Pricing your menu with confidence
How to price so the dishes that sell are also the ones that make money.
1 min read
Pricing by gut feel is how good restaurants quietly lose money. The fix isn’t complicated: know what each dish costs to make, then price with that in front of you.
A simple approach
- Start from the food cost — what the ingredients in a dish actually cost you.
- Aim for that cost to be a sensible share of the price (many kitchens target roughly 28–35%).
- Don't price every dish to the same percentage — let popular, cheap-to-make items carry a little more.
- Round to prices that read well on a menu rather than odd exact figures.
- Revisit prices when supplier costs move, not once a year.
TipMenulisa's recipe tool under Menu › Recipes does the maths for you and flags the dishes that are quietly eating your margin — start there.
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