Menu Engineering is the part of the job no one taught you: reading which dishes carry the money, costing yield for the truth, and designing a menu that shifts what your guests order. Five weeks, real numbers, your menu rebuilt.
Self-paced access inside the Academy. Part of the Module 1 to Module 5 path.
You can run a section flat out, send food you would put your name to, and still watch the margin bleed out between the invoice and the till. It is rarely the cooking. It is the menu quietly deciding your profit before service even starts, and no one ever handed you the tools to read it.
Learn to see them and you stop guessing. You price on purpose, you sell on purpose, and you cut on purpose.
This is the map. Across five weeks you learn to build it from your own numbers, then act on it dish by dish.
Take a full snapshot of your menu as a financial system, not a list. Map what it actually controls, and find where a small shift in average spend is already worth real money.
Weigh the truth. Cost your dishes after yield, find the gap between invoice price and what lands on the plate, and watch dishes change class once the real number is in.
Read the guest, not just the kitchen. Rewrite descriptions in customer language, design an anchor dish, and shift what people order and spend on purpose.
Bring every variable together at once. Classify every dish on the matrix, apply an anchoring strategy, and build desserts and sides into a real revenue layer.
Two modules of work land here. Audit your current menu, engineer the new one, and put both versions side by side with the numbers to back every change.
The Kitchen Lab is a dinner-led coastal café you work inside all the way through. You find the leaks, re-engineer the menu, and see the profit move, then take the same method home to your own pass.
Self-paced access inside the Academy, at the pace your roster allows.
Five weeks of lessons and worksheets, made for the pass, not the classroom.
The full Menu Engineering system and the Kitchen Lab case to practise on.
A capstone that leaves you with a rebuilt menu, not a certificate for the wall.
A live wrap-up session with Ricardo at the end of the module.
The same method every season, so the menu keeps paying long after the module ends.
For the chef who can cook and now wants the menu to earn like it should. Head chefs, sous chefs, and CDPs stepping up, done watching good food make thin money.
Self-paced, start when you are ready. Module 1 is the recommended base, and you can begin here if you already run your numbers.
Module 1 builds the financial base this module stands on, so it is the recommended start. If you already cost and read your own numbers, you can begin here.
The module is five weeks of structured work, but your access stays open. Go at the pace your roster allows and come back to it every season.
It is a live wrap-up session with Ricardo for chefs finishing the module together. Bring your rebuilt menu and your questions.
A menu you have engineered on real numbers, and the method to do it again yourself, without needing anyone's permission.