I ran a restaurant on a laminated sheet for 7 years. Here's what I'd tell my younger self about food cost.

Know your number before you need it

For a long time I ran on feel. Feel is real — it's years of standing on the line — but feel doesn't tell you that your food cost drifted from 31% to 37% over a slow spring. A number does. The single best habit I built was knowing my food cost percentage at any given week, not waiting for it to show up as a bad month.

If you take one thing from this: get your baseline. You can do it by hand in ten minutes with a food cost percentage calculator. You can't fix what you never measured.

The leak is never where the drama is

When money got tight, my instinct was to look at the big, scary line items. But the real damage was always small and quiet — a case of oil that went up fifty cents, a portion that had slowly gotten heavier, a dish I'd priced two years ago and never re-costed. Little taps, all left running.

I learned to chase the boring stuff. That's where the margin actually was. A short list of what to check is here: how to lower food cost.

Tight decisions make tight food

Here's the one that took me the longest. When money is tight, you tighten up — and it's self-fulfilling. You buy a little cheaper, you cut a corner, and all of a sudden the food feels tight and isn't as good as it was. The pressure makes the decisions worse.

The way out wasn't working harder in the moment. It was stepping back and fixing the systems so I wasn't making pressured calls in the first place. When you can see the whole restaurant, you stop making bad decisions out of fear.

The business is as important as the food

I came up believing the food was everything. The food matters enormously — but I've watched high-caliber chefs open landmark spots and close inside a year. The ones who make it understand their business: their pricing, their bills, their labor, their numbers. Pricing and staying on top of costs isn't the un-fun part of the craft. It is the craft, if you want to still be open in three years.

Let go earlier than feels comfortable

I did everything myself — shelf installation, deep-cleaning appliances, the books, the line — to save money. It taught me the whole machine, and I wouldn't trade that. But holding onto all of it is never sustainable. The sooner you delegate or hand a job to a tool, the sooner you get back to the parts only you can do. That's the whole reason I built Lowboy: I wanted the numbers handled so I had more time for the food, the team, and the room.

None of this means giving up the notebook or the dry-erase in the walk-in. Keep all of it. Just don't let the numbers hide behind it anymore.