Chefs are sharing the ‘common menu item that is almost always a rip off’ – 22 dishes to avoid like the plague at a restaurant

‘Charging $6-$9 for a side Caesar salad which consists of a handful of romaine, a sprinkling of the cheapest Parmesan cheese available, a spoonful of dressing and a couple of croutons, and labor cost is actually nothing cause it takes about 15 seconds to make.’
–BucnCrazy

‘Not a chef anymore, but a fucking wedge salad is the most bullshit menu item i’ve ever seen. The audacity to just serve someone a giant uncut block of lettuce with toppings on it and market it as something fancy or special is astronomical.’
–John_Dice599

‘Truffle fries are a total rip-off because truffle oil is just synthetic flavouring made from petroleum.’
–Previous-Cattle7728

‘I would say breakfast in general are the highest profit margin items I’ve served.

For the price of one standard restaurant breakfast with eggs, toast, meat and potatoes, you could buy the ingredients yourself and have breakfast for 2 for a week. Pancakes are an even wider profit margin. The markup is insane.

Soda is another insanely high profit margin item. It’s where movie theaters make all their money.’
–lawrencenotlarry

‘Pasta can be a crap shoot. I’ve worked at 3 places with a proper pasta program, where they had the big extruders, the right flour, etc. Pasta there was excellent. But. It came at a cost. Their pasta dishes weren’t cheap. So, if you see pasta as the “cheap” option, chances are it’s just Sysco dried penne thrown into big Ole pot and then reheated to order.’
–R4eth

‘Desserts if it’s a place where you know they wouldn’t have an actual pastry chef. Almost always just thawed frozen cakes or “ice cream” that’s actually frozen dairy dessert from Sysco.’
–benjaminhlogan

‘Gravy at chicken restaurants. It’s incredibly cheap to make and largely uses byproducts of things they already have like crackling.

They’ll always charge way more than what it’s actually worth. The markup on it is crazy.’
–Fyrefawx

‘Edamame… 75¢ worth of frozen soy beans microwaved.’
–jamestheredd

‘Alcohol. Huge profit on all things alcohol— beer, wine, cocktails.

Honorable mention: French fries. It takes two seconds to fry up, and the profit margin is huge on a side of fries.’
–TheOctoBox

‘Not lazy, but its so insanely cheap to make bread in a restaurant that we get a very good margin on it. For example a portion of focaccia costs us 40c to make. To break even we’d have to sell it for $1.20. But we can sell it for 5 bucks with a little EVO or butter.

Another one is pate and terrine. It uses the cheapest cuts of meat and offal, with a little cream or butter in the case of pate, and even cheaper binders in the case of terrine. Because it’s rich you only need a small portion on the plate with some toasted bread (yesterday’s bread) and you can easily sell it for 15 bucks.

At one place I worked we did a pigs head terrine. We bought in an entire head for 2 bucks. Which gave us twenty portions. There was work involved, but the head chef giggled every time we sold one because it did wonders for our overall food cost to sales ratio.

Again, not on the lazy end of the spectrum, but we are kind of ripping people off because we are pricing those dishes to make as much margin as we can.’
–Toucan_Lips

‘Almost anything wagyu is going to be a scam. Most people don’t know that “wagyu” just means “japanese beef”, and they wrongly assume it means “highly marbled fatty premium steak”. The expensive, luxurious steak is specifically A5 wagyu, the highest grade of wagyu. If it doesn’t say A5, then you should not be paying top dollar for it.

This is especially true for “wagyu” burgers, because it’s super duper pointless to take meat prized for its rich texture and just grind it all up so the fat melts out on the griddle.’
–Jodabomb24

‘Anything fried – fries, chicken wings, mozzarella sticks, etc. Those will come frozen even at a nice place, so you’re just paying someone to fry frozen food for you.’
–the_bollo