What Kitchen Staff Training Costs You When You Skip It
TL;DR: A menu audit for chefs inheriting a kitchen means pulling real sales and margin data, categorising every dish using the BCG matrix, and making cuts based on numbers rather than habit or nostalgia.
Taking over someone else’s kitchen menu without a proper menu audit for chefs is how you end up flogging a braised lamb shank in July because it was ‘always popular’ and nobody thought to question it. I have done this. It was not my finest hour.
When you inherit a restaurant menu, you inherit everything that came with it: the logic, the laziness, the occasional flash of brilliance, and a fair amount of accumulated inertia dressed up as tradition. The kitchen team will tell you certain dishes have always been on the menu. The front of house will tell you guests love them. And then you look at the actual numbers and realise you have been running a dish that sells six covers a week, takes forty minutes to plate, and barely breaks even. That is not tradition. That is a hostage situation.
The good news is there is a structured way through it. The bad news is it requires a couple of weeks of honest data, a few uncomfortable conversations, and the willingness to kill something you might personally love.
Most chefs who have been through a business course will have encountered the BCG matrix for restaurants, even if they did not realise it at the time. It comes from management consulting, which means it sounds more corporate than it is. Strip away the jargon and it gives you a very practical way to categorise every dish on your menu.
The framework uses four categories. Stars sell well and make good money. Dogs sell poorly and make little money. Workhorses sell well but make thin margins. Puzzles (sometimes called question marks) make good margins but sell infrequently. Each category demands a different response, and confusing them is expensive.
A dog is not necessarily a bad dish. It might be beautiful. It might have been someone’s signature. But if it is sitting in the bottom-left corner of that matrix week after week, sentiment alone is not a sound business case.
The first thing to accept is that you cannot audit a menu by eating your way through it once and forming opinions. That is a tasting, not an analysis. A proper restaurant menu evaluation uses two types of data: sales mix and contribution margin. You need both, and you need at least four weeks of records to see any kind of pattern.
Step five matters more than people give it credit for. I have seen menus where the dog category was full of dishes that were genuinely poorly executed rather than genuinely unwanted. Fix the dish, rephrase the description, change the price point, and sometimes a dog becomes something worth keeping. Sometimes it does not. But you should at least know which situation you are in.
Taking over a restaurant kitchen means you will have opinions before you have evidence. Every chef does. You walk in with your palate, your influences, and a set of convictions about what a menu should be. That is not a problem unless you let it drive the audit before the numbers do.
I once inherited a menu that had a mushroom risotto I found deeply uninteresting. Classic workhorse dish, I thought. Simple, safe, uninspired. Then I looked at the data and it was the second-highest contributor on the entire menu. It sold to roughly a third of tables. The margin was decent. I kept it, adjusted the recipe slightly, and moved on to the actual problems. My personal boredom with risotto was not relevant information.
The inherited restaurant menu reflects the previous chef’s relationships with suppliers, their strengths and blind spots, the demands of the local market, and probably a few historical accidents that nobody remembers the origin of. None of that is automatically wrong. Assume nothing until the data speaks.
Dish profitability analysis is not just about removing the losers. It is about understanding what the losers are costing you in prep time, storage space, skill load on the kitchen team, and mental bandwidth. A dish that loses money slowly also occupies a slot on the menu where something better could live.
The cuts that hurt are usually the ones that have an emotional owner in the building. A pastry chef who designed a dessert that sells badly but is technically extraordinary. A front of house manager who swears his regulars would leave if the Caesar salad disappeared. These conversations are worth having carefully and with the numbers in hand, because gut feeling plus loyalty is a very poor substitute for evidence.
The cuts that free you are the dogs with no constituency and no upside. Remove them cleanly, without fanfare, and watch what happens to prep time and wastage. In my experience, nobody notices half of what you remove, which tells you something about why it needed removing.
Menu engineering analysis goes one step further than simply identifying where dishes sit in the matrix. It asks what you should do with each category to improve the overall performance of the menu.
Stars need protection and consistency. If a dish is selling well and making money, the worst thing you can do is tinker with it for the sake of putting your stamp on things. Adjust the plating if you must. Leave the recipe alone until you understand why it works.
Workhorses need margin improvement. These are usually dishes with real sales volume where small changes to the recipe, the portion, or the supplier relationship can shift the contribution margin without affecting what the guest experiences. A beef short rib sold at the right price point with a tighter yield control is a very different proposition from the same dish sold with sloppy butchery and a generous hand on the braising jus.
Puzzles need a decision. Either you invest in selling them properly, by repositioning them on the menu, training the floor team to recommend them, or adjusting the price, or you accept they will never move enough covers and you redirect that margin potential elsewhere.
None of this works if the kitchen team feel the audit is being done to them rather than with them. Line cooks know things about execution problems that never make it into the POS data. A dish that comes back repeatedly is not always a guest preference issue. Sometimes it is a plating problem, a temperature problem, or a recipe that reads well but does not hold service.
Talk to the team before you start cutting. Not to take a vote, but to gather intelligence. Ask what is a nightmare to prep consistently. Ask what the floor team struggles to describe. Ask what generates the most wastage on a slow Tuesday. The answers will shape where you focus your energy.
A menu audit for chefs who are new to a kitchen is also, whether you like it or not, an opportunity to show the team how you think. Get it right and you earn a great deal of trust very quickly. Charge in with a red pen and a point to prove and you will spend the next six months repairing something that did not need breaking.
Allow at least four to six weeks for data collection before making any significant cuts or additions. You want to see the menu perform across different days of the week, different service periods, and ideally at least one weekend trading period. Decisions made on two weeks of data are guesses dressed up as strategy.
Almost always no. A phased approach works better. Stabilise the kitchen first, understand what is selling and why, then make changes in stages. Wholesale menu replacement on day one creates operational chaos and tells the team that their existing knowledge has no value. Neither outcome is useful.
It is a way of categorising every dish by two variables: how often it sells and how much it contributes to profit. Stars are high on both. Dogs are low on both. Workhorses sell frequently but contribute less per cover. Puzzles contribute well but sell infrequently. Each category points you toward a different type of action.
Lead with data, not opinion. If a dish is underperforming, the numbers make the argument so you do not have to. Frame decisions around what works for the kitchen and the guest, not what fits your personal style. If a dish has genuine merit but poor execution, consider whether it can be rescued before removing it entirely.
The menu you inherit is a starting point, not a judgement. What you do with it in the first three months is.
Chef Ian McAndrew’s specialist eBooks and guides are available directly on ChefYesChef, including his technical titles and autobiography. If you want more practical, chef-led reading beyond this article, you’ll find the full collection here.
Chef Ian McAndrew works with chefs, businesses, and individuals on a wide range of culinary projects, from concept development to practical problem-solving.
If you’d like to talk through an idea or need informed guidance, you’re welcome to contact him.
Essential cookies required for the site to function. Cannot be disabled.
Cookies that help us understand how visitors use the site.
Cookies used to deliver relevant advertisements.
Privacy Policy Terms of Service
