How to cost a Spanish set lunch menu (menú del día)

A menú del día isn't one dish, it's a pack of five elements (starter, main, dessert, bread and a drink) that the customer sees as a single fixed-price deal. To know whether that pack actually makes you money, you need to cost each piece separately and then add up the total cost per diner. That's the starting point for setting a price on purpose, instead of guessing.

If you already know what food cost is and how to cost a recipe, this article takes it one step further: costing the set menu as a whole, where the profitability of the pack matters more than any single dish in it.

Why you cost the whole menu, not each dish on its own

The usual trap is looking at the food cost of each dish in isolation. A lobster rice dish might run a 45% food cost, which looks unworkable on its own. But if that main is balanced by a noodle soup starter at an 8% food cost and a seasonal fruit dessert at 6%, the whole pack can still land at a perfectly healthy 28%.

The key is that the customer pays one fixed price for the menu. You can design the choice of dishes by mixing higher-cost and lower-cost options so the average food cost of the whole pack hits your target. That's menu engineering, and it starts with the costing.

A worked example in euros

Picture a restaurant selling its menú del día at €12.50. Here's the ingredient cost per diner for a typical Monday choice of dishes:

To get the real cost per diner you need to estimate what share of customers picks each option. Say 60% order the salad and 40% the soup; 70% choose the pork and 30% the cod; and 65% take the yoghurt against 35% for the fruit. With those weightings:

1. 1Average starter cost: (€0.72 × 0.60) + (€0.41 × 0.40) = €0.43 + €0.16 = €0.59
2. 2Average main cost: (€1.85 × 0.70) + (€3.20 × 0.30) = €1.30 + €0.96 = €2.26
3. 3Average dessert cost: (€0.28 × 0.65) + (€0.18 × 0.35) = €0.18 + €0.06 = €0.24
4. 4Bread (fixed): €0.14
5. 5Drink (fixed): €0.22
6. 6Total cost per diner: €0.59 + €2.26 + €0.24 + €0.14 + €0.22 = €3.45

Working out the food cost and setting the price

With a cost per diner of €3.45 and a selling price of €12.50, the food cost of the menu is: (€3.45 ÷ €12.50) × 100 = 27.6%.

A 27-28% food cost is a healthy figure for a set lunch menu in Spanish hospitality. The usual target sits between 25% and 32%, depending on the type of venue, staffing costs and fixed overheads.

Look at the cod: its €3.20 cost against a €12.50 price would mean a 25.6% food cost if it were the only main on offer, which on its own is reasonable. But if every main on the menu were fresh fish, the average cost of the pack would climb to 35-38% and the menu would stop being profitable at €12.50. That's where designing a sensible mix of options makes the difference.

When to review the costing

A set menu costing isn't a document you write once and forget. Ingredient prices move, seasonality changes the cost of fruit and vegetables, and customer preferences shift over time. There are three moments when it's worth reviewing it:

• When you change the choice of dishes on the menu (a new dish, a seasonal swap).
• When a delivery arrives with prices noticeably different from usual (oil going up, fish out of season).
• When the month's ingredient spend doesn't match what you'd calculated: there may be unrecorded waste, portions going out oversized, or stock loss.

If you run different menus through the week (Monday different from Friday, a special menu on Sunday), you need to do this calculation for each rotation separately. Otherwise the real weekly cost can drift well away from your estimate.

Costing a set menu across more than one site

If you run more than one site, or share a kitchen with another brand, costing the set menu gets harder: supplier prices can vary by volume, waste isn't the same in every kitchen, and portions can drift. In that case, the practical answer is centralising your costings in a tool that updates the cost automatically whenever an ingredient's price changes, so nobody has to recalculate it by hand.