San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Restaurants’ basic economics: Pasta can mean more dough
Flour, eggs and water aren’t expensive. So why do some restaurants charge $30 per plate?
In the restaurant industry, it’s an open secret. The base ingredients for pasta are not the priciest in a kitchen. A 50-pound bag of high-quality, finely milled flour often costs between $50 and $60. Egg prices spiked recently but appear to be coming back down. Water just flows out of the faucet.
The overall cost of ingredients on a pasta dish average out to be low, even with expensive meats, like veal or lamb, in a sauce.
That, coupled with pasta’s popularity, makes these delicious carbs a cornerstone of many restaurant menus — and business strategies. With restaurants facing climbing expenses such as rent and labor, pasta allows them some flexibility.
At Italian restaurantAltoVino in San Francisco’s Nob Hill, chef Nick Kelly offers winebraised oxtails, a hearty seafood soup and a 35-ounce steak dubbed “La Florentina” — all dishes using expensive meat and fish that make up a big percentage of the restaurant’s ingredient costs. He also offers plenty of fresh, handmade pasta, rolled out into sheets and cut into pappardelle and mezzaluna, a half moonshaped pasta stuffed with braised red chard, ricotta and Meyer lemon.
“In restaurants in general, you don’t make very much money off of your entrees like your steaks or anything that has a high price,” said Kelly. “You make all your money off vegetables, grains and flour.” Pasta to the rescue.
As Kelly breaks it down, proteins can make up around 50% of the restaurant’s total food costs, while pasta’s ingredients make up just 11%. And AltoVino sells a lot of pasta: at least two dishes per table, on average, at prices between $24 and $26. This sales rate can make the average food cost percentage — the projected revenue compared to cost of ingredients — of all his dishes fall between 22% and 25% per dish. This range is around what many restaurateurs feel is a sweet spot to see profits and pay employees a decent wage.
But recently, the economics of pasta has faced headwinds. Kelly’s preferred bulk bag of flour went up from $26 to $32 at the end of 2022, and the recent rise in egg prices nearly doubled his supplier’s case price, from $56 to $106. Despite these hikes and general inflation, pasta ingredients are still a small slice of AltoVino’s food costs.
“That’s why you’ll sometimes see pastas on non-Italian menus, because they are so cost effective,” Kelly said.
Daytrip in Oakland is far from an Italian restaurant, with its psychedelic dishes like nixtamalized yams and jellied tuna with tomato. From its first dinner service in October 2021, it has also offered a pasta dish: linguine tossed in butter and an ever-changing miso from local fermenters Shared Cultures. Why keep it on the menu? That’s simple, said chefowner Finn Stern: “I just f—ing love eating pasta.”
But serving pasta is good business, too. Stern said his pasta drives sales and has been a reliable way of balancing out his food costs. That’s despite higher-cost eggs from small farms and flour from a specialty grain miller in Sonoma County.
Of course, there’s another cost to pasta, and it’s the biggest one: labor. At Daytrip, a rotating staff member takes a day and a half just to prepare it. “So now we have a low-foodcost item, but it’s a really high labor cost,” Stern said. “We tried adding more pasta to the menu and we ran out of bandwidth.”
Up until five months ago, Kelly was making AltoVino’s pasta by himself. But running the kitchen demanded more of his attention, so he decided to bring on a worker to make pasta. An extra employee creates a higher labor cost of nearly $1,000 a week for some restaurants, but also allows the restaurant to offer more labor intensive, filled pastas, like casoncelli and tortellini, which can claim a higher price.
Affordability is one of the main goals for Matt Solimano, chef and owner of the popular pasta pop-up Sfizio, which is opening a brick-and-mortar site in Oakland this spring. Solimano makes his pasta from scratch, but with an eye toward speed. To save time, which he pays for by the hour in a commissary kitchen, he selects less labor-intensive extruded pasta shapes instead of hand-formed ones. He uses a mixer to blend water, flour and eggs together, and then runs the blobs of dough through his VIP/2 professional extrusion machine: Out pour shapes like spaghetti, which goes into bowls topped with meatballs or pesto.
Michelle Minori shaped pasta by hand and with extruders at San Francisco destination Flour + Water and later helped open pasta-centric San Francisco restaurant BarZotto as executive chef. Even timesaving tools like extruders and mixers have their disadvantages, she observed. Top-of-theline equipment can cost thousands of dollars and can be easily broken.
“Everywhere that I’ve worked you have to be really well-trained to even get close to the extruder,” said Minori, who is now a restaurant consultant. Training, another labor cost, “is huge for pasta, equipment or not.”
So is pasta simply a profit engine? “It’s hard to answer that,” Minori said. “Pasta gives an opportunity to be a moneymaker — a path to profits.”
To stay on that path, restaurants must also use all available resources.
The pappardelle Bolognese is AltoVino’s most popular pasta. To create it, staff take advantage of the in-house whole animal butchery program to use any leftover trim and bits. Prosciutto remaining from other dishes goes into a pan with the soffritto base to add more flavor to the sauce.
“The biggest thing for us is we use everything and we just really make sure that we don’t throw anything away,” Kelly said.
Even relatively inexpensive bits of pasta dough left over from daily prep get some use. When cutting round shapes like mezzaluna, Kelly takes the trim and re-rolls it, repeating until it becomes too dry to use. If enough dry dough accumulates at the end of the week, he said, the staff will use it for their own pasta at family meal.