Your Most Profitable Dishes Aren't Selling Themselves — Train Your Staff to Change That
Hey Team!
You've got a menu. You've probably got a pretty good idea which items on it are making you money and which ones are just taking up space on the line. But here's the part most operators skip: your staff doesn't know what you know. They're guessing. And when a server doesn't know which dish to point a guest toward, they default to the ribeye because everybody knows what a ribeye is.
That's not a server problem. That's a training problem.
I've watched this play out for thirty years. You've got a wings-and-burgers joint on game day, packed house, every table turning in ninety minutes. Your bone-in wings have a 68% food cost advantage over your half-pound burger, but your servers are selling burgers three-to-one because burgers are easy to describe. Nobody told them the wings story. Nobody told them anything, really, except the specials and which tables were sat when.
The fix isn't complicated, but it does require you to do something most operators never do: share your numbers with your team.
Not all of them. You don't need a 22-year-old shift lead reviewing your P&L on a Tuesday. But if you've got a queso appetizer sitting at a 74% margin and your servers aren't actively suggesting it to every table that orders drinks first, you're leaving real money on the floor every single shift. Tell them that. Tell them the queso is the one. Tell them why. A server who understands that selling three queso orders a night is the difference between a good shift for the house and a slow bleed will actually try to sell it.
Now here's where training comes in, because awareness alone isn't enough. A server can know a dish has great margin and still fumble the description at the table. If they're standing there going "it's, um, it's really good, it's like a cheese dip kind of thing," you've lost the sale. The guest is ordering a Diet Coke and an entrée and you got nothing from that table on the appetizer line.
The description matters as much as the motivation. So when you're building training around high-margin items, you need to do both. Why this dish matters to the house, and exactly how to talk about it to a guest.
Here's what that looks like in practice. Take your queso. Build a few quiz questions around it. Not just "what's in the queso" but "how would you describe it to a guest who just ordered their first round of drinks?" and "what's the best moment in the meal to suggest it?" You're training the behavior, not just the recipe. When a server has answered that question three or four times in a quiz, the language starts to feel natural. They stop fumbling. They stop saying "um." They've actually thought through the moment before it happens.
The same logic applies to your entrée mix. If your smash burger runs a better margin than your chicken sandwich and you want to move it, your servers need two things: a description that makes it sound irresistible, and a reason to care whether it sells. Give them both. Quiz them on the description. Tell them the house depends on selling the right stuff, not just selling stuff.
This is something I think about constantly with the restaurants I still run. We're not a white-tablecloth spot. We're a sports bar and a neighborhood tavern. Our guests aren't consulting the menu like it's a wine list. They're asking the server "what's good here?" and the server's answer in that moment is worth money. That answer has to be trained. It won't just happen because you hired someone who seems enthusiastic.
When I built the platform I use now for staff training, this was exactly the use case I was thinking about. Upload your menu, generate questions specifically about the items you want pushed, and run your staff through it before they hit the floor. The questions aren't generic. They're about your queso, your smash burger, your bone-in wings. Your staff is drilling on your actual margin story, not some hypothetical dish in a training video someone made in 2009.
But honestly, you don't need a platform to start doing this. You can start tonight. Pull your top five margin items. Write down three sentences for each one that a server could say at the table. Then ask yourself whether your current staff could recite anything close to that. If the answer is no, you've found your gap.
The operators I talk to who actually close this gap have one thing in common. They stopped treating menu knowledge as something staff would pick up over time. They made it deliberate. They said "here are the five dishes that matter most to us financially, here is how to describe them, here is when to bring them up, and we're going to practice this until it sticks."
That's it. That's the whole thing.
Your most profitable dishes aren't going to sell themselves. Your staff will sell what they're confident talking about, and they'll be confident about what they've been trained on. The ribeye will keep winning the default vote until you give them a better reason to go a different direction.
Give them the reason. Give them the language. Then quiz them on it until it's automatic.
That's not luck. That's just training done right.
Have a great day! — Terry Psaltakis
Your AI Restaurant Guy
For more on putting this into practice, see how ShiftTrained approaches cocktail training.
