Setting your prices

How to set a price for a dish?
First we calculate how much every gram of each ingredient in a dish costs us, so the main ingredient, whether it’s salmon, sole, a piece of meat… then everything else, the bread we serve, etc. Then we apply a coefficient. We generally multiply by 3… So if you have 5€ worth of merchandise on a plate, it would probably be soldfor about 15€, plus 3% VAT, and that covers… the main cost in a restaurant like mine the labor, your staff, which represents 40% of your revenues, plus fixed expenses and all the rest. So you sort of work backwards.

Is it always the same rule?
The higher the cost of your main product the smaller the coefficient.

…any examples?
A sole meuniere, for example, there might be between 12€ and 18€ worth of fish on the plate but you’ll still sell it for under 45€ because you can’t get too pricy either. Sometimes you might have inexpensive products, but the dish is a lot of work to prepare, hours and hours in the kitchen, so you need to charge for the labor. It all depends… It’s not an operation… But for our establishment to be profitable, we need to multiply by 3 to have a sufficient return on our volumes.