18 Years in F&B Operations
200+ engagements · $40M+ recovered margin
Your Restaurant Has a Problem.
It Isn't the Food.
Most struggling restaurants have excellent kitchens. The damage is in the spreadsheet — in the purchasing decisions, the scheduling model, the menu architecture, and the conversation no one wants to have with the owner.
Sound familiar?
Shrinking margins that don't respond to menu price increases
Rising turnover that costs you $4,200 per line cook lost
Stagnant covers while fixed costs compound every month
Food Cost Before
41%
Food Cost After
27%
Same menu. Same team. 6-week engagement.
Why is my food cost above 35%?
Because your purchasing spec and your actual prep yield haven't been reconciled since the last chef left. Most operators are running on theoretical food cost — the number their POS calculates based on recipe cards written three years ago. Actual food cost lives in the walk-in at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday: the over-portioned protein, the prep waste nobody counted, the vendor invoice that crept 8% in six months while the menu price held. At Palate, the first engagement always starts with a full yield audit and a vendor-by-vendor renegotiation. One independent steakhouse in Denver came in at 41% food cost. Six weeks later they were running 27% — same menu, same kitchen team, different purchasing discipline and a tighter prep SOP.
“I thought we had a pricing problem. Turned out we had a portioning problem and a vendor problem. The menu was fine.”
Annual Turnover Before
180%
Annual Turnover After
64%
One quarter. Schedule restructure + prep debrief protocol.
How do I keep my best line cooks?
You stop treating retention as an HR problem and start treating it as a financial one. Replacing a trained line cook costs $4,200 in recruiting, onboarding time, and the quality drag during the first 60 days. That number is rarely on any operator's radar because it doesn't appear as a line item — it hides inside food cost variance, comp tickets, and the GM's overtime. The fix isn't always wages. At a 90-seat brasserie in Chicago, the top two causes of turnover were scheduling unpredictability and a prep culture that made cooks feel invisible. We rebuilt the schedule model and introduced a weekly 15-minute prep debrief. Turnover dropped from 180% annually to 64% in one quarter — and the kitchen's ticket time improved by 4 minutes.
“We had great cooks walking out the door every month. Nobody had ever sat down and asked them why. That was the problem.”
Monthly Loss (Unit 3)
−$18K
Result at 90 Days
+EBITDA
90-day operational playbook. No concept changes.
Can I grow without a second mortgage?
Yes — but not by replicating what you built. You replicate the systems underneath what you built. The operators who scale successfully aren't opening identical restaurants; they're opening restaurants that share a purchasing infrastructure, a training framework, and a financial reporting cadence that gives ownership visibility before a problem becomes a crisis. The operators who fail at unit two usually skipped those conversations at unit one because unit one was profitable enough to absorb the chaos. Unit two has no tolerance for chaos. A multi-unit operator in Austin came to Palate with three locations: the original was thriving, the second was breaking even, the third was bleeding $18K a month. The diagnosis wasn't the market or the concept. It was that units two and three had no version of the operational DNA that made unit one work. We built a playbook. Unit three turned EBITDA-positive in 90 days.
“I kept thinking the third location had a location problem. It had a systems problem. There's a difference, and it matters.”