Restaurant revenue management, by the seat-hour

Most restaurants still judge a night on covers and average check. Both numbers hide where the money is made.

A table at 20:00 on a Saturday and the same table at 16:00 on a Tuesday are different products. Most menus charge the same for both.

I've opened 65 restaurants. The biggest gains I've seen came from looking at the room by the seat-hour, and from timing one dinner service with a stopwatch.

So I've put everything I know about restaurant revenue management in one place. 300 slides, free to download.

Inside:
· Costing from the edible portion. Salad greens cost 54% more on the plate than on the invoice.
· Menu engineering and menu design, and what the eye-tracking research found about the famous "sweet spot".
· RevPASH by the hour. In our specimen room, three hours carry 43% of the day.
· Table mix. Why a party of six queues at the door of a half-empty room.
· Meal duration. Eleven minutes saved without touching the meal itself.
· Forecasting, booking slots, waitlists, no-shows and the deposit ladder.
· The queue maths that explains why the last 15% of a room costs the most.
· The supplement. Wagyu in place of the lamb, a foie gras Rossini on top, two guests splitting one main. Each has a price.
· Drinks priced by the rupees they leave, on a multiplier that falls as the pour cost rises.
· Channels, the wine grid, guest lifetime value, the kitchen, labour and banquets.
· Resort dining, where the guest is captive.
· A 100-term glossary and every formula on five pages.

On a specimen 100-seat room, four moves add ₹3.05 lakh of profit a month. No new seats. No new staff.

The workbook behind every number is in the first comment. Put in your own figures and it recalculates for your restaurant.

If you run a restaurant, save this and send it to your chef. Then time one dinner service.