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The One Menu Metric Most Owners Track — And Why It’s Silently Misleading Them

Ask any independent restaurant owner what their best-selling dish is and they’ll answer instantly.

They’ll even tell you the exact number of that dish they sold last week.

Very few can tell you which dish made them the most money.

That gap is quietly costing thousands of euros/dollars/pounds every month.

The Classic Trap: The €9 Caesar Salad

Here’s a real menu I pulled from a 120-seat bistro in Stockholm last winter (names changed, numbers exact):

Item	Selling Price	Food Cost	Gross Profit	Units Sold (30 days)	Total Profit Contribution
Caesar Salad	€9	€4.80	€4.20	1,240	€5,208
Grilled Octopus	€24	€7.20	€16.80	380	€6,384
Mushroom Risotto	€18	€5.10	€12.90	520	€6,708

The Caesar salad was the uncontested “best seller” — mentioned proudly on the website, pushed by staff, featured on social media.

The risotto and octopus, combined, made more profit despite selling less than half the volume.

Yet the owner kept running out of anchovies and romaine because “the Caesar is what people want.”

Why This Happens Everywhere

Volume feels like success. 1,240 orders sounds better than 380.
COGS percentage misleads. The Caesar had a respectable 53% cost (many owners aim for 30–35%, but in Europe that’s often unrealistic). The octopus at 30% “looked expensive” on paper.
Labor is invisible. Prepping 1,240 Caesar salads requires far more hands than 380 octopus plates that are mostly grilled and plated in 6 minutes.

The Metric That Actually Matters: Profit per Minute of Kitchen Labor

When you factor in realistic prep + cook + plate time, the picture flips again:

Item	Gross Profit	Total Kitchen Minutes (30 days)	Profit per Kitchen Minute
Caesar Salad	€5,208	18,600	€0.28
Grilled Octopus	€6,384	3,040	€2.10
Mushroom Risotto	€6,708	6,240	€1.08

The octopus generates almost 8× more profit for every minute the kitchen spends on it.

How Top Operators Actually Use This Data

The smartest places I’ve worked (Copenhagen, London, Barcelona) do three things every quarter:

Rank every dish by total profit contribution (not units sold)
Rank every dish by profit per minute of labor
Cross-reference both lists and adjust menu placement, pricing, and staff push accordingly:
- High-profit, high-volume → Stars (keep and promote)
- High-profit, low-volume → Puzzles (raise visibility, train staff to sell)
- Low-profit, high-volume → Dogs (raise price, reduce portion, or 86 entirely)

One 80-seat neo-bistro in Berlin did this exercise in January 2025.
They removed two “best-selling” pastas, raised the price of their burger by €2, and started pushing a high-margin sea bass special.

Net profit increased 18% in 60 days with almost no change in guest count.

The Simple Spreadsheet You Can Build Tonight

You don’t need fancy software.
Four columns are enough:

Item name
Total units sold (last 30–90 days)
Gross profit per portion (selling price − food cost)
Estimated kitchen minutes per portion

Multiply, sort, and stare at the truth.

Most owners who do this for the first time have the same reaction:
“That dish has been on the menu for three years… and it’s been losing us money the entire time?”

Final Thought

Tracking best-sellers feels productive because it’s easy.

Tracking profit contribution feels uncomfortable because it forces decisions.

The places winning in 2025 aren’t the ones with the most popular items.

They’re the ones that quietly removed their most popular items when the math stopped making sense.

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Lina Bergström