Working ranges by venue type
| Venue | Common band | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Quick service / takeaway | 25–32% | volume and speed carry thin plates |
| Café / brunch | 24–30% | coffee margin subsidises the kitchen |
| Full service casual | 28–34% | the broad middle |
| Fine dining | 30–38% | ingredient-led, priced on experience |
| Steak / seafood led | 35–45% | high cost, high ticket, big margin dollars |
| Pizza | 20–28% | flour is cheap; labour and ovens are the cost |
| Bars (beverage) | 18–24% | the classic margin engine |
Bands, not targets: they describe how concepts commonly land, given their labour and rent structures. Your right number comes from your own costs.
Percentage is a ratio; rent is paid in dollars
The instinct to push every percentage down is how menus go wrong. A 40% food-cost ribeye leaving $17 of margin beats a 22% side salad leaving $4 — the salad just flatters the spreadsheet. Read percentage and margin together, per dish: the percentage tells you when costs drift, the dollars tell you what each plate contributes. The menu engineering matrix does that read across a whole menu at once.
When a “good” number is a lie
A comfortable percentage computed from a wrong plate cost is worse than an alarming true one. The usual flattery: skipped yields (the trimmed chicken problem), stale pack prices, and portions counted from hope. Before judging your number against any band, rebuild the plate cost honestly with the food cost calculator — a surprising number of “good” menus turn out to be discounting by accident.
Common questions
- Is 30% a good food cost?
- For a full-service restaurant it sits inside the common working band. Whether it is good for YOUR menu depends on what the other 70% has to carry — labour, rent, everything — and on the dollars: 30% on a $28 entrée leaves $19.60; 30% on a $9 sandwich leaves $6.30.
- Why do steakhouses run high food costs and bars low ones?
- A steak is expensive to buy and quick to serve: high food cost, low labour. A cocktail is cheap to pour and slow to make: low beverage cost, high labour. Venues price so that food-plus-labour (prime cost) works, which is why food cost alone differs so much between concepts.
- Should every dish hit the same target?
- No — and menus engineered that way price their stars off the menu. Run cheap-to-make dishes below target and let signature or protein-heavy dishes run above it, watching margin dollars per plate. The blended number is what has to land, not each line.