The Cheapest Thing on Your Menu Decides Your Check Average
Hey Team! I went looking for the most expensive thing on a restaurant menu this week and ended up staring at the cheapest one instead.
So I pulled the median price of every category to see what a floor actually sells, sampled across 14,242 dishes and drinks. Steak came back at $22.23. Seafood $19.99. Burgers $16.
Dessert came back at $10.00.
Ten dollars. The smallest number on the whole menu, and the one nobody trains.
The item you never drill is the one that moves the check
Think about where your training time goes. You walk a new server through the entrees, because that is where the money looks like it is. You talk about the steak, the fish, the thing the chef is proud of. By the time you get to the back of the menu everybody is tired and dessert gets four words.
Except the guest already picked the entree. They came in wanting dinner. Nobody needs a server to sell them the thing they arrived to buy.
Dessert is different. Dessert is a decision the guest was not going to make on their own, and it lives or dies on whether the server can describe it in one sentence without looking at the menu. Same with the cocktail before it, median $12.50. Same with the second glass of wine.
That is the whole job, and it is worth doing the arithmetic on.
Run it on your own floor
Five servers, ten shifts a week. That is roughly 217 chances a month for each of them to add one thing.
At the median dessert price, one more per server per shift is a little over two thousand dollars a month. Not a rounding error and not a fantasy, just your staffing multiplied by a real price off real menus.
I built a calculator that does this with your numbers instead of mine. It is free, there is no signup, and it shows you the number before it asks you for anything.
Every price in it is a real median, sampled across 110 restaurants and published with its sample size so you can judge it yourself. Most of the upsell math floating around online is somebody's guess dressed up as research. Ours has receipts.
The wine number that stopped me
While I was in there I found something I did not go looking for.
Across the sample, the average wine listing is about $70. The median is $16.
That is not a rounding difference. That is two completely different lists living inside one heading, a by the glass program and a bottle program, and the software cannot tell them apart because the menu does not either.
Which means your guest cannot tell them apart on first read, and neither can a new server. If your wine list reads as one long column of names and numbers, the person selling it is guessing where the value sits, and guessing servers steer to the cheapest safe answer every time.
What actually changes it
Restaurants that trained their floor on the menu saw check totals up 11% and wine sales up 34%, loaded from real POS data across our customers. No menu changes. No price changes. Nobody hired.
I am not going to hand you a guaranteed multiple on your money, because I would have to invent it and you have been sold enough invented numbers. What I will tell you is that a server who can describe a dessert in one sentence sells more of them than a server who points at the menu, and that is not a theory, that is thirty years of standing on a floor.
The calculator will tell you what that is worth in your room.
Have a great day! — Terry
