Chef’s table NZ

  Being a great chef and being a great restaurant owner are two different jobs that happen to share a kitchen. I've watched brilliant cooks — people I'd trust with any dish on the pass — struggle the moment the conversation turns to leases, wage bills, and cash flow. It's not a lack of intelligence. It's that the skills that make you good at one barely transfer to the other. The Kitchen Rewards a Different Kind of Thinking A good chef thinks in seconds and plates. Is this seasoned right, right now? Is that pan about to burn? Twelve tickets on the rail, all moving at once, all solved in real time. That instinct — fast, sensory, present-tense — is exactly what makes someone excellent behind the stove. Running a business rewards the opposite instinct: slow, abstract, months-ahead thinking. Cash flow forecasting. Lease negotiations. Deciding today whether a supplier price increase in March still lets you hit margin in June. None of that fires the same part of the brain that...

  You look at the menu, see $44 next to a piece of chicken, and think — that's a lot for chicken. Fair enough. From the outside, it looks like a markup. From inside the kitchen, it's closer to a math problem with very little room for error. Let me break it down the way I actually break it down when I'm pricing a menu. Food Cost Is Only the Start The rule of thumb in this industry is that food cost should sit around 28-33% of the menu price. So if that main costs $44, the raw ingredients — the protein, the veg, the sauce components, the garnish — should cost somewhere around $12-14 to plate. That already surprises people. Where does the rest go? Labour Isn't Just "The Chef Cooking It" That $44 main was touched by more people than you'd think: Someone butchered or portioned the protein Someone made the stock or sauce base, probably days in advance Someone prepped the veg and garnish The chef who fired it on the pass The person who plated it The waiter who ca...

  I already wrote about why a cocktail costs $22 . This time, let's zoom out to the whole bill. What you're actually paying for When a diner looks at a menu price, they see one number. What they don't see is everything stacked underneath it: food cost, rent, wages, power, insurance, compliance, breakages, and whatever margin is left over after all of that — which, in hospitality, is usually thinner than people assume. Auckland makes this harder than most cities. Commercial rent in the right location is expensive. Wages have gone up, which is a good thing for the people earning them, but it flows straight into the price of your meal. Supplier costs move constantly, and a kitchen has very little control over what produce costs this week versus last week. Roughly what things cost right now Prices vary a lot by venue and suburb, but as a general shape of what you'll find across Auckland dining in 2026: A casual weekday lunch — a sandwich, a bowl, a simple plate — tends to l...

  Every few months someone messages me the same question. Usually it's a young cook, sometimes it's a parent worried about their kid's career choice. "How much do chefs actually make?" Google will give you a number. It's not wrong, exactly. It's just not the whole story. The numbers you'll find Search it yourself and you'll land somewhere around these figures: Commis chef / entry level: close to minimum wage ($23.95 an hour as it stands), maybe a dollar or two above it Chef de partie: roughly $25–$29 an hour on average, based on current job listings and payroll data Sous chef: roughly $29–$34 an hour on average Head chef: roughly $35 up to $49+ an hour, depending on the venue and city — a head chef salary of $85,000–$100,000 a year works out to around $42–$48 an hour on a standard 40-hour week Average chef salary nationally: sits somewhere in the mid-$70,000s to low $80,000s a year Those numbers are real. They come from job listings and payroll sur...

  Everyone wants to open their own place. Ask any line cook with two years' experience where they see themselves in five years, and half of them will say "my own restaurant." Ask them what it actually costs, and you'll get silence. I've opened venues for other people for over twenty years. Not my own name on the lease, but my hands on every single line item. So let me walk you through what the dream actually costs before a single customer walks through the door. The lease is just the entry fee A commercial lease in a decent location isn't just rent. It's bond, it's personal guarantees, it's a fit-out clause that decides whether you're allowed to touch the walls at all. Landlords in good locations know exactly what they have, and they price the risk of a first-time operator into every clause. You'll sign for a term longer than you're comfortable with, because nobody will give a new operator a short lease. That's five years of commitm...

 I'm not a bartender. I've never pulled a pour or built a cocktail during service. But after twenty years running kitchens, I've sat in enough P&L meetings to know exactly why a $22 gin and tonic and a $38 pasta dish are doing very different jobs for the same business. Let me explain it the way I understand it — from the kitchen looking sideways at the bar. What I Know About My Side  I know food costing down to the gram. A pasta dish costs me $8–9 in ingredients and sells for $38. That's about 22–25% cost. A steak is tighter — closer to 35–40% once you factor in the cut, and worse if the protein price spiked that month, selling anywhere from $48–58. A starter runs $4–5 in raw product, sells for $20–24. Around 20–25%. These numbers are tight. Every dollar of food cost gets scrutinised, portioned, yielded, and recalculated. I've spent entire afternoons building yield tables just to shave half a percent off a dish's cost. That's the world I live in. What I...

  I've opened restaurants before. I know how to negotiate a lease. I know how to design a kitchen that actually works. I know how to build a menu, manage food cost, hire a team, and keep a service running when everything is falling apart at once. I've done it. Just not for myself. That's the part nobody in hospitality talks about. The experienced ones — the chefs, the operators, the people who've spent decades inside someone else's business — are often the most hesitant to make the leap. Not because they don't know how. Because they know exactly how hard it is. And in New Zealand right now, the news doesn't help. Restaurants closing. Cafés shutting their doors. Pubs that survived Covid folding anyway. You read the headlines and think — why would I put my own money into this? But here's what I've learned from watching businesses succeed and fail from the inside. The ones that close usually made the same mistakes. They opened too big. They undere...