Calculating price on the plate: math, intuition, hope


A chef walks into his kitchen after finishing his fourth cigarette of the day in the back parking lot. “I’m going to change the chimichurri on the pork.”

“Okay,” responds the owner, and then turns to another saying, “He really does think about menu changes when he’s laying in bed.” She happens to be sleeping with the chef.

“How do you figure out your pricing?” I ask a chef who would rather go unnamed. “Okay, don’t write this down, but I don’t,” he responds, going on to say that he simply figures out how to keep the protein under 25 percent, and then hopes that the setups don’t push the entire dish past 30 to 35 percent.

Chef Landon Schoenfeld, who is currently in the opening throes of his new bistro, Haute Dish, says he’s not letting anything but his own experiences dictate his menu choices. “I think if I put love into the food that I like, people will respond to that.”

Sameh Wadi, chef/owner of Minneapolis’ white tablecloth, Middle Eastern bistro Saffron, admits that last year, he spent $1,000 on a single pound of imported Iranian saffron, and now that it’s nearly gone, he’s thinking of alternatives to the precious ingredient, which goes into many of his dishes. He jokes, “I wish I would have called this place cumin, or cilantro, or anything but Saffron!” And then, more seriously, “I don’t have $1,000 laying around right now.”

When I ask how he knows if that $1,000 dollars translated onto the plate over the past year, he thinks for a moment and answers: “When I set out to open this restaurant, I didn’t do it to make a million dollars. I did it so that Tim McKee might walk in one day and say, ‘This is amazing. Why didn’t I think of it myself?’ And, it happened.”

Since an independent restaurant is nothing if not a gossamer dream come true, it should perhaps come as no surprise that chefs seem to cook first for themselves, second for their customer base, and possibly only third with the bottom line in mind.

Emily Streeter, executive chef of Richard’s Pub in St. Peter, Minn., bases her menu on seasonal changes. “Usually what I choose has to do with what I haven’t eaten in a year and what I’m craving.”

Wadi says his menu items are based loosely on things he wants to eat, and he follows his gut, so to speak, to the extent that morning inspiration tends to dictate the menu as much as anything else. “I wake up, something is in my head, I go into the restaurant, I write it down, order the ingredients, make it, serve it.”

He was recently inspired by a blue prawn saganaki. “I knew I wanted something Greek-influenced with grilled shrimp,” he explains, mentioning that the grilled shrimp portion was a late-summer craving. “But by the time I got around to a menu change, it was already fall, so I started researching my idea, and came away with this saganaki thing.” (Which is like a tagine, in that it indicates the vessel that it gets cooked as well as served in.) “I researched the shrimp, and found that I could buy three for $3.50, meaning I could sell this dish for $12, and no matter the accoutrement, I could still make money. It’s a traditional dish that I gave my own interpretation, and so of course on the first night a native Greek came in and ordered it. I almost passed out. But, he loved it; said it was the bomb. That’s the kind of experience that makes a dish permanent on my menu.”

While fantasies of spring vegetables and grilled shrimps may be at the heart of a menu, no good chef cooks in a vacuum of selfish cravings.

“I have to consider that I’m not in the city anymore,” says Streeter, who came up as executive chef of the defunct French bistro Un Deux Trois, and then opened her own French-influenced bistro, Emma’s, also now closed. “In a small town, you have to keep a steak entrée and a chicken entrée on the menu, or people get mad. And, we recently put an artichoke dip on the menu which is now our biggest seller.”

She makes that artichoke dip palatable for herself by preparing all of the ingredients from scratch, including the aioli. “People aren’t used to that around here, so it seems really special.”

Artichoke dip may be her moneymaker, but Streeter says that certainly doesn’t preclude her creativity. “We still have awesome customers who come in and they only want the special, no matter what it is. I use tasting menus to showcase a local pork or three different types of autumn squash. This is how I get people to try something they haven’t experienced before. This is my job as a chef.”

Wadi says he absolutely concurs: “I’m an ambassador of Middle Eastern cuisine in America.”

But how can you tell if a dish simply isn’t working? “I had sweetbreads on the menu at Emma’s and people hated them. I think one out of like, 106 people would order the sweetbreads. I had to take them off.”

And while customer opinion will ultimately dictate what comes off the menu, it determines what stays on as well. “There are menu items I’m simply not allowed to take off the menu. I’ve had temper tantrums, I even had one death threat!” says Wadi.

A death threat?

“Yes. The person said ‘If you ever take this carpaccio off the menu, I will f@$#ing kill you!”

One of those mainstay menu items is the lamb shoulder, a very expensive item from a wholesale standpoint—costing about $5 per portion prior to adding any other ingredients. Wadi says he’s able to keep the shoulder on the menu with smart cooking techniques. “I render the fat, which goes into many of my other dishes, and I use the trim for meatballs and for the lamb burger.”

Schoenfeld has been dreaming about his restaurant opening for longer than he can remember, and many of the dishes are a product of childhood memories. “It’s a fascination with nostalgic dishes that we grew up eating as Midwesterners—tater tot hot dish, pork and beans—I want to take these humble dishes and elevate them.”

While he’ll be substituting beautifully brined, smoked and then sous vide pork bellies for regular old bacon, he knows he has to keep prices moderate, and most items will fall into the under $20 range. How will he do so? Luckily, he says, he loves working with “economy” cuts of meat such as pork shanks and chicken wings, and he’s good with charcuterie. “And if there are dishes that still don’t work, I’ve got back up plans for every one of them.”

So now that their dream dishes are as tangible as a dinner menu you hold in your hands, do these chefs like to indulge in them?
They would if someone else cooked them: “Food just tastes better when someone else cooks.” And, they’re happy to eat their own cooking if its something other than the current menu items. But what are their deepest culinary cravings? Mexican, sushi, greasy bar food. Whatever is the polar opposite of the menu: “Pretty much anything I don’t have to see, smell or cook all day,” they concur.