Most venues that call do not have a food problem. They have a margin problem, a consistency problem, or an owner who cannot take a week off. The food is usually the symptom.
The work starts with the two things that decide whether a kitchen is viable: what each dish actually costs once waste and labour are counted, and whether the section can produce it the same way at 8pm on a Saturday as it did in the trial. Everything else — the concept, the wine list, the plating — is downstream of those two.
Who it's for:
Restaurant and café owners, venue operators, new openings.
What's Included
- ✦Menu development and recipe creation
- ✦Dish costing and margin review
- ✦Kitchen workflow and prep systems
- ✦Supplier sourcing — authentic Italian producers
- ✦Concept development and positioning
- ✦Ongoing advisory, monthly or by project
Menu development that survives a costing sheet
A menu is a commercial document before it is a creative one. Every dish gets built with a target plate cost, a yield test on the actual ingredients your suppliers deliver, and a prep time measured on your equipment rather than estimated.
That usually changes the menu. Dishes that read beautifully and return 22% gross margin get reworked or cut. Dishes with a strong margin and weak sales get repositioned on the page, because where an item sits and how it is described moves sales more than most owners expect.
What you end up with is a shorter list than you started with, a clearer identity, and a costed spec sheet for every dish so the number does not quietly drift when a supplier price moves.
Kitchen systems and prep flow
A kitchen that only works when the owner is standing in it is not a business, it is a job with extra risk. The fix is rarely more staff — it is prep sequencing, par levels, and removing the three or four bottlenecks that make service feel chaotic.
Chef Gabriele works a service before recommending anything. What gets ordered, what gets thrown out at close, where the section falls behind, and which station is quietly carrying the others is visible in one shift and almost never visible in a spreadsheet.
The output is a prep list, par levels, station setups and written specs — the boring documents that let a kitchen run to a standard without the head chef holding it together by memory.
Training the team who will actually cook it
A new menu handed over without training reverts within a month. The section cooks it the way they understood it, which is rarely the way it was specified.
Training happens on your equipment, on your section, at your pace of service. Usually a short intensive while the menu launches, then a return visit a month later — because the second pass, once the team has cooked the dishes a hundred times and formed their own habits, is where the standard actually sets.
Sourcing and the question of authenticity
Plenty of Australian venues want an Italian identity and end up with an Italian-themed one. The difference is usually in sourcing and technique, not in the words on the menu.
Chef Gabriele imports and buys for his own restaurant, so supplier introductions are to producers he actually uses. Where the genuine product is not commercially viable for your price point, he will say so and build the dish around what is — which is more useful than a specification you quietly abandon in month two.
Common questions
We're not an Italian venue. Is this still relevant?
Yes. Costing, prep flow, section training and menu structure are not cuisine-specific. The Italian expertise is only decisive when a venue wants that identity to be genuine — otherwise it's a chef with 20 years of kitchen operations looking at your operation.
Do you work with venues that haven't opened yet?
Often. Pre-opening is the cheapest point to fix things — menu, equipment list, prep design and staffing model are far easier to get right before a lease is committed and a kitchen is built than after.
How much of your time does this take from us?
The on-site work is deliberately during service and prep, not in meetings. Expect a handful of shifts across an engagement plus a written scope and a costing review. Chef Gabriele runs his own restaurant, so he schedules around real kitchen hours.
Will you rewrite our whole menu?
Only if that's what the numbers say. Frequently the better answer is cutting a third of the list, recosting the rest and fixing how it's ordered on the page. A full rewrite is a bigger disruption than most venues need.