re: Five of the Most Overpriced Foods on Restaurant Menus

Restaurants make a shite load of money off of soft drinks.

Also fried fish.

quote:

---

2 things i will never pay a lot for- mexican and italian food its so dirt cheap to make

---

Generally I agree about the Mexican food, but quality Mexican restaurants using good ingrediates to exist and can reasonably be expected to be "expensive".
Not all places are the grease and cheese dumps like 90% of the ones found in this state.

quote:

---

Barcadia charges $10 for like 25 fried pickle spheres.

---

How do they manage that? It sounds labor intensive carving the pickles into round balls and frying them.

quote:

---

If i remember right- steak is near worst in terms of profit margain

---

That's probably correct on the individual item, however they can save money by hiring jacklegs in the kitchen.

quote:

---

Wheres alcohol? The mark up on that is ridiculous.

---

Not necessarily across the board. There is a negative correlation between prices/margins in restaurants on most bottles.
Restaurants make money on booze sells not necessarily because of high margins(even though some are really high), but because they already have your butt in the door and they're making $3-$5 per drink rather than a super high margin item like coke where they're only making $1.25.

quote:

---

Isn't this percentage the norm for food costs for restaurants?

---

20% is great. 35% is usually the high mark.

quote:

---

Pizza
Restaurant food cost: Between 20% and 32%

---

"Gourmet" pizza can easily sit around 10% if you aren't importing your water from Italy.

The trend is the high end gourmet pizzas. They are always packed and on an hour wait and they charge $15-18 per pizza plus $2 per topping

It's gotta cost them no more than $3 to make one

quote:

---

You can't discount the extreme price of the ovens that many gourmet pizza places incur.

---

Sure you can. That's irrelevant when discussing food costs which is the premise of the article.

quote:

---

You can't discount the extreme price of the ovens that many gourmet pizza places incur.

---

I wouldn't call most of them extreme especially considering they might be responsible for cooking >80% of your menu. Some of the extreme costs come when you import a brick oven or they are a difficult install and fit in a certain space that require renovations.

Deck ovens can vary greatly in prices as well.

quote:

---

I wouldn't call most of them extreme especially considering they might be responsible for cooking >80% of your menu. Some of the extreme costs come when you import a brick oven or they are a difficult install and fit in a certain space that require renovations.

---

I guess this discussion has lost it's way. The big brick ovens are exactly what I'm talking about.

So you think it's worthy of comparing food costs at a hamburger joint and a pizzeria when one has a fixed cost (kitchen equipment) that might be 10x more then the other?

The food cost argument is rendered moot at that point.

quote:

---

Wheres alcohol? The mark up on that is ridiculous.

---

Well, let's see. A 750ml bottle has about 17 pours of 1 1/4 ozs.

Say a restaurant gets a bottle of Crown for $25.00 and they charge $8 for a shot, with no mixer. That's $136. That's .18.

A keg has about 165 pours at 12 oz. Overpours and spills considered, let's say 145.

Say a restaurant gets a Bud Light keg for $75 and they charge $3.50. That's $507. That's about .15.

Not too shabby. (Yes, I know that these are rough numbers.)


I'd be curious to see how much the margins are on salads.

When I worked at Outback, the Bloomin Onion was marked up incredibly high. I believe it was something like $.59 to make and they sold it for $6.49!