A restaurant costs a menu. A pub costs a menu and a cellar. A hotel costs a restaurant, a bar, a breakfast buffet, a banqueting calendar and a room service card, often sharing the same ingredients across all of them. The costing maths is identical everywhere; what changes in pubs and hotels is how many different selling formats one ingredient passes through, and that is exactly where margins go missing.
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Every multi-site operator has eaten the same dish at two of their own restaurants and been served two different dishes. Same name on the menu, different portion, different garnish, different margin. Guests notice the inconsistency; finance notices that site A runs three points more food cost than site B on an identical menu and nobody can explain which site is right.
Most recipe costs are wrong in the same direction. The spreadsheet prices a kilogram of salmon at the invoice price, the kitchen loses a fifth of that kilogram to trim and skin, and every portion sold quietly costs more than the menu believes. Multiply that by batch preps costed on guesswork and portions that drift with whoever is on the pass, and a menu that promises 68 per cent gross profit delivers 63 and nobody can say why.
Every recipe costing tool demos beautifully. A chef builds a dish, ingredient costs appear, a margin shows in green, everyone nods. The differences that decide whether the software still earns its keep in month six are less photogenic: what happens when a supplier changes a price mid-week, when a prep batch feeds forty recipes, when site three portions differently to site one, and when finance asks why the theoretical margin never matches the bank.
