Bar and restaurant consulting
Bar and restaurant consulting under one engagement
Plenty of venues are a restaurant and a bar at the same time, and the two halves are usually managed as if they were separate businesses that happen to share a roof. That is where the margin goes. This is a single engagement covering both — plate cost and pour cost, shared labor, one combined prime cost.
Why running both halves separately costs you money
A venue with a strong bar and a strong kitchen has two cost structures with completely different rhythms. Food runs at a higher cost percentage and a lower margin per dollar; beverage runs at a lower cost percentage and carries the profit. When they are reviewed separately, the kitchen gets squeezed to hit a food cost target while the bar quietly loses four points of pour cost that nobody is measuring, because the bar has always felt like the profitable side.
The labor is worse. Bar and floor staff overlap constantly — a server pulling drinks during a rush, a barback clearing tables at close — and when the schedule is built by department, both departments staff for their own peak and the venue pays twice for the same hour. In most combined venues we walk into, this is the single largest recoverable number, and it never shows up in a food cost review.
- Beverage margin subsidising a kitchen nobody has re-costed in two years
- Pour cost unmeasured because the bar 'always makes money'
- Bar and floor scheduled separately, so both peak-staff the same hour
- Menu and drinks list priced in isolation from each other
- One prime cost number nobody actually produces
What a combined engagement covers
We treat the venue as one P&L. The diagnostic reads both sides together: item-level POS across food and beverage, twelve to twenty-four months of accounts, supplier invoices for both, the current schedule across all departments, and live observation of two or three services — including a slow midweek one and a full Friday, because those are the two shifts that expose different problems.
From there the work is whichever combination the numbers call for. Sometimes the kitchen is fine and the entire gap is pour cost and bar scheduling. Sometimes it is the reverse. Usually it is a bit of both plus a pricing structure that was set when the venue opened and has never been revisited against current invoice prices.
- Plate-level costing across the food menu, modifiers included
- Pour cost by category, with variance tracking and a counting routine that survives a busy week
- Drinks list rebuilt around contribution margin, not just perceived value
- One labor model covering kitchen, bar and floor against forecast trade
- Combined prime cost target with a weekly scorecard the owner reads in ten minutes
- Purchasing consolidated across food and beverage suppliers
Formats we work with
Gastropubs and bar-restaurants where food and drink revenue are close to even. Neighbourhood restaurants with a serious cocktail program. Bars that added a kitchen and never re-modelled the labor. Bistros with a wine list carrying real inventory value. Coffee shops that moved into evening service and now run two businesses on one roster.
We work on site across Texas, Florida and South Carolina, and take engagements worldwide where the numbers and the travel make sense.
How the engagement runs
Two to three weeks of diagnostic, then implementation against a written scope at a fixed fee agreed before anything starts. A senior operator is in the building — during service, not just during the quiet daytime hours when everything looks fine. We stay until the change holds through a real Friday, then hand over a systems pack and a scorecard your team maintains without us.
What operators get
- One combined prime cost target instead of two departments defending their own
- Pour cost measured, benchmarked and held rather than assumed to be fine
- A single labor model across kitchen, bar and floor built on forecast trade
- Menu and drinks list priced against current invoices and contribution margin
Common questions
- Do you handle the bar and the kitchen in one engagement?
- Yes — that is the point of this engagement. Both sides are diagnosed and rebuilt together against one combined prime cost, because in a venue that runs both, the labor and the margin cross between them constantly.
- What should combined prime cost be for a bar and restaurant?
- Most healthy combined venues land between 60% and 65% of net sales once food, beverage and full labor are counted. Where a venue sits inside that range depends on the food-to-beverage revenue split — a heavier beverage mix should pull it toward the lower end.
- What is a good pour cost?
- Roughly 18–22% for spirits, 22–26% for draft beer and 28–32% for wine, depending on the list. The number that matters more than any of these is variance: the gap between what your pour cost should be given what you sold and what it actually was.
- Our bar is profitable — should we still look at it?
- Especially then. A bar that has always been profitable is the least-audited part of most venues, and unmeasured pour cost variance of four or five points is common precisely because nobody has had a reason to look.
- Can you do just the bar side?
- Yes — bar consulting is available as a standalone engagement. We recommend the combined version only when the venue genuinely runs both halves at scale and the labor crosses between them.
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