Costing a tasty menu requires precise variability

Factoring in on-the-fly flavor adjustments to your recipes doesn’t need to cause unease. Just establish the cost frontiers.

There is such a thing as being too precise. It’s all a matter of context.

Today, for instance, I went into a restaurant with a digital scale which reads to the tenth of an ounce, and weighed out each of the ingredients that goes into each of their recipes (this is how I have fun). And tomorrow I’m going to take those amounts and a bunch of invoices and put a cost next to each ingredient extended to the tenth of a penny. And then we will have a foundation to talk about menu pricing and margin and whether pigs have wings. Without it, we won’t, and neither will the pigs.

But I wouldn’t have to do this if the recipes were already precise; I could simply take the production manual home with the invoices. It would tell me that each village salad gets precisely 1.25 ounces of Kalamata olives, give or take a couple hundredths, and thank heaven those olives are so consistent, and I’d put a cost next to it and be done. This restaurant, however, is a single unit, so no one in Schenectady will be reading these same recipes and striving toward global uniformity. The restaurant also displays a curious preference for taste over the letter of the recipe law. This, of course, means that my estimates are going to have a bigger margin of error: if a cook thinks a sauce isn’t rich enough, he or she has been granted a free hand with the butter and cream.

Oh, my aching food cost, you might think. Well, yeah, as the holder of the calculator, I have to agree. However. When I was a pup—and when you were too, if you have the same sort of old-school restaurant rap sheet—there were chefs who would shriek at you or slap you if you didn’t taste a sauce before you put it on a plate. They would patiently explain—often at a decibel level that could melt cheese—that ingredients vary but the taste should not; that if Jehovah in his wisdom withholds sugar from a January tomato, you must add it yourself. And how do you know that the cream is fresh, that the herbs are correct, that there is not too much or too little salt? You taste, my friend, you taste, and if you have trouble remembering it I will create a footnote in your memory by dumping the next untasted plate on the floor.

This created a certain amount of systemic variability within the cost structure, and the accountant, as a rule, had an idiopathic blotchiness on his face and hands that would show up the day after monthly inventory and last about a week. This was considered a hazard of the trade, and no one paid it much attention. All the other accountants had it too, after all, and it always went away. The chefs would sniff at the idea that amounts should be more closely watched: the proteins are portioned with fanatical care; don’t tell me I can’t afford to make them taste good. Raise the price if it makes you feel better. Or go smoke.

Oddly enough, I’m okay with this attitude. It tends to produce better food, and it implies a certain level of skill in the kitchen and a price point on the menu to pay for it. You do have to shell out a bit more for cooks who can adjust a sauce on the fly than you would for the guys who only deal with pre-portioned bags of seasoned chicken strips. And after a few months of watching the fluctuations, you get an idea of the range within which the cost of each menu item moves. It’s not going to be huge, in general; it just ain’t going to settle down to be a nice fixed cost. But what’s wrong with a nice, fixed range? Given that commodities now stagger around the balance sheet like drunken hippos, a range for each cost is inevitable no matter how tidily you write your recipes.

And this, of course, means that I should cost each ingredient in those recipes six times, once a month for a half year, so I can establish the frontiers within which the costs move, and give myself both an average and a look at the extremes. I’d worry about my skin condition if I didn’t have the temperament to say: When pigs fly. Now where’d the accountant get to?