Your menu is the most powerful sales tool you own. Cost your dishes, find your Stars and your Dogs, and write descriptions that sell — with AI and your own numbers, no consultant required.
A menu built with intent lifts profit per table without raising a single eyebrow on price. Menu engineering — knowing which dishes make you money and which just make you busy — used to be the preserve of consultants with spreadsheets. AI puts it within reach of any operator with 30 minutes and their own numbers.
Food-cost %, cash gross profit and a health check — from your ingredient prices.
Every dish into four honest categories, each with one specific action to take.
Appetising, honest, cliché-free menu copy in your voice that nudges the order.
Open a free AI tool (Claude or ChatGPT) and give it your real figures:
Work out the food cost and gross profit for this dish. Selling price (excl. tax): [e.g. 16.00] Ingredients and costs: [e.g. 150g beef 3.20, bun 0.40, cheese 0.55, ...] Give me: total plate cost, food-cost %, cash gross profit, and whether the % is healthy for this dish type.
The full guide walks you through costing, the four-box menu, pricing with intent, and rewriting your descriptions — all with copy-paste prompts.
I spent 14 years managing restaurants. The places that knew their numbers and designed their menus around them always won. AI finally makes that easy for everyone else.
Franky — founder of bridge., 14 years a restaurant manager, founder of All You Can Reserve and Olivia.
Knowing which dishes are popular and which are profitable, then designing the menu so guests order more of the ones that make you money. Every dish falls into Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles or Dogs — each with a clear action.
Start with food cost — what a dish costs to make as a percentage of its price — but look at cash profit too. A dish at 35% food cost making 9 beats one at 25% making 4. AI calculates both from your ingredient costs in seconds.
Yes. It sorts your dishes by sales and margin, suggests where to place high-margin items, flags prices that look off, and rewrites descriptions so your best dishes sell themselves — all from your own numbers.