01
Local acquisition aimed at the booking
Ads in a radius around your restaurant, at the hours when people decide where to eat, with the booking one tap away. No generic brand campaigns for a business that lives off a three-kilometre radius.
Websites and branding for restaurants
Your website can make them this hungryand fill your Tuesdays
Every ingredient carries what it actually costs. That is the job: fill the room and keep the margin standing.
Real recipe costing · double Black Angus burger
- Brioche bun€0.42
was €0.5090 g for both halves, from a local bakery. Negotiated on weekly volume instead of loose boxes. - Lettuce and house sauce€0.26
was €0.41Whole leaf and 25 g of sauce from a squeeze bottle. By spoon, 40 g went out and nobody saw it. - Tomato and red onion€0.17
was €0.2245 g net. Vegetable waste fell from 34% to 22% with FIFO and portioning. - Smoked bacon€0.21
was €0.4225 g weighed, not eyeballed. Before, an average of 34 g went out per plate. - Aged cheddar€0.38
was €0.50Two slices, 40 g. A different product line without touching the flavour your customers know. - Black Angus€1.40
was €1.63180 g of beef aged 21 days. Whole cuts minced in-house: €7.80/kg instead of 9.10. - Fries and mise en place€0.40
was €0.58150 g of potato plus oil, salt and the paper on the plate. Cut and supplier adjusted.
€3.24 plate cost today · was €4.26 · 31% food cost on a menu price of €11.50
01 Website and brand
Every menu asks for a different site, and we adapt to yours
A restaurant website has one job: get the person already looking for you to book before they close the tab. The story of the place and the photos of the team add to that while they push towards it. Put them in front and they get in the way.
What we build
- A menu you can read on your phone standing in the street, not a PDF you have to zoom
- Direct bookings on your own domain, with no per-cover commission to anyone
- Product photography and motion with your own dishes, in whatever format the menu needs
- An up-to-date Google listing: photos and hours in sync, with today’s menu where people look for it
- A brand that matches across the website, the printed menu, the shopfront and the delivery
- Speed and accessibility measured, which is where rankings come from
A menu with two hundred items, a booking system with sittings and covers, a collection order, a full catalogue. Whatever your case, difficulty sets the timeline, never whether it can be done. And it comes out fast, because speed gets decided while it is being built.
02 The diagnosis
Full every Friday, yet the year doesn’t add up
When that happens, the problem isn’t in the dining room. A restaurant loses money in two places and only one of them shows: the empty Tuesday. The other is the forty cents that leak out of every plate, and multiplied by fifteen hundred plates they weigh more than the Tuesday.
Prime cost above 70
€4
is what you keep of every €100 billed, with rent and utilities already paid. One slow month swallows it whole
Prime cost at 62
€15
is what you keep of the same €100. Without raising menu prices, without more covers, without touching the quality of the plate
The prime cost — ingredients plus labour — is the metric that rules a restaurant. Below 65 % of net revenue the business breathes. Above it, no campaign fixes anything: every new customer you bring in walks in with the margin already broken.
Hence the order. Measure the accounts. Correct whatever falls outside the range. Only then put money into acquisition. The other way round, every advertising euro drops into a business that loses margin plate by plate.
Reference ranges · full-service restaurant, on net revenue
- Food cost between 28 and 35% of what the kitchen bills
- Beverage cost between 18 and 24% on alcohol, 10 to 15% on soft drinks
- Labour between 30 and 35%, with rotas sized to actual service windows
- Rent and occupancy below 15%, ideally between 6 and 10%
If your numbers land inside those ranges, the work is front-of-house and repeat visits. If they land outside, it starts in the kitchen and in the purchase invoices. They almost always land outside, and almost nobody knows it: measuring forces you to cost every dish one by one, and that is never urgent until it is.
03 Purchasing savings
The same dishes, €1,591 less spend a month
The burger above went from €4.26 to €3.24 in cost without changing a single ingredient on the menu. That’s €1.02 per plate. At 1,560 plates a month, €1,591. Over a year, close to €19,000.
