Your P&L already knows where the money went.
We read food cost, beverage cost, and sales mix the way an operator reads a dining room, then hand you the specific decisions that move margin. No dashboards you’ll never open. No 90-page deck.
Bring last month’s P&L and a sales-mix report. That’s the whole prep.
Most venues don’t have a sales problem. They have a leak problem.
Yields drift, vendors reprice, portions creep. A plate costed at open is fiction by month nine.
Price increases arrive quietly, line by line, and land in your food cost before anyone signs off on them.
Your highest-margin items are often buried mid-page while a loss leader sits in the top-right corner.
Beverage cost is the fastest thing to fix and the fastest thing to lose again without a standard that holds on a Saturday.
Four disciplines, one margin.
Food cost review & menu engineering
Recipe-level costing against real invoices, then a menu rebuilt around what actually earns.
- Plate-level cost and contribution margin
- Sales-mix analysis by item and daypart
- Menu re-engineering and layout recommendations
Beverage cost & pour control
Liquor, beer, and wine cost brought under a standard your bar team can hold through a rush.
- Pour cost by category and by bartender shift
- Cocktail spec costing and batching
- Inventory and variance routine
Menu pricing strategy
Prices set from contribution margin and guest psychology, not from what the place down the street charges.
- Price architecture across the menu
- Elasticity and anchor-item strategy
- Staged increase plan with guest messaging
Margin and channel reporting
A reporting rhythm that tells you Monday what happened last week, and what to do about it.
- Reporting rebuilt around prime cost and channel mix
- Weekly prime-cost reporting
- Targets and variance review with your GM
Three weeks from invoices to decisions.
We pull invoices, recipes, sales mix, and the last three P&Ls. Then we quantify every leak instead of guessing at it.
You get a ranked set of decisions with the dollar impact of each: costed, sequenced, and argued for.
New specs, prices, order guides, and a weekly reporting routine handed to the people who have to run it.
Owner-operators who still sign the invoices.
Independents fighting a two-point food-cost slide. Small groups whose second location doesn’t behave like the first. Openings that need cost discipline installed before service, not after the first bad quarter.
Kareem Pearson
Founder and principal consultant. Ledger & Lounge is a single-practitioner advisory by design. The person who reads your numbers is the person who has stood on your line.
Financial discipline paired with the realities of staffing, service, and guest experience. Every engagement ends with decisions an operator can actually run on Monday.
More about the practice
A restaurant doing $2 million in annual sales gains $40,000 when it improves operating margin by two percentage points.
What are two points worth in your business?
Bring your latest P&L and sales-mix report to a free 30-minute profit call. We will identify the largest profit leaks, estimate what may be recoverable, and tell you whether engaging us makes financial sense.