When a Salad Bowl Needs to Become a Race Car A 2–3 minute read In QSR and fast casual, one metric quietly runs the entire P&L: throughput . Lunch hits. The line builds. Mobile orders fire. Delivery drivers stack up. From the sidewalk it looks like momentum. But inside the four walls, the numbers don't agree. You're busy, and the margin still isn't where it should be. That gap has a name. Seconds Per Plate Is the Real KPI Most operators watch daily sales. The best operators wa

A 3-minute read · Restaurant Operations · Daniel Angerer I wouldn't buy your restaurant because it's perfect. I'd buy it because something in it works. A full dining room on a Tuesday with nothing running. A dish guests drive past three competitors to order. A location that pulls foot traffic without a dollar in marketing. A team that actually gives a damn. Something in there has already earned real market validation, and nobody's measuring it. That's the signal for restaura

Most restaurants don't have a sales problem. They have a drink problem. Not that kind. A mix  problem. Too many sodas. Not enough "I'll have another one." And that gap, that quiet, unsexy gap between what's being poured and what could be, shows up directly on your bottom line every single night. Where the Money Actually Lives Here's a number that should bother every operator: a $4 soda looks efficient on paper. A $16 cocktail actually moves the business. The math is simple on

The Most Expensive Sentence in Restaurants "We should open another one." It usually gets said on a packed Friday night. The energy is high, the bar is three deep, and the room feels electric. For the operator, it feels like validation. For the investor across the table, it sounds like opportunity. Both of them might be wrong. The decision to expand a restaurant brand is one of the most capital-intensive moves in hospitality, and one of the most frequently made on the wrong ev

Oil Prices Hit Record High! Here's the P&L Breakdown — Through a $30 Chicken Dish Nobody underwrites a restaurant deal modeling for crude oil volatility. And yet here we are. If you're an operator, you felt it in your Tuesday invoices before you read it in the news. If you're an investor, you're about to see it in Q2 EBITDA. Either way, the mechanism is the same — and understanding it is the difference between protecting margin and quietly bleeding it. Let's break it down thr

A few weeks ago I was in the Financial District, waiting on a document from a city office near Wall Street. Hour wait. Nothing to do. I walked in, took one look around, and felt my energy leave my body. Fluorescent lights. Plastic chairs. A ticket system designed by someone who had never been inconvenienced. Ten minutes felt like forty. I lasted twenty minutes before I walked next door waiting for my document into. small café. Reclaimed wood, warm pendant lights, music just u

Most restaurants don't have a sales problem. They have a drink problem. Not that kind. A mix  problem. Too many sodas. Not enough "I'll have another one." And that gap in your restaurant beverage profit margins, that quiet, unsexy gap between what's being poured and what could be, shows up directly on your bottom line every single night. Where the Money Actually Lives Here's a number that should bother every operator: a $4 soda looks efficient on paper. A $16 cocktail actuall

Three cases of heirloom tomatoes. Half a case of black truffle aioli from that one special in March. A sheet pan of portioned salmon from Thursday that didn't move because the server forgot to 86 it. Sound familiar? That's not a food cost problem. That's a restaurant purchasing system problem, and it's running a quiet tax on your P&L every single week. The Number That Should Bother You A $5M restaurant with a 30% food cost is deploying $1.5M a year into purchasing decisions.

Revenue is up. Tables are full. And somehow, EBITDA still didn't get the memo. Here's what's actually going on, and why Jeff Bezos's abs are more relevant than you think.Let me paint you a picture. A photo of Jeff Bezos circulates online. He looks, to put it diplomatically,  extremely optimized . The kind of shape that doesn't come from "trying to eat better." The kind that comes from someone who decided to treat their body like a business problem and then went full spreadshe

Most operators think they’re running a restaurant. What they’re actually running is a system. Something very close to a neuron. A neuron does three things: Receive → Process → Transmit When the signal is clean, it moves fast. When it’s not, everything slows down. If that sounds like your Saturday night, you don’t have a people problem. You have a system problem. 1. INPUT: Demand Isn’t Your Problem Demand comes from Reservations Walk ins Online orders Tickets fire. Energy hits

....one slow station sets the speed for the entire operation. Case Study: Friday Night Friday night. Tickets stacking. Chef calling orders. Team moving fast. From the outside, it looks like a strong service. Behind the peak volume, the story shifts. Revenue holds. Profit doesn’t move. A restaurant that feels successful but isn’t converting that volume into margin. I walk into this exact setup all the time. What’s actually happening I scan the kitchen line. One station is cons

...And It's Killing Your Profit Most restaurants track numbers. Very few track a system. And without a system, profit is inconsistent at best. The Shift Tracking isolated metrics doesn’t create control. A KPI stack does. It connects labor, cost of goods, and revenue into one operating system that drives decisions every week. The KPI Stack If you want predictable margin, these are the numbers that matter: 1. Labor % (In Context) Labor % alone is incomplete. You need to track:

The $7 Sale Most Restaurants Keep Losing Saturday afternoon. 3:45 PM. We walk into a reputable, long-time neighborhood, all-day café. We order coffee and my spouse wants a croissant. “Kitchen is closed,” the barista says. And just like that “this is a great Saturday” turns into “this sucks.” We drink the coffee hastily - and still leave without the croissant. On the way out, I ask the hostess if I can buy one to go. Now it’s possible! A warm croissant arrives. Homemade jam.

Years ago, I walked into a packed restaurant. Full dining room. Waitlist at the door. Great energy. The owner pulled me aside and said, “Business is amazing… I just don’t know where the money is going.” That sentence has followed me through more than 30 restaurant openings and multi-unit expansions. Because here’s the reality: Most restaurants don’t have a revenue problem. They have an operating system problem. Busy hides problems. Systems expose and fix them. After scaling c

What Restaurant Operators Actually Need From AI to Improve Margins Walk into any restaurant today and you’ll hear: “We need AI.” What that usually means: More marketing tools. More dashboards. More noise. That’s not where operators win. After 20+ years building and scaling restaurant businesses, one thing is clear: Most AI tools are solving the wrong problem. Operators don’t need AI that talks to customers. They need AI that improves the business. Here’s where it actually mat

Ever wondered why most concecpts break at the second location! I’ve seen this pattern over and over A restaurant is packed. Great food. Strong team So the next step feels obvious. Open another location. Then a third And suddenly margins tighten. Service slips The founder is back on the floor putting out fires Nothing broke. But everything changed A great restaurant is not the same as a scalable business One unit can run on energy and presence. Two or three units expose everyt

Most restaurant operators think EBITDA optimization is about cutting costs. It’s not. It’s about building a high-performance operating system that drives margin, consistency, and scalable growth across restaurant businesses. 1. Audit and Establish Control I start by creating full visibility into restaurant operations. Weekly P&L and KPI cadence Labor, COGS, and menu performance Throughput and operational bottlenecks This defines where margin is won or lost and creates a clear