Restaurant Man

Zusatztext 73375788 Informationen zum Autor Joe Bastianich Klappentext The New York Times Bestselling Book for Foodies "The best, funniest, most revealing inside look at the restaurant biz since Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential." -Jay McInerney With a foreword by Mario Batali Joe Bastianich is unquestionably one of the most successful restaurateurs in America-if not the world. So how did a nice Italian boy from Queens turn his passion for food and wine into an empire? In Restaurant Man, Joe charts a remarkable journey that first began in his parents' neighborhood eatery. Along the way, he shares fascinating stories about his establishments and his superstar chef partners-his mother, Lidia Bastianich, and Mario Batali. Ever since Anthony Bourdain whet literary palates with Kitchen Confidential, restaurant memoirs have been mainstays of the bestseller lists. Serving up equal parts rock 'n' roll and hard-ass business reality, Restaurant Man is a compelling ragu-to-riches chronicle that foodies and aspiring restauranteurs alike will be hankering to read. CHAPTER ONE Restaurant Man Here’s everything you need to know to open a restaurant. Your margins are three times your cost on everything. Some things you make more, some things you make less. You have loss leaders on the menu—veal chops and steak might cost you 50 percent of the ticket price on the menu. Pasta and salad you can run closer to 15, just as long as everything works out to 30 percent. Bells and whistles like appetizers and desserts bring down the cost. Desserts are almost pure profit. Wine by the glass is usually marked up four times, although we don’t always do that. At Babbo we get about three times cost for a quartino, or sometimes even two times, so our wine cost is 30 to 50 percent. Thirty percent of your monthly take is going to be your food and wine cost. Thirty percent is going to be labor, 20 percent is miscellaneous, including the rent, and 20 percent is your profit. Your rent per month should be your gross take on your slowest day. And that’s it. Restaurant math is easy. If you need to gross ten grand in a day, then it’s about having two hundred people coming in and spending fifty bucks apiece. And within that $10,000, you should have $3,333 going to the cost of goods sold, $3,333 going to labor to execute that, and 20 percent miscellaneous, including the linens and insurance and bug spray and anything else. That leaves 20 percent profit. Like I said, it’s very simple. There are a lot of more complex models, but this is the basic way of doing it. Anything you give away for free is bad. Linen is the number-one evil, because it is expensive and no one pays for it. Same with bread and butter. You don’t mind paying fifteen bucks for a veal chop you sell for thirty dollars, but paying a dollar and a quarter for a tablecloth and thirty-five cents for each napkin that someone gets dirty before they even have their first drink is a drag. In a typical Manhattan fine-dining restaurant, between 10 and 20 percent profit is an acceptable margin. Twenty percent if you’re a stud, 10 percent if you’re just doing okay. But every little thing will eat into your margin. A spoon that goes into the garbage is coming out of your pocket. A pot of coffee no one drinks costs you money. How close the chef cuts the fish to the bone will make a big difference. In this business, to make money you have to save money. My dad taught me that. He was a restaurant man. That’s what he called it: “Restaurant Man.” He taught me at an early age the enigma of the business—you have to appear to be generous, but you have to be inherently a cheap fuck to make it work. He taught me how to make money—it’s a nickel-and-dime business, and you make dollars by accumulating nickels. If you try to make dollars by grabbing dollars, you’ll never survive. It comes down to a ve...

Product details

• Authors: Joe Bastianich
• Publisher: Plume USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.07.2013
• EAN: 9780142196847
• ISBN: 978-0-14-219684-7
• No. of pages: 296
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 202 mm x 17 mm
• Series: Plume
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries