Chapter 10 — Exercises

Thirty-four problems, graduated from recall through applied judgment. Items marked with a dagger (†) have worked solutions in the Answers to Selected Exercises appendix — try them before you look.

Several problems ask you to build or repair a menu. Do it on paper, with prices, and make the arithmetic resolve. A menu that "looks about right" is exactly the artifact this chapter exists to replace.

A note on scope. Nothing in this chapter costs a plate. Where a problem asks you about cost, it is asking about the costs that attach to an item before you buy an ingredient for it — prep labor, spoilage, ordering, training. Recipe costing is Chapter 11's work, and you will do plenty of it there.

A. Recall and definitions (1–8)

1. Name the five jobs a menu performs simultaneously, and state which two of them together constitute prime cost.

2. Define cross-utilization in one sentence. Then give one example from your own experience of an ingredient that reached exactly one dish.

3. What is item count, and name three costs it drives that never appear as their own line on a profit-and-loss statement.

4. † A standardized recipe and a recipe cost card are different documents. State what each one is for, what they share, and why the recipe must be written in weights rather than in "a handful."

5. What is a menu panel, and what is the one thing it genuinely controls regardless of any psychological effect?

6. Define price anchoring. Then state, in one sentence each, what is well established about it and what is not.

7. Bellwether's menu carries 22 dinner food items in four categories. List the categories and the number of items in each.

8. † The chapter rejects four proposed items. Name them and the filter each one failed.

B. The item list and cross-utilization (9–15)

9. You are opening a 60-seat neighborhood restaurant with a flat-top, a six-burner range, a convection oven, and a fryer. A partner proposes a whole roasted branzino as the signature. Run it through all three filters and give a written verdict.

10. Draw a cross-utilization map for a menu with these five items: roast chicken, Caesar salad, chicken sandwich, French onion soup, and steak frites. Show every purchased family and every item it reaches. Which purchased family reaches the most items?

11. † Bellwether's poultry program reaches five menu items. Suppose the restaurant's supplier switches to birds delivered without giblets. Which item is affected, what has to change on the purchasing side, and where in the plan does the change show up first?

12. The chapter says cross-utilization "concentrates supply risk." Identify the three Bellwether programs whose failure would take out the most menu items, and write a one-line contingency for each.

13. A menu uses one house vinaigrette on four items. A guest orders two of them. Name the risk, and give two ways a kitchen can cross-utilize the component without the guest noticing a repeat.

14. † Bellwether deliberately buys ribeyes portion-cut rather than breaking down primals. Explain the reasoning in prime-cost terms, and state what you would have to measure to know whether the decision is right.

15. A food truck sells eight items from a 12-foot kitchen with one flat-top and one fryer. Explain why the chapter says a truck should not simply copy a restaurant's cross-utilization map, and describe what a truck's map should look like instead.

C. Computation: the check build and the price ladder (16–23)

16. † A restaurant's plan assumes an entrée attachment rate of 0.85, a starter attachment of 0.50, and a dessert attachment of 0.18. Its weighted average prices are \$27.00, \$11.00, and \$9.50. Compute food per cover.

17. Using your answer to problem 16: if the plan's target food spend per cover is \$32.00, by how much is the menu short, and name three different levers that could close it.

18. A five-item entrée list is priced \$19, \$23, \$26, \$29, and \$38. Projected shares of entrée orders are 18%, 22%, 28%, 24%, and 8%. Compute the weighted average entrée price. Then compute the median. What does the gap between the two tell you?

19. † Take the entrée list from problem 18. The chef wants to add a \$44 item expected to take 6% of entrée orders, drawn proportionally from the other five. Compute the new weighted average entrée price. If entrée attachment is 0.88, how much does food per cover move?

20. Bellwether's starters-and-sides category has to average \$12.00 across eleven items. Verify the weighted average in Figure 10.7 by recomputing it. Then change one thing: the flatbread runs at 20% of orders instead of 13%, with the extra seven points taken from the \$7 hearth bread. What is the new weighted average, and what does that do to food per cover?

21. A restaurant wants a \$38 average check at a 70/30 food-beverage mix. Its entrée attachment is 0.92, its starter attachment 0.40 at a \$10 average, and its dessert attachment 0.12 at an \$8 average. What weighted average entrée price does it need? Round to the nearest dollar and say whether your answer is a plausible menu.

