Brandon O'Dell's Page

A popular topic lately in a couple different restaurant discussion forums I participate in is the question of who owns the recipes your restaurant uses?



Let's look at a couple possible scenarios that could affect your restaurant.

1. Your executive chef or kitchen manager quits. Maybe one or two members of the kitchen staff leave with her/him. Your chef keeps extensive recipes written down in a book they've had since long before they…

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This article will be one of the most important I've ever written for restaurant owners and managers in other food services. In this article, I'm going to do something you won't see from another consultant. I'm going to share with you the exact steps of an action plan I created to help a restaurant create a food cost fitness program, along with some helpful commentary from me. These steps would be the same for liquor costs, but would focus on different employees in a different area of the… Continue

High failure rates for restaurants. Yes they're exagerated, but they're still high. According to recent studies from Cornell and Ohio State universities, 59-60% of restaurants fail within the first three years. As many as 75% may fail within the first five. Why are they so high? For a list of the six biggest reasons, see The biggest mistakes restaurants make, and why they have a high failure rate.



For… Continue

This may be the most important question you can answer when designing a restaurant concept. It is definately the most important question to answer when creating a marketing plan.



One of the biggest mistakes restaurants make is trying to appeal to everyone. If you think that your target market includes everyone, you are setting yourself up to fail. If you want to be successful in any business, especially… Continue

One thing I'll never forgive formal culinary schools for, is teaching new impressionable would-be chefs to use a budgeted cost percentage to price food menus. Chain restaurants share an equal responsibility for perpetuating this bad practice by focusing their managers on food cost percentages without letting them in on the secret that the cost percentage is a management tool, not a pricing tool.



Though most culinary programs teach many different methods for pricing… Continue