Glossary · 63 terms
Restaurant food cost glossary
Restaurant costing, defined properly. Every term a restaurant owner runs into on a P&L, an invoice or a consultant's deck — with the formula, a worked example using real numbers, and what the number actually tells you. No restatements of the obvious.
Cost & margin
What a dish costs, what it earns, and the gap between them.
Pricing & menu
Setting prices, engineering a menu, and the psychology of both.
Yield & kitchen
Trim, portions, waste — where the theoretical cost meets the plate.
Inventory & stock
Pars, counts, rotation, and the cash sitting on your shelves.
Purchasing & suppliers
Invoices, unit prices, vendor terms, and catching a rise early.
P&L & unit economics
Break-even, labour, covers, and the numbers a lender asks for.
Knowing the terms is the easy half.
The hard half is keeping every one of these numbers current when supplier prices move every week. Marji reads your invoices, recosts every dish that uses the ingredient, and names the ones that crossed your margin target — so the glossary stops being homework.
One number a week.
What moved in wholesale food prices, what it does to a typical dish, and one thing worth repricing. No pitch.