22. † Build a price ladder. You are writing a seven-item entrée list for a restaurant targeting a weighted average entrée price of exactly **\$26.00**. Constraints: the lowest item is \$18, the highest is \$42, no two items may share a price, and at least three items must fall between \$23 and \$28. Give the prices, give the assumed shares, and show that the weighted average resolves to \$26.00 exactly.

23. Using the twenty-five-cover Thursday in §10.7: recompute food per cover if table 2 had ordered a hanger steak (\$36) instead of the dry-aged ribeye (\$46). How far does the average move, and what does that tell you about reading a single service?

D. Menu size, throughput, and the line (24–28)

24. † Cost this — the non-ingredient cost of an item. A proposed dish requires 40 minutes of prep a day across six service days, discards about \$22 a week of a unique perishable component, adds 6 minutes a week of ordering and counting, and is retrained four times a year to a staff of 14 at 15 minutes each. Fully loaded labor is \$21.00 an hour. Compute the total annual identifiable cost and the cost per plate if the item sells 12 a week.

25. Using your answer to problem 24: the chef argues the item should stay because "it sells." Write the two questions you would ask before agreeing, and say what answer to each would change your mind.

26. † Bellwether's line runs four people at peak. Using Figure 10.4, allocate those four people to stations for a 95-cover Saturday, state which station you would reinforce first if a fifth body became available for three hours, and justify the choice with the numbers from §10.4.

27. Recompute the peak fire utilization in §10.4 under two changes: covers rise to 110, and the share of covers arriving in the 90-minute peak window rises from 55% to 62%. Everything else holds. What is the new utilization, and what is the first thing you would change on the menu?

28. Read this menu and find the leaks. A 70-seat bistro runs 41 items: 9 starters, 4 salads, 14 entrées, 6 sandwiches (lunch only, but printed on the dinner menu), 5 sides, and 3 desserts. Its proteins are chicken, duck, salmon, halibut, shrimp, scallops, hanger steak, ribeye, short rib, pork belly, and lamb shank. There is one fryer, one six-burner, one flat-top, one combi oven, and a three-person line. Identify at least five distinct structural problems and rank them by what you would fix first.

E. Recipes, specials, and change cadence (29–31)

29. Write a standardized recipe card, in the format of Figure 10.5, for a dish you know well. Include a station, portions in weights, a hold instruction, a plating instruction, a "what good looks like" paragraph, and a ticket-time target. Do not include any prices or costs.

30. † A kitchen runs three specials a night, six nights a week, none of them costed. Write the one-page policy that changes this. It must specify who does what, by when, on what document, and what happens when there is not time.

31. Bellwether reprints its menu weekly on an in-house template at about \$50 a week. A designer proposes a letterpress menu at \$1,100 a run. Using the reasoning in Chapter 3 §3.5 and this chapter's change cadence, write the three-sentence answer you would give the designer.

F. Judgment, writing, and the Business Plan (32–34)

32. A consultant tells you that placing your highest-margin item in the "golden triangle" will lift its sales by 12%. You have read §10.6. Write the two questions you would ask, and then write what you would actually do about the placement of that item — and why.

33. The dilemma. A server reports that guests keep asking whether the Hearth Chicken can be made gluten-free. It can, with one change to the salsa verde and a different bread on the side. The chef is opposed: it introduces a second sauce batch, a labeling requirement, and a risk that a cross-contamination mistake harms someone. The front-of-house partner points out that the restaurant is turning away a table roughly twice a week.

(a) Frame the decision in terms of the three filters from §10.2. (b) Name the food-safety obligations that attach and say who has to be trained (see Chapter 25). (c) State what you would do, and write the two sentences you would put in the training notes. (d) Now assume a different fact: the modification is not reliably safe in your kitchen. Write the sentence a server should say to a guest — honest, specific, and not a legal disclaimer.

34. Business Plan extension. Take your own concept (or Bellwether's, if you are working the book's project) and produce three documents:

(a) A printed dinner menu with categories, one-line descriptions, and prices — no more than 24 food items. (b) A cross-utilization map in the format of Figure 10.3, showing every purchased family and every item it reaches, including at least one thing you throw away. (c) A one-page reconciliation proving that your price ladder, at your assumed attachment rates and order shares, produces your target food spend per cover. Every column must resolve.

Then write the paragraph that goes under the heading "What this menu does not settle." Be at least as honest as §10's checkpoint was.