Cost a plate the way a restaurant actually builds one.

Restaurant plates are harder to cost than cafe items for three reasons, and this page turns all three on by default. The protein usually loses weight to trimming and cooking. There is real skilled labour in the build, not just assembly. And the plate carries components — a sauce, a garnish, a side — that were made in bulk somewhere else in the kitchen and never appear on a supplier invoice under the name of the dish.

The calculator opens with a pork belly plate costed the way a chef would: 220 grams of belly at an 88% yield, potatoes at 82% after peeling, butter, garlic and oil, with packaging and labour already visible in the Advanced panel. Labour here is a per-serving allocation, not your full wage bill — the minutes of skilled time that specific plate consumes.

Because labour and packaging sit in the Advanced panel rather than in the ingredient list, your food cost percentage stays calculated on food alone. That keeps it comparable with industry figures and with your own history, while the cost per serving still tells you the truth about what leaves the kitchen.

Trim loss is a cost you already paid

effective unit cost = purchase price per kg / (yield % / 100)

A whole pork belly at 380 per kilo trimmed to 88% usable is really 431.82 per usable kilo. Cost it at 380 and every plate is understated by roughly twelve per cent of its largest single line.

Yields worth knowing for your own kitchen: most root vegetables lose 15 to 20 per cent to peeling, leafy herbs can lose 30 per cent to stalks, and a braising cut can lose a quarter of its weight to rendering. Weigh yours rather than trusting a chart — the cut, the supplier and the butcher all matter.

Allocating labour to a plate without pretending it is exact

Take the fully loaded hourly cost of the person who makes the dish, including statutory contributions, then estimate the minutes that plate takes across prep and service. Ten minutes of a 210-peso hour is 35 pesos.

This will not be precise and does not need to be. Its job is to stop you believing a labour-intensive dish and an assembly dish with the same food cost are equally profitable. They are not, and the gap is usually large enough to change what you put on the menu.

Sub-recipes and the components nobody costs

Stocks, sauces, compound butters, pickles and dressings are made once and used across many dishes. Cost each as its own batch recipe, get a cost per litre or per 100 grams, then enter that figure as the purchase price for the component.

This is also where portion discipline shows up. A sauce costed at 30 millilitres and ladled at 50 is a 67 per cent overrun on that line, invisible in every document except the stock-take.