Pricing
How to price a restaurant menu and wine list
Wine and menu pricing for US restaurants: true cost, markup versus gross profit, pour cost, house wine, by the glass. Sales tax sits on top. Stop guessing.
Written by Marco Azzari on
"Any wine sale is better than no wine sale" is a belief you can only afford if you know the true cost of the line. A lot of independent restaurants do not. Prices were set from memory, copied from the last owner, or multiplied by a factor that felt normal in 2018. The distributor raised the case price twice since. Guests now check the retail price at the table.
This section is the number half of the wiki.
Start here if you run a small room and you guess: how to price a wine list. Three lines first (house, best-selling glass, best-selling bottle), true cost, on the menu price.
Start here if you have to answer a GM: markup is not margin. Pour cost, gross profit, beverage cost. The language of the review meeting.
By the glass is usually the highest-margin engine and the one on autopilot: how to price wine by the glass. House wine is the pour that happens when nobody chooses: how to price house wine. Kitchen and bar use different cost % and operators mix them: food cost and wine cost. Guests already know your markup: phone-check markup.
One thing you do not have to build into any of these prices: sales tax. In the US it is added on top of the menu price at checkout, and the tip goes on top of that. Neither touches your margin. The leak is a price you never rebuilt, not a tax.