AI assistant · N3 Analysis with a verdict
Menu Engineering Architect for Restaurants
Builds the complete menu engineering matrix for your menu: every dish classified by cash contribution margin and real popularity, with a different action plan per quadrant.
N3Analysis with a verdict
Crosses YOUR numbers and takes a stand, with a table, units and currency. Not options: a recommendation you can defend.
◆ This assistant 24 of the 164 published assistants are at this levelIs this for you?
What it does and what you get
- Most menus are designed by intuition and corrected by complaint.
- This assistant turns your sales and costs into a four-quadrant matrix (Star, Plowhorse, Puzzle, Dog), shows where margin is hiding and decides what to do with each dish: protect, re-engineer, reposition or replace.
- It is the starting point for the whole category.
What you end up with
A table with every dish classified as Star, Plowhorse, Puzzle or Dog, with its cash margin, plus an executive read and a 30-day plan with owners.
EXAMPLE This is what you getAn example built with Sazón de Origen, the house's fictional restaurant.Not your data: your result is built with YOUR restaurant's.See the full example →Sample result
The owner asked this: «Here are my 34 references with units and costs for the last 8 weeks. Put every dish in its quadrant and tell me what to do with each one.»
Extract of the master table, sorted by period margin. Figures in COP, 8 weeks normalized to a month.
| Dish | Category | Units | Price | Cost | Unit margin | Period margin | Quadrant |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| House platter | Mains | 620 | 72,000 | 27,400 | 44,600 | 27,652,000 | Star |
| Three-meat sancocho | Soups | 480 | 60,000 | 21,600 | 38,400 | 18,432,000 | Star |
| Ajiaco | Soups | 355 | 50,000 | 16,500 | 33,500 | 11,892,500 | Star |
| Garlic trout | Fish | 210 | 66,000 | 21,100 | 44,900 | 9,429,000 | Star |
| Charcoal tenderloin | Mains | 155 | 62,000 | 21,100 | 40,900 | 6,339,500 | Star (clears the threshold by 1 unit) |
| Posta negra | Mains | 140 | 54,000 | 16,200 | 37,800 | 5,292,000 | Puzzle |
| Grandmother's dessert | Desserts | 240 | 28,000 | 7,000 | 21,000 | 5,040,000 | Plowhorse |
| House rice | Mains | 190 | 46,000 | 21,200 | 24,800 | 4,712,000 | Plowhorse |
| House stuffed breast | Mains | 130 | 44,000 | 13,600 | 30,400 | 3,952,000 | Puzzle |
| Picada board for two | Starters | 22 | 68,000 | 29,900 | 38,100 | 838,200 | Puzzle |
| Rib broth | Soups | 95 | 28,000 | 8,400 | 19,600 | 1,862,000 | Dog |
Popularity thresholds used (70% of each category's average sales): mains 154 u · soups 139 u · desserts 109 u · fish 78 u · starters 52 u. Menu median unit margin: 25,800 COP.
The full menu splits like this: 7 stars · 11 plowhorses · 9 puzzles · 7 dogs. No reference was left out.
A note on the costings: the house's last costing is 7 months old. That is past 90 days, so all four quadrants are read with a reservation, and it is said out loud: every margin above is a hypothesis until a portion gets weighed in service.
1 · Five references make 52% of the margin. Platter, sancocho, ajiaco, trout and tenderloin leave 73,745,000 COP of the 141,234,000 the menu produces per month. That is a strength and a dependency: if beef rises 10% and it is half the platter's cost, that dish alone costs you 849,400 COP a month with nobody noticing.
2 · The tail charges rent. 12 references sell under 40 units a month and contribute 9,213,300 COP: 6.5% of the margin on 35% of the menu. They do not all come off at once: 5 of those 12 have unit margins above the median and deserve a visibility trial before removal. The other 7 are dogs, and the hole they leave also costs, so they come off with a replacement, not on their own.
3 · House rice is the most expensive plowhorse you own. 190 units a month at 24,800 COP of margin, in the same section where the platter leaves 44,600. Every rice that goes out instead of a platter is 19,800 COP that did not come in. You do not raise its price: you check its gram weights against the spec sheet and take away its top slot in the section. Raising prices on your five best sellers with no prior test moves the mix before it moves the margin.
And here the matrix flags its own limit. With thresholds computed per category, «to share» produces three stars selling 14, 12 and 9 units a month, and «from the stove» produces two more at 38 and 24. These are categories of 3 and 4 references: the threshold is computed against themselves, which is why they all pass. When a category has fewer than 5 references, its average tells you nothing. Those five were reclassified against the whole menu's median units (112 u/month) and fell to puzzle or dog, which is where they were. The data is in the table; the criterion is written here.
Illustrative example generated with a fictional restaurant. Not a promise of results, not a client case.
This is 2 of 3 parts. Behind the wall: the **matrix repeated channel by channel** with commission deducted and its SUPUESTO line —three dishes below the contribution floor on the platform— and the **30-day plan** with action, dish, owner, week and expected effect on margin, plus the quarterly review checklist.
See the full example — free accountWorks with these AIs
How to use it
Which of your data it uses
This assistant works with 8 of the 23 fields in «My Restaurant», among them Cuisine or concept, Best-selling dishes and Dish descriptions (paste your menu). It does not ask out of curiosity: these are what make the answer speak about YOUR scale instead of an industry average — the same calculation on a business of another size returns a number you cannot decide with. You fill them once and they apply across the library, so the second assistant you open already starts with them in place. Whatever you leave blank, the assistant asks for one thing at a time instead of inventing it, and says so before answering, so you know what it is working from.
Always up to date
Every assistant carries a visible version and date. When an AI changes how it works, the assistant's version goes up and you see what changed.
v1.1.42026-08-28Becomes FREE. The home page offers three freely readable assistants and two of its three links had been dead since the 2026-08-26 merge: MPV-0219 was absorbed and MPV-0217 retired, and nobody moved the `es_gratuito` flag to their heirs — the catalogue was left with a SINGLE published free card. This card is the heir the showcase copy already describes, so it takes that slot. From today `_QA/prueba_gratis_del_home.py` watches it: it reads the `data-slug` values from both home pages and requires each to be published AND free, so the next merge goes red before it reaches production.v1.1.32026-08-26TASK now uses the restaurant's data instead of naming it only in the header. Raising the version pushed the card past the cut-off of `motor/arraigo.py` and the gate exposed a debt that predates it: zero fields inside TASK.v1.1.22026-08-26Declares what it does NOT do. `motor/alcance.py` had flagged it as high risk —its title names a role, or its body promises to act on a system— and with no `limites_es`/`limites_en` the public page was promising by omission.v1.1.12026-08-14Spelling: Spanish accents restored in the prose. No field marker, link or meaning changed.v1.1.02026-08-13Expanded under the margin mandate while keeping the four-quadrant frame: 6 numbered steps, 5 named output blocks, 8 business fields, named traps, verification checklist and figures with units.More assistants in this category
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This assistant is free with an account
Create it and read the whole thing, adapted to your AI and personalised with your restaurant's data. No card, no plan: the free account opens every assistant marked as free.
