church-group.

It's an ego business. The food and booze are incidental.

 

It's not a ripoff if you get what you want.

 

Yeah, that's not bad if you can put down about a pound of meat or so. Is it one of the those Brazilian joints where they come to the table with the sabre-skewer of meat and plop whatever you like down on the plate?

For the restaurant? Assuming they serve drinks and get each cover into the $80 range or so, they're probably banking that most guests won't eclipse their break even point on the food costs, which would be right around $20 per person. Coincidentally, that's about what filet will cost the joint per pound wholesale.

 

Damn it... now you've got me costing this place out.

Never done all-you-can-eat, but I'm guessing the model is built backwards from a series of assumptions. Firstly that the guests who exceed their money's worth are balanced by guests that do not. Secondly that the production system would slot more into of a buffet style where the joint has a set prep list that requires no deviation because they're not selling tickets (custom orders, which in a busy place on the wrong night is like playing fifty games of Tetris at once). That would mean fewer mistakes, less breakage, virtually no spoilage, and a vastly simplified ordering system with fewer invoices. In short, there's a lot less that can go wrong if you know exactly what you're going to serve on any given night, which might not sound like much, but when you're operating at around a 3% profit margin, every little bit counts. Thirdly that a model of this nature means you can get away with paying prep-cook wages over line-cook wages and get away with fewer people in the kitchen. Probably get away with a kitchen manager or two instead of chefs and sous chefs, which might save you another $50k a year in administration costs.

Let's say for mathematical purposes that the joint averages 100 people per night. And they've arrived at $60 a cover as their sweet spot. Add booze, and we'll call it $80 (a safe assumption). That means they can count on $8000 a night every night. We'll floor the food costs all the way to the red zone (33%) but drop the labor to a sublime 25% to give us a prime cost of 58% (<60% is the benchmark). Prime cost is food cost plus labor and is used to compare restaurants of different ilk. A fast food joint has high food costs because they sell $1 burgers but low labor. A fine dining joint has low food cost because they sell $40 steaks but a shit-ton more labor. The point being that you can max out one if you cheat on the other, and I'm guessing that all-you-can-eat joints cheat on labor to afford their food.

So if they're taking in $8k a night (nearly $3 million a year) their payroll would have to come in at under $2k a night, which is $14k a week. That sounds like a lot and it is, but if you have three managers making a thousand a week and group of cooks each making $500, it's not hard to get there. They would have to keep the food cost around $2500 a week, which ain't happening but we haven't factored the booze in yet. For this we turn to our old friend COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold), which is the combination of everything you sell. The math is a bit trickier and can really only be examined after a few months of deductive inventory, but this is where good owners get paid and bad owners go broke.

If I were designing it, I would go all in on wine pairing and digestifs. I mean, it's all you can fucking eat so you're going to be full, and I wouldn't dare eat several pounds of meat without chasing it with a couple of shots of limoncello, averna, frangelico, or whatever. And most of those are cheap. A $20 750ml bottle of amaro breaks down into fifteen 1.5 oz portions at $1.33 each. We'll charge $7 a shot (19% liquor cost). With the wines, I'm probably trying to steer people toward glasses over bottles, so I wouldn't offer too many by-the-bottle-only wines. The guests are more than welcome to a by a full bottle that is also offered by the glass, but that doesn't happen too often. Bottle selling is all about exclusivity... remove that, and they'll pick and choose by the glass. We'd double and triple down on pairings: Bordeaux, Cab, and Malbec for the fatty meats; Syrahs and Pinot Noirs for porks and chickens depending on the spice profile; and then a nice selection of whites beyond the usual Chards... probably some Sancerres, Gruners, and a few Reislings of both the sweet and dry variety to be paired with anything spicy (which is why you tend to see a lot of whites offered in Mexican restaurants). The house would buy these bottles in the $10-$12 range and charge $9-$11 a glass with a few cheaper exceptions. A 750ml bottle of wine portions into 4 6oz glasses (though I might be tempted to drop the glass to 5oz and cheat by buying 1.75L bottles where possible). Add it all up and bring the glass wines home at around 20% liquor cost, sell a shit ton of those and factor it back into the food to get the total cost of all goods down into the green zone of 0%.

(and whiskey off course... a $75 bottle of high-end single malt portions out at $5 apiece, we charge $16, which is a high liquor cost at 31%, but a high absolute profit as $11 a glass... and shit, you're going to need to work up an appetite, so have a little Oban before you strap on the feed bag)

The important thing would be to train the front of the house staff in how to push wine and after dinner drinks. That would be all we'd ever talk about at premeal. I would never shut up about it. They would hear me in their head for the rest of their lives.

ETA: I have no idea where that fucking emoji came from. It was supposed to read 30%.

 

It's the things I don't know that I don't know yet that scare me.