Menu size: why thirty dishes is usually too many

Menus rarely start long. They grow. A guest asks for a lighter option, so a salad goes on. The chef wants to try something new, so a special becomes permanent. A competitor down the road has a burger, so a burger appears. Each addition makes sense on the day. Three years later, the menu has thirty dishes, the walk-in is full, the prep list takes all morning and the kitchen sends out its most popular dishes a little more slowly than it should.

Menu size is one of the biggest decisions a venue makes about its kitchen, and one of the least deliberate. This guide looks at what each extra dish really costs, in stock, waste, prep and ticket times, how to read the long tail of dishes in your own sales, and how to work out the number of dishes that suits your kitchen. Every figure in it is an example from an invented venue, and your own numbers are the ones that count.

Menus grow by addition, almost never by design. Adding a dish feels low risk: it might sell, it pleases someone, and nothing has to be taken away. Removing a dish feels risky: someone will miss it.

So the pressure only ever runs one way. A menu reviewed once a year, if at all, gains three or four dishes for every one it loses. Specials that do well become permanent without anyone deciding the menu needs another dish. Requests from regulars are met with a new line rather than a change to an existing one.

None of this is careless. It is the natural result of a lot of small, sensible decisions with no one weighing their total. The point of looking at menu size deliberately is to weigh the total.

An extra dish costs far more than its ingredients. Every dish on the menu adds some or all of the following:

The cost of a dish that sells a few times a week is mostly fixed. It is the same whether it sells twice or twenty times, which is why the dishes that sell least are the most expensive to keep.

Every ingredient on the menu needs a par level, the amount kept on hand to get through until the next delivery. More dishes mean more ingredients, and more ingredients mean more money sitting on shelves.

The problem is sharpest for ingredients used in a single dish. A dish that needs a particular cheese, a specific cut or an unusual herb needs that ingredient in stock every day, in a quantity large enough to cover a busy night, even though most nights only a few portions sell. The rest sits in the fridge, tying up cash and space.

A shorter menu built on fewer ingredients, each used across several dishes, needs less stock to cover the same sales. That is cash freed and space cleared, before anything is said about waste.

Waste follows the slow dishes. An ingredient used in a popular dish turns over quickly and is used while it is fresh. An ingredient used only in a dish that sells twice a week turns over slowly, and much of it reaches the end of its life unsold.

The same is true of prepared components. A sauce made for a slow dish must be made in a batch large enough to be practical, and most of the batch may be thrown away before the dish sells again. A garnish prepped for a dish that nobody orders tonight is binned at the end of service.

So the waste from a long menu is not spread evenly. It concentrates in the long tail, and a food cost percentage that looks stubbornly high is often a long tail quietly throwing food away. Our guide to reducing food waste in a restaurant kitchen covers where else to look.

The morning prep list is where menu size shows most plainly. Every dish adds its components: sauces, dressings, portioned proteins, cut vegetables, garnishes. Many of those are prepared every day, whether the dish sells many times or none.

Count it for your own menu. For each dish, estimate the minutes of prep it adds to a typical day. Then compare that with how often it sells. A dish that adds twenty minutes of prep and sells five times a day costs four minutes of prep per plate before it is cooked. A popular dish whose components are shared with others may cost a fraction of a minute.

Across a long tail of slow dishes, those minutes add up to hours a week of skilled time spent preparing food that is mostly not sold, or not sold fresh.

Kitchen capacity sets a hard limit on menu size. At the busiest point of service, each station can produce only so many plates in an hour, and each dish it carries makes its work more complex.

A cook on the grill who handles eight dishes must keep eight sets of components ready, remember eight plating styles and switch between them as tickets arrive. A cook handling four dishes does each one faster and more consistently. When the room is full, that difference becomes ticket times, and ticket times become the guest's experience.

Map every dish to its station and look at the load. If one station carries far more dishes than the others, it will be the bottleneck every busy night, and the menu, not the cook, is the cause.

Long menus slow the kitchen in two ways. Cooks working across many dishes are slower on each one, and dishes cooked rarely are cooked less well, because nobody's hands know them.

The second effect is easy to overlook. A dish cooked forty times a week is cooked consistently: the portion is right, the seasoning is right, the plate looks the same every time. A dish cooked three times a week is cooked from memory, sometimes by whoever is free, and it varies. Guests who order it notice.

Our guide to ticket times, the only kitchen metric that moves covers how to measure the first effect. The second shows up in remakes, in guest comments and in the quiet disappointment of a dish that is never quite as good as it was.

