As most business operators in the hospitality trade will tell you they’ve been living with rising costs. So how can you absorb costs like this & be profitable. A good place to Start is with your current menu

Menu planning and the importance of the menu is an essential tool in creating the power to bring customers in though your front door. The menu is a highly important factor not only because of its content but also in the way it is set out. The way dishes are displayed and its use to maximize profit. When creating the menu – it is vital you understand the basic principles – Know your customer base. Know your produce & how to match/marry produce. What food gross profit margin you want to achieve & how much can you charge per item/dish on the menu

Okay, assuming that you have established your customer base via location or social media & old fashion word of mouth. Let’s move on to the produce/ingredients & how they marry together. Most business will leave this to the head chef. It normally takes the form of the following brief – write me a menu on what you want to cook? Or let’s write a menu that you can cook well & what the customers want. The latter statement tends to work much better as it satisfies the chefs cooking & creative needs & focuses on the customers taste.

Working on a food Gross profit margin of 70 percent will assist in pricing the dishes on the menu. So before you do this - a few questions to ask yourself - have you an upto date pricelist from your supplier? Do you negotiate quartly price agreements with key suppliers? Do you know who much you spent over the past 12months with key suppliers? Do you get quotes from the “usual” suppliers? Do you check invoice prices with agreed price list? Are you using a branded product when a yellow label product is better value? Do you employ a stock taker to measure your food gross profit? If you answer yes to all these, well done you’ll be ready for the decade of rising prices

Harrods Food Hall – Morel Mushrooms

Having pondered on my lack of success in collecting Morel mushrooms. I was curious as to what the market price of these luxury mushrooms would be in a large food hall. Well on my most recent trip to London I snapped the photo & modest price tag.  Whislt  browsing in Harrods Food Hall I was also reliving ever taste sensation from a long lunch . Having  just finished dinning at The Ledbury Restaurant in Notting Hill. The meal was composed around a six course lunch, five different tasting wines is now firmly ranked as the best dinning out experience in my twenty five years in the Hospitality industry. Superlatives are not enough to describe this dinning experience, but in my next blog post I’ll give it a try.

So next blog round will also look at gardening in the Finn Valley & updates on the wild raspberries & Wild Bilberry.

Coming down the blog line will be “How to do extraordinary food with ordinary ingredients” #Keep it Natural