Making Dough Restaurant Show - by Hengam Stanfield

Hengam breaks down the five ways operators torpedo their own restaurants before the first ticket prints — undercapitalization, location blindness, menu bloat, labor mismanagement, and the fantasy that passion pays rent. You've watched these mistakes kill places with good food and decent bones, watched owners discover that a 40% food cost and no cash reserves don't care how much heart you put into your carbonara. The numbers don't lie, and they don't forgive.

Hengam knows what happens when you promote your best line cook to manager without teaching them how to read a P&L — they excel at expediting and crash on labor costs. These ten fundamentals aren't theory; they're the difference between a manager who can work a station and one who can actually manage the people working every station. You're either building systems or you're rebuilding the same fires every shift.

The only number that matters more than your break-even is how many days past it you're operating. Hengam cuts through the spreadsheet fog to show you the math that determines whether you're building something or slowly bleeding out — and she does it in the time it takes to prep a mise station. Anyone running a kitchen knows that feeling when the register stays quiet on a Tuesday and the bills don't. This is how you turn that sick feeling into actual numbers you can chase.