What you get
- Recipe costing for every dish with net weights and real waste
- Theoretical food cost against actual: the gap is money being lost
- Menu engineering: which dish is a star, which a workhorse, which shouldn’t be there
- Two or three suppliers compared per product family, and rebates negotiated
- Waste control with FIFO, periodic stocktakes and standardised portions
- A recommended price per dish based on your target food cost and perceived value
First report within 10 days of sending us your invoices and menu
Menu engineering is the lever that hurts least. Cross what each dish sells with what it leaves in margin and the menu sorts itself. Some dishes only need a better spot on the page. Others take sixty cents more and nobody stops ordering them. And one or two have spent two years taking up fridge space on their way to the bin.
An uncomfortable warning: if your supplier has put you up 9 % and your menu hasn’t moved in two years, the hole is in your prices. We’ll tell you so even when you’d rather hear something else.
04 Fill and repeat
A customer who returns every six weeks is worth ten who discover you
New customers get paid for every single time. Repeat custom is built once and keeps paying on its own. We set up both, and the big money sits in the second, which is exactly the one almost no restaurant has sorted.
02
Direct bookings before platforms
With commissions of 25 to 35 % and a food cost of 30 %, a platform order leaves you loose change. Getting discovered there is fine. The second time has to come in through your own channel, where the whole bill stays at home.
03
A customer database, the one asset you keep
Every booking and every order leaves an email and a phone number with permission. That list stays with you, even if tomorrow the app raises its commission or shuts down. With it you fill a Tuesday in February by sending one message, without buying reach.
04
Reviews requested at just the right moment
You ask for the review with the customer still at the table, bill just paid and in a good mood. Three days later they only half remember. Automated and well written, that lifts the rating on your Google listing, the shop window that brings people through the door.
05 Automation
The work nobody has time for at eleven at night
They are small jobs that pile up without making a sound. Every one that gets automated hands time back to the dining room and the kitchen.
What we leave running
- Booking confirmation and reminder by WhatsApp, which cuts no-shows
- An automatic review request when the bill is settled
- A come-back campaign at forty days without a visit, with a reason rather than a discount
- A birthday greeting with the booking pre-filled — the one that converts best
- Every new customer added to your database automatically, no manual work
- A weekly report with covers, average bill and actual food cost on one screen
None of this requires you to learn a new tool. We build it and the summary lands in your inbox. If something breaks, we fix that too.
RelatedDirect sourcing
Tableware and furniture brought from source, with the cost already landed at your restaurant.
See how it works RelatedAutomate your businessThe CRM and the reports, wired into the tools you already have.
See the service How we workThe WeRaise MethodThe whole customer journey in the same hands, from the first ad to the third purchase.
See the method— Questions
What we get asked before starting
Short answers. You get the long ones with your numbers in front of us.
?
How far can food cost come down?
It depends where you start from. In a full-service restaurant sitting above 38 %, you almost always recover between 5 and 9 points. They come out of the recipe costing, out of weighing portions, out of throwing less product away and out of buying better. The menu and the quality stay as they are.
?
Do I have to switch suppliers?
Not always. A good share of the savings comes from buying better from the same supplier: consolidating families, negotiating rebates, adjusting formats and no longer paying for product that ends up in the bin. Changing supplier comes later.
?
What if I run a café or a takeaway?
The ranges change. In a café, drinks rule; in a takeaway, labour weighs less and the platform commission eats the rest. The method applies the same way, with a different reference table in front of you.
?
Will you work with my accountant?
Yes, and it’s worth doing. We work on the operating account and on purchasing; tax and employment matters are always signed off by whoever keeps your books. We are not tax advisers and we won’t pretend to be.
— The next step
Ten days to find out how much sits under your menu
Send us your menu, two months of purchase invoices and last year’s operating account. We tell you how much can be recovered and which lines it comes out of.
Step 01
Send us the numbers
Menu with prices, two months of purchase invoices and last year’s accounts.
Step 02
We cost and measure
Dish by dish. Theoretical food cost against actual, prime cost and a margin ranking per dish.
Step 03
We show you the map
How much is on the table, which lines it sits in and what it costs to go and get it.
Step 04
You decide
Run it with your own team or leave it in our hands. The report is yours either way.
Half an hour on video. You put your project on the table and leave knowing how to move forward.