Walk into any struggling venue and you’ll likely find the same culprit: a menu that’s trying to be everything to everyone. It’s a trap that claims restaurants, cafes, and clubs across Australia, and according to hospitality consultant Paul Rifkin, it’s one of the fastest ways to destroy profitability.
“In a lot of places that I go into, a menu is formed by a committee,” says Rifkin, who works with about 75 clubs across Australia. “It can be board directors, people who work in the kitchens, people who work on the front, customers that come in and say, we want this on the menu, we want that on the menu. And before you know it, the menu is far too big, takes up too much time to prep, unprofitable.”
But the real cost of menu bloat goes far beyond the obvious.
The pantry list problem
Joel Chrystal, culinary innovation specialist at Imagine Collective, points to what he calls the most overlooked metric in menu management: the pantry list.
“You can have a menu with 25 items on it, but if the pantry list is 150 items, you’re going to struggle,” Chrystal explains. “Cross-utilising products as much as possible is an enormous benefit, both to the customer and operationally.”
The mathematics are brutal. More ingredients mean more ordering complexity, more potential for waste, more storage requirements, and more training needed for staff to execute dishes correctly. Each additional ingredient that doesn’t appear across multiple dishes is a profit leak waiting to happen.
For operators wondering where to start, Chrystal recommends a simple audit: “List every ingredient you stock. Then map which dishes use each ingredient. If you’re holding stock for just one or two dishes, you need to ask yourself if those dishes are worth it.”
When equipment can’t keep up
The disconnect between menu ambition and kitchen reality creates another hidden cost: the bottleneck.
“I walk into places that have got cafe style deep fryers and ovens, and they’re trying to produce food in high volume at high pace, and then they’re wondering why they got a bottleneck, because these pieces of equipment cannot do it,” Rifkin explains.
The problem compounds during peak service. When orders flood in from multiple channels—counter service, table ordering, QR codes, the bar—a menu that looks manageable on paper can bring a kitchen to its knees.
“A menu has to work,” Rifkin states. “The menu must match the kitchen. If the equipment is not there to do the menu, you cannot do the menu. And hence you get the bottleneck, and then you get the unhappy customer who has to wait an hour when it’s busy.”
His advice? Map your menu flow. Track which dishes hit which stations. If one person or one piece of equipment is handling a disproportionate share of orders, you’ve found your problem.
The 80/20 rule that operators ignore
Perhaps the most sobering reality about menu bloat comes from customer behaviour itself.
“80% of your customers are going to eat 20% of your menu,” Rifkin states. Drawing on his 17 years at one club where he grew weekly covers to about 13,000 meals a week, he adds: “The best sell never changed. Roast pork was the best sell when I started. Roast pork was the best sell when I left.”
Despite opening eight new restaurants and introducing numerous offerings over that time, customer preferences remained remarkably stable. Yet operators continue to add items, convinced that variety equals success.
“Be very, very careful about what you change,” warns Rifkin. “The quickest way to destroy a restaurant is to get so creative that you change your menu. And then when the customer comes back to try or to bring their friends for what they said was good, it’s not there.”
The real estate you can’t afford to waste
Every menu has prime real estate—the spots where the eye naturally lands first. Yet Rifkin regularly finds the worst performers sitting in these coveted positions.
“There’s so much stuff that sits on menus and takes up really good real estate,” he says. “Sometimes it’s sitting at the right hand side, at the top, it’s in prime position, and it doesn’t sell. Or worse than that, it’s actually the lowest price thing, which has the highest cost to produce. It’s what they call the dog, and it just sits there on the menu, doing absolutely nothing for profitability.”
Identifying these “dogs” requires data, not intuition. Chrystal advocates for monthly menu analysis as a bare minimum. “Go to the data, pull your sales report, see what’s actually selling,” he advises. “Nine times out of ten, you’ll be surprised.”
Starting the trim
For operators ready to tackle menu bloat, the panel offered clear starting points:
Audit your pantry list. Every ingredient that appears in only one dish is a candidate for elimination or cross-utilisation.
Map your kitchen flow. Identify bottlenecks where orders converge on single stations or equipment.
Analyse sales data monthly. Know what sells, what doesn’t, and what quietly drains profits despite appearing popular.
Match menu to capability. Your team’s skill level and your equipment’s capacity should dictate menu complexity, not the other way around.
Protect your best-sellers. The dishes that built your reputation deserve menu stability, not creative tinkering.
Kristie Booker, FMCG director at Imagine Collective, frames it in terms of brand storytelling: “A menu without goals is like a venue without a business plan.”
The irony of menu bloat is that operators add items thinking they’re giving customers more choice, when in reality they’re often delivering a worse experience: longer wait times, inconsistent quality, and dishes that never quite hit the mark because kitchen staff are stretched too thin.
Less isn’t just more. Sometimes, it’s the difference between profit and loss.
