Glossary section
Restaurant numbers
The vocabulary of a restaurant's finances. The same terms show up in every lease negotiation, supplier conversation, and "free audit" pitch. Naming them cleanly is how you stop getting talked past.
23 definitions.
- Prime cost — food cost + labor cost, as a % of sales
- Food cost — cost of goods sold, as a % of sales
- Labor cost — wages + payroll taxes, as a % of sales
- Cover — one customer served
- Average check — total sales ÷ covers
- Aggregator — third-party delivery platform
- Commission — the % a platform takes per order
- Direct ordering — orders through your own site
- Menu engineering — treating each dish as a portfolio decision, not a P&L line
- Contribution margin — what one sale of an item adds to covering fixed costs and profit
- Menu mix — the share of total sales each item commands
- Plate cost — the real ingredient cost of one finished plate
- Yield percent — the share of what you bought that ends up on a plate
- Edible portion (EP) — the cost of one usable ounce after trim
- Menu copy — the language doing the selling, separate from the dish
- Sensory adjective — a word that names a flavor, texture, temperature, or preparation
- Charm pricing — prices ending in .95, .99, or .49
- Break-even — where revenue equals costs
- Margin — sales minus costs; several kinds
- Price elasticity — how cover count moves with price
- Fixed costs — costs that don't scale with sales
- Variable costs — costs that scale with sales
- Margin Math — client-side restaurant finance calculators