A long menu costs the guest too. Reading thirty dishes takes time, and many guests skim rather than read, so a lot of the menu is never really seen. Guests faced with too much choice can take longer to decide and feel less sure of their choice.

That cost lands on the venue as well. Tables that take longer to order turn more slowly. Servers spend more time explaining. And guests who cannot decide often fall back on the most familiar dish, which may not be the one the kitchen most wants to sell.

A small menu, by contrast, is read in full. Every dish gets a fair chance, and guests choose with more confidence. Our guide to a small menu, done confidently and profitably covers that side in detail.

The clearest evidence about menu size is in your own sales. Take a recent period, a month or two, and list every dish with the number of plates sold, from most to least.

In most venues, the list has the same shape. A handful of dishes at the top sell far more than the rest, a middle group sells steadily, and a long tail at the bottom sells only occasionally. The idea of a long tail comes from retail, where it can be valuable; in a kitchen, the tail is where the cost hides.

Look at the bottom of the list. How many dishes sold fewer than, say, two plates a day? What share of total sales did they make up together? Often the bottom third of the menu accounts for well under a tenth of sales, while it accounts for a large share of the stock, prep and waste.

Take an example bistro with thirty dishes across starters, mains, sides and desserts, selling about 3,000 dishes a month.

The top ten dishes sell 1,900 of those, nearly two thirds. The middle ten sell 800. The bottom ten sell 300 between them, an average of about one plate a day each. Those bottom ten dishes need fourteen ingredients that appear nowhere else on the menu, add about ninety minutes to the daily prep list and account for, by the head chef's estimate, around half of the kitchen's food waste.

If the bottom ten dishes came off and the guests who ordered them moved to other dishes, the bistro would keep most of those sales, lose fourteen specialist ingredients, an hour and a half of daily prep and much of its waste. Even if some of those sales were lost entirely, the savings would very likely outweigh them.

The long tail is a list of candidates, not a list of dishes to remove. Some slow dishes earn their place for reasons the sales do not show.

A vegan main may sell modestly but be the reason a table of six books at all, because one of them is vegan. A children's dish may sell rarely but matter to families. A dish that defines the venue, the one in every review, may sell less than the burger but bring guests through the door. A dish that uses an ingredient already on the menu for other dishes may cost very little to keep.

So for each slow dish, ask what it does that its sales do not show, and whether a different dish could do it better. Our guide to removing a dish from the menu without a riot covers how to take one off when the answer is that it should go.

Menu engineering, judging each dish by its popularity and profitability, is the natural tool for deciding menu size. It shows which dishes carry the menu, which earn well but sell slowly, and which do neither.

A long menu makes menu engineering harder, because with thirty dishes the share each one can take is small, and the differences between them blur. A shorter menu makes the picture clearer and the decisions easier. Our guide to menu engineering, and the four dishes you must act on covers the method.

Add kitchen time and hidden costs to the picture. A dish that looks acceptable on popularity and margin may still be one of the most expensive to keep once its prep, waste and station load are counted. Our guide to menu item profitability, dish by dish covers how.

Food cost percentage, the cost of ingredients as a share of food sales, often falls when the menu shrinks. Less waste means less food bought and not sold. Fewer ingredients means better buying, because the venue orders larger quantities of fewer things. Shared ingredients mean less half-used stock.

It does not fall automatically. A shorter menu of expensive dishes can still have a high food cost, and a menu that is cut carelessly can lose sales that carried the margin. But in most kitchens with a long tail, the tail is costing more than it earns, and food cost percentage is where that shows.

Measure it before and after any change to the menu size, over periods long enough to be fair, so the effect is visible rather than assumed.

There is no universal right number of dishes. The right number depends on the kitchen: the number of cooks on each station at the peak, the equipment, the space, the prep time available and the style of food.

A practical way to find it is to work from the stations. For each station, how many dishes can the cook there produce consistently and quickly at the busiest point of service? Add those up, and you have a ceiling. Then ask how many dishes the guests need to find something they want, across the sections and dietary needs. That gives a floor. The right menu size lies between the two, and is usually closer to the floor than most menus are.

For an example kitchen with three cooks at the peak, one on the grill, one on the stove and one on cold and desserts, that might mean five or six dishes per station, or fifteen to eighteen in total, not thirty.

Menu size is not only the total number of dishes but how they are spread across sections. A menu of eighteen dishes with ten mains and two starters feels unbalanced; one with five starters, eight mains, two sides and three desserts feels complete.

