sit-down restaurant industry-

general, but I think it does kind of hold up that you want your labor and your food costs to be around 60% of the profit of your sales. And so for us what that looks like is usually around 30% labor and 30% food. So, if someone spends $10 on Honest Mary’s $3 of that is going to go to paying our staff and $3 of that’s going to be going to paying our food. And, then there’s another $2 of that’s just gonna be paying operating costs and rent and things like that. So, then hopefully, we can take home $2 for every $10. …As far as pricing the menu, we want to set the price in such a way that after we’ve paid for the cost of that bowl, we can still get sustainable profit.”

Bryce Gilmore, owner and head chef at Barley Swine, has a similar approach. His take on profit division is that “you figure out what that percentage needs to be based on what your other costs are, whether it’s labor or rent or utilities, things like that. And then you also balance that with how well does your dish sell? If you don’t sell very many of them, you might be able to charge more or less for it.” Implementing this within their restaurants helps owners keep their businesses running smoothly and efficiently.

Meanwhile, Margaret Smith, coowner of Allday Pizza prefers a different approach. Smith inserts the profits into a master Excel document that calculates the total cost of ingredients for a dish and therefore how much she should charge for a dish. However, setting prices is just a small part of the challenges that owners have to

By Emil Chafigoulline

deal with in managing their restaurants. An additional challenge for sit-down restaurants is dealing with the competition between businesses in the same field, as this can influence employee availability, prices, and popularity of restaurants. Smith said, “You have to be competitive with your prices that are facing the consumer, and in order to be most competitive with those prices, you have to be smart inhouse, and you have to make sure your wages are not carving out too much of your percentages.”

Rather than focusing on meal prices, Barley Swine competes through its employee pay. Gilmore said that “If I say that I can only afford $15 an hour, but all the other restaurants in town are paying $18 an hour, then I’m going to have a hard time hiring people. So we have to make our prices comparable with other restaurants and then we have to figure out how to be able to afford that.” From customers to employees, people play a big role in influencing how successful a business is. Owners must gain their support, whether they use to pay or prices is up to them.

Dine-in restaurants have a choice in how they compete and how they divide their profit, but one of the greatest freedoms is getting to finance and work toward certain

“I just hope more people start to care more about where the food comes from. I think that when more and more people demand a better food system by supporting small farms buying local by not being too stingy and paying more money for meat in general, I think that you’ll see the food system start to thrive a little bit more.”

-Bryce Gilmore

goals. Different owners try to take their businesses in different directions. For example, since Gilmore cares deeply about the environment, Barley Swine “works with this charity group called Zero Footprint, and when [they] found them a while back pre-COVID, [they] did a little survey thing to figure out what [their] carbon footprint was just trying to quantify what that was. And, they came up with a way to put a dollar amount to it, where we basically pay a certain amount of money to them every month, and then they take those dollars and they apply them to different farming practices. So, basically giving the money to farmers, and they’re applying different techniques to try to recapture carbon into the ground.”

Honest Mary’s also strives to make the world a better place; Montieth prioritizes caring for people through jobs. He said, “I love knowing that I got to be a part of creating something that gives people meaningful jobs and helps people see that. I think creating a meaningful job in the restaurant space, especially where there are a lot of really bad jobs, is really important.” These owners go through a great deal to maintain a healthy profit within their restaurants, and they all do so in a variety of ways with different strategies. This leads to some interesting financial styles between different sit-down restaurants in the Austin food scene.

By Emil Chafigoulline