Lunch of the day is the most predictable revenue in a restaurant and usually the worst-costed part of the menu. A price set "like the neighbour's", a set invented in the morning from what is left over, and a chalkboard on the pavement as the only channel.
It can be organised so that lunch earns rather than merely filling the room between twelve and three.
How many items
Optimally 2–3 mains and one soup. No more.
The reason is kitchen-side, not marketing: lunch has to leave the pass 8–10 minutes after the order, because the guest has an hour. With five mains the kitchen holds five mise en place in parallel and loses the time it was meant to save.
The second reason: a guest at lunch does not want to choose. They came to eat, not to plan a meal. Three items is a 20-second decision; ten is three minutes at the table.
A sensible composition: one meat, one meat-free, one lighter or fish. Soup shared.
How to price it
Lunch has different economics from the evening menu — it works on volume, not on margin per unit. That does not mean the margin can be anything.
Starting point: food cost 25–32% at lunch, against 30–40% in the evening. Lower, because the items are simpler, portions predictable, and there is no waste on rarely used ingredients.
The rest of the calculation, the part that gets forgotten:
- labour cost — lunch is the same kitchen headcount, but three hours of peak instead of a spread-out evening;
- soup and a drink included — if you add them, they go into food cost; they are not free;
- volume — lunch pays off with a full room. At 30% occupancy it loses money, and shortening it beats discounting it.
The spreadsheet for food cost and margin is in menu engineering.
The time window
The standard is 11:30–15:00 or 12:00–16:00. What matters more than the hours themselves is that they are fixed and visible — an office guest plans the trip rather than checking whether lunch is still on.
Two settings worth thinking through:
Hard or soft close. "Until 15:00" means last order at 15:00, not last guest. Write it down. Otherwise it gets settled at the table at 15:05.
Friday. Friday lunch often behaves differently: longer sittings, bigger bills, sometimes alcohol. It can pay to shorten the window, or to add one item from a higher tier.
Rotation: weekly or daily
Daily builds a habit of coming in — the guest turns up to see what is on today. It does, though, require publishing every morning, consistently, including on the day you are short-staffed.
Weekly is easier to plan and to buy for, but after 4 weeks guests know the cycle and some stop coming on the repeat days.
The middle option that works most often: a fixed weekly skeleton (Monday pasta, Wednesday fish) with variable execution. Purchasing stays predictable and the menu is not identical week to week.
Where to publish it
The board outside serves people already walking past. The lunch decision is made earlier — in the office, on a phone, at the question "where today".
Four places, in order of importance:
- Google Business Profile — the guest searches "lunch near me" and sees the menu without opening your site. How to attach it — menu in your Google profile.
- A fixed address for the lunch menu — one link you send to a company group chat, and which does not change weekly.
- Social media in the morning — a photo of the board at nine works better than a description at twelve.
- The board outside — it stays, but as the last step, not the first.
Point two is the one that usually does not exist. A lunch menu sent as a file to a group chat gets lost in the conversation; a fixed address that always shows today's offer gets bookmarked.
Updating: this is where the system proves itself
Lunch changes daily, so the lunch menu is the most frequently updated part of the whole offer. If a change needs a print run or a request to the provider, within a month it stops happening.
The realistic cycle: in the morning somebody types today's set into the panel, the menu at the fixed address updates itself, the board outside is rewritten once. Three minutes, not thirty.
When an item runs out at 13:30, you switch it off mid-service — the only way to avoid the "that's gone" conversation at every table.
See QR menu or menu examples.
Lunch and the rest of the menu
Two mistakes that cost the most:
A lunch that cannibalises the menu. When the lunch set contains the same dish as the evening menu, €5 cheaper, the guest moves the visit to noon. Lunch items should be different, not cheaper.
A lunch with no path onward. A lunch guest is a cheap contact with a venue they already walked into. One line on the lunch menu — about dinner, about the weekend, about booking — costs nothing and is the only part of lunch with a higher margin.
Frequently asked questions
How many dishes should a lunch of the day have?
Two or three mains and a soup. More slows the kitchen and lengthens the guest's decision.
What food cost should I assume at lunch?
25–32%. Lower than the evening menu, because the items are simpler and portions repeatable.
Should lunch change daily or weekly?
What works best is a fixed weekly skeleton with variable execution — purchasing stays predictable and the offer does not repeat dish for dish.
Where should I publish the lunch menu?
At a fixed address you can send to a company group chat, plus in your Google Business Profile. The board outside only serves passers-by.
