Yeah it's also because most Michelin's have three chefs for every seat. Throw them in to a normal place with a 250 cover brunch service and they drown because there's no one else to rely on.
Bruh if he got labor to less than 10% he can afford food to be like 40% lmao if he can do 60k a day, his on hand inventory can be like 100k+ depending on delivery frequency. If I ever had labor this low and numbers this big my district manager woulda sucked me and the whole kitchen crew off like a sloppy thot
Idk, I just did the math, at .86% labor and 61k for the day, he spent 524$ on labor. Sounds like huge cap to me. At florida minimum wage thats 40 labor hours. That's 5 employees for an 8 hour shift, or 9 for a 4.5 hour shift, at minimum wage. Doing 60k in a shift. Idk thats big if true, but im not sure thats actually doable unless it was mostly alcohol sales and there were some high rollers dropping grands. Lowest labor I've seen in fine dining was when 4 dolphin linebackers came in and spent 45k for a table of 8, but it was like 42k of alcohols and like 3 grand worth of steaks and shit. But even then we had like 25 people on staff cause its a fancy place and people expect super quick service, so labor was at 7% or so for the day. And that was still fucking stupid low.
I used to work for a five guys and around Christmas we would get so busy our labor dipped down to like 6-7% for a few weeks. It was a......but much. Never before or since have I fried myself out of breath
I did the math. If this is true, there is simply no way service wasn't a complete disaster unless your average wage is like 5 an hour. I've moved some fucking mountains in my day, enough to suss out what a day looks like from a glance at numbers.
Make sure you rest yourself. Those are burnout numbers.
So you paid your people less than 100 dollars for a full days work even though they put out more covers than a fast food place does?
You're a real piece of work
Doesn't that mean you're taking money from FOH staff to give to the kitchen staff? I'm guessing everyone is making minimum wage. So your restaurant is making money, hand over fist, but you probably have employees that need to work 3 jobs to pay rent, as well as others who have to take government assistance? In actuality, the government is subsidizing your restaurant.
Lol. Everyone in that restaurant needs a raise. They paid less than $600 to their employees to make 60k in one day. That sounds like some 3rd world hell hole.
Three head chefs in a kitchen would be World War III. Three sous chefs in a kitchen with a proper hierarchy would be Civil War 2.0: Turbo Chef Bugaloo.
I'm sorry but these numbers you're giving make zero sense.
That's the business a McDonald's does. There's no way you're having that kind of turnaround at a relatively high-end, $55-meal restaurant.
I'm going to assume that by 1100 reservations, you mean 1100 covers (because unless you've got hundreds of tables, you're not pulling off 1100 reservations). But even with that? That's a plate out every 33 seconds all day, every day, for a restaurant open 10 hours. If you're doing half as much on your outdoor seating, that's a plate every 22 seconds.
Unless you're a bar/brewery that serves food and you're lumping all that revenue together and only weighing labor cost against the kitchen (which would be really, really stupid), no one is pulling this off with a team of 6-7 people
Yeah they tried to brag(somehow thinking that not understanding an actual fine dining restaurant is bragging) and obviously for their numbers wrong but are now doubling down on things that are physically impossible
It could be a Hooters or Home Town Buffet type of restaurant in some red state that pays $6 or 7 an hour or it could be $200 per head restaurant that pays the same minimum wage. With a larger % of alcohol than food sales, that is doable. If that labor report is only for the BOH, not counting 3 or 4 salaried employees, then that gives them 12 - 15 people on staff.
I'm not accusing you of lying...but you're reading some numbers wrong.
Nothing you are saying is remotely feasible altogether. You're not pulling off those numbers with that labor cost and holding onto staff. You can't do all of that. Unless you're paying way above industry standard, you're not keeping employees around when they can go do half the work at similar pay. And if you are paying way above industry standard, there's no way you're getting the labor costs you're claiming.
Hell I don't even know where would have a market for 5000+ people a weekend while serving 50 dollar food.
With out knowing what type of restaurant it is, it's impossible to accurately judge this. If his labor report is for BOH(not counting salaried staff), and most of those sales are alcohol then it doesn't reflect the actual overall cost but would still be accurate for what BOH cost had been.
I've worked an event for my current employer that, on paper, looked like it sold 91k, but in actuality we probably sold around 35k in food and alcohol but the rest of the money was part of a package that involved a hefty donation for victims in the Maui fires in 2023.
If he's doing 1600 covers or so a day (like he claims) with 1100 in reservations every Friday, Saturday, Sunday while serving food in the $40-60 range with only 6 people in the kitchen? With only one salaried sous on hand each shift? And each station having 6-12 dishes you they have to make?
You're not doing that and retaining staff unless a significant portion of people aren't eating. And if that's the case, then it's really dishonest to come in here and claim that your cooks are serving 1600 people a day.
I've worked an event for my current employer that, on paper, looked like it sold 91k, but in actuality we probably sold around 35k in food and alcohol but the rest of the money was part of a package that involved a hefty donation for victims in the Maui fires in 2023.
Which is the kind of stuff that makes me say the person was reading the numbers wrong. Sure, maybe the actual listed labor cost on the screen was insanely low, but that's not actually representative of the sales you were doing.
Guy made a dozen comments where he could have provided any explanation on how any of this adds up and gave us...nothing. if it were just the one comment about 1100 covers, I would have said "that's fucking crazy" and left it at that. But he took the time to tell us what POS system they use, but won't even tell us the basic business model of the restaurant.
The labor report is the only number a KM can manipulate from his end, making it the only labor % that is important to him. But maybe I missed a bunch of his previous posts cause I didn't see the 1600 covers.
The math can however still work out if the hourly staff in the kitchen was at a wage of $6-7 working with 3-4 salaried employees (who can often go uncounted in the raw labor report) This puts the restaurant at 6-7 hourly employees per 6 hour shift. If the food prep is done by a central commissary then you eliminate the need for a large prep crew. That gives you an hourly cook with a salaried employee per station if its a regular 3 station line. leaving you with 1 floater and 2 dish.
If this was a Buffalo Wild Wings in Georgia, that number would make total sense.
But maybe I missed a bunch of his previous posts cause I didn't see the 1600 covers.
You did. Because he was not talking about a BDubs in Georgia.
This was a place that did 1100 covers in reservations every weekend day. The menu is on the more expensive side with $40-50 entrees. Prep was done in-house every morning, and there were only two sous total (one in the morning on prep and one in the evening on line), so no, it's not a bunch of of salaried employees. I mean how many salaried cooks do you think a Buffalo Wild Wings has?
And the median wage for a line cook in Georgia is like 14 bucks an hour. There's no way you're doing that kind of volume with a high-skill menu and retaining workers while only paying them minimum wage. Fucking Chipotle or McDonalds pay more.
The math does not work. At all. In any way. The only way to make the math possibly work is, again, if a fuck ton of these people aren't eating. At which point, not sharing that information is just being dishonest
1100 covers a service? Do you have sub-15min table times or is your dining room just gigantic? I would bet serious money that the only restaurant in my entire city seeing that much foot traffic is the college campus’s Cookout on Halloween.
770
u/FunAd6875 May 21 '25
Yeah it's also because most Michelin's have three chefs for every seat. Throw them in to a normal place with a 250 cover brunch service and they drown because there's no one else to rely on.