Four dishes usually carry a menu. Knowing which four changes how you price, prep and promote everything else.
Plot every dish by contribution margin and popularity and a familiar pattern appears: a small group of items carries the kitchen, and a long tail complicates prep for very little return.
The instinct is to raise prices across the board. A better move is to redesign around the winners — reposition them on the menu, build prep around their ingredients and retire the items that only add complexity.
Operators who run this exercise twice a year typically recover two to four margin points without a single guest complaint about price.