Look at each section's size against how guests order. If most guests order a main and only some order starters, the mains section deserves more dishes than the starters. If desserts sell well, a small, strong dessert list earns its place; if they rarely sell, three desserts may be enough.

Look at dietary coverage in each section too. A shorter menu needs each section to offer something for the most common needs, rather than relying on one long section to cover them.

Shrinking a menu is best done in steps. Start with the data: sales by dish, the ingredients each uses, the prep each adds and the station each loads. Mark the obvious candidates, the dishes that sell rarely, use specialist ingredients and earn modestly.

Then check balance. After the cuts, does each section still offer a range of dishes, prices and dietary options? Does each station have a fair share? Where gaps appear, fill them with dishes that use ingredients already on the menu.

Make the change at a natural moment, such as a seasonal menu change, so guests see a new menu rather than a shrinking one. Tell regulars about any favourites that are going, and offer them something in their place.

A menu cut to the right size will start to grow again unless someone guards it. The pressures that made it long are still there.

A simple rule helps: one in, one out. A new dish joins the menu only when an existing one leaves, so the size holds steady while the dishes change. Specials stay specials unless a deliberate decision makes one permanent, and then something else comes off.

Review the menu's size at every seasonal change, with the same data as before: sales by dish, the long tail, the stock and the prep. A menu that is reviewed regularly stays the size the kitchen can cook well.

An invented bistro with a kitchen of four has a menu of thirty-one dishes. Its sales report shows that the bottom eleven dishes sell fewer than two plates a day each and together make up under a tenth of sales. Those eleven dishes need sixteen ingredients used nowhere else and add about an hour and a half to the daily prep list.

At its autumn menu change, the bistro moves to eighteen dishes: five starters, eight mains, two sides and three desserts, with at least one vegetarian, one vegan and one dish made without gluten-containing ingredients in each section. It keeps two slow dishes that matter, a vegan main and a children's dish, and reworks them to use ingredients already on the menu.

Within two months, morning prep ends an hour earlier, the walk-in holds a third less stock, ticket times on busy nights fall, and the kitchen throws away noticeably less. Total sales hold steady, and food cost percentage falls by a couple of points. The bistro adopts a one-in, one-out rule for the next season.

In servearound, the menu report shows the long tail in your own sales: units sold, checks, revenue and share of sales for every dish and category over any dates, and how many dishes sold at all in the period. From the menu guests open on their phones, it also shows how often each dish was looked at against how often it was ordered, and which categories were never opened. Kitchen analytics show ticket times by station and which dishes take up the most kitchen minutes in total.

A dish switched off is hidden from guests but kept, so a dish removed at one menu change can return at another, and marking a dish sold out on the till shows it as sold out on every guest menu at once. servearound does not hold recipes, stock or dish costs today, so ingredients, prep and food cost percentage stay in your own records; inventory tracking, for the stock behind the menu, is coming. See the menus module and Analytics.

As many as your kitchen can cook well at its busiest. Work from the stations for a ceiling and from guests' needs for a floor; the answer is usually well below thirty.

Each dish adds stock, waste, prep, space, station load and training, and most of that cost is the same whether the dish sells often or rarely.

The dishes at the bottom of the sales list that sell only occasionally. They usually make up a small share of sales and a large share of stock, prep and waste.

No. Keep slow dishes that serve a purpose, such as a dietary need, a children's dish or a signature, and rework them to use shared ingredients.

Often, through less waste, better buying and shared ingredients, though it depends on which dishes remain and how the menu is cut.

Cooks handling fewer dishes work faster and more consistently, and dishes cooked often are cooked better, so tickets move more quickly at the peak.

Use the data, keep balance across sections and dietary needs, change at a seasonal moment and tell regulars about favourites that are going.

Use a one-in, one-out rule, keep specials as specials unless a deliberate decision is made, and review the size at every menu change.

It shows which dishes carry the menu and which do not, and a shorter menu makes its picture clearer. Add kitchen time and hidden costs before deciding.

Menus grow by addition, and thirty dishes is usually more than a kitchen can cook well or a guest can read properly. Every extra dish adds stock, waste, prep, space, station load and training, and those costs fall hardest on the slow dishes in the long tail, which often make up a small share of sales and a large share of the kitchen's cost.

Read the long tail in your own sales, weigh each slow dish against what it really does for the menu, and find your number from the stations' capacity and the guests' needs. Shrink the menu at a natural moment, keep each section balanced and every dietary need covered, and hold the size with a one-in, one-out rule at every menu change.