Restaurant & Menu Engineering — Analysis

Most dashboards answer questions. Very few tell you what to do on Monday.

I rebuilt a restaurant analytics report this week and spent as much time on the narrative as the numbers.

What that meant in practice:

Every page ends with a written read-out panel. Not a KPI. An actual sentence explaining what the chart means and what it implies. "Labour averages 23.2% of sales, but The Bistro Table runs 60.4%, and it is a scheduling problem, not a menu problem."

Colour carries meaning, not decoration. Stars are teal, Plow Horses blue, Puzzles amber, Dogs coral, and those four colours mean the same thing on every page.

The menu engineering matrix uses reference lines at the actual portfolio benchmarks, so the quadrants are real thresholds rather than eyeballed corners.

The icon set is hand-drawn SVG rather than stock clipart, rendered at 4x so it stays crisp on any display. Shipped in both a dark and a light theme.

And a final page that does nothing but list the three model issues I found and the corrected DAX to fix them. If the numbers are wrong, the design is decoration.

Six pages. One dataset. 17 venues, 167 menu items.

Happy to share the DAX fix pack if it is useful to anyone.