What Is Costing a Dish?

Costing a dish means pricing out exactly what one menu item costs to make, ingredient by ingredient, rather than looking at food spending as a whole. Say you're costing a chicken parmesan. You'd need the price per portion of chicken breast, the breadcrumbs, the cheese, the marinara, and the pasta on the side, then add those up to get one number, what that plate costs before it ever reaches a table.

Most restaurants build this off a standardized recipe card with set quantities, because if the cook uses six ounces of chicken one night and eight the next, the cost swings and your numbers stop meaning anything. Once you've got a total ingredient cost, you compare it against the menu price to get the dish's food cost percentage, which is the figure most owners actually check when they're deciding whether a price needs to go up.

This is the kind of thing that matters most when you're adding a new item to the menu, when a supplier raises prices, and you need to know if a dish is still worth keeping, or when you're trying to figure out why one entree sells well but doesn't seem to be making any money. Costing a dish also makes it easy to see which items are quietly carrying the menu and which ones are eating into margins without anyone noticing.

Ingredient prices don't stay put, so this isn't something you do once and forget. Restaurants that revisit dish costs regularly catch price creep early, instead of discovering it three months later in a bad P&L.