Who is this assistant for?

Someone asks how much goes on the plate and the answer is "whatever looks right". You have old spec sheets nobody reads because they are written on purchase weight. You opened a second location and the same dish comes out differently at each. Every new cook takes a month to plate the way the house does.

A dish's margin is decided in the ladle, and in most kitchens that ladle has no number written anywhere. This assistant does not measure deviation: it sets the point deviation is measured against. It takes the gram weight out of the chef's head, gives every line the tool that delivers it, states how far the portion may move and still be the portion, and leaves a pass card a new cook can obey on day one.

AI assistant · N5 Complete system

◆ Included in the annual plan👨‍🍳 Standard Recipes, Spec Sheets and Productionv1.0.2 · 2026-09-23

Portioning Standards Builder for Restaurants

Writes the portion standard that does not exist yet: net gram weight per component, the tool that delivers it, the band the house accepts and the card that reads at the pass without stopping service.

Depth

8/23

Your data

Compatible AIs

Steps to use it

Depth of the resulttap a level to see what you get

◀ Put out today's fireRun the year ▶

🏛️

N5Complete system

Several chained pieces you install and operate over time, with their review cadence. It changes how the business runs, not one decision.

◆ This assistant 110 of the 164 published assistants are at this level

Is this for you?

What it does and what you get

A dish's margin is decided in the ladle, and in most kitchens that ladle has no number written anywhere.
This assistant does not measure deviation: it sets the point deviation is measured against.
It takes the gram weight out of the chef's head, gives every line the tool that delivers it, states how far the portion may move and still be the portion, and leaves a pass card a new cook can obey on day one.

What you end up with

A component-level standard table with net gram weight, tool and band; a matrix saying where to start; the laminate-ready pass card; the blank verification template and a rollout plan with owner, date and indicator.

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

Sazón de OrigenFictional contemporary Colombian restaurant in Medellín, 2 locations, 6 years in business. Every sample result in the library comes from this same case. Fictional restaurant

The owner asked this: «I have two locations and not one spec sheet with a gram weight. The chef plates from memory and my food cost lands at 34%. I want the written standard for my three fastest-moving dishes, with the tool for each line, ready to hang at the pass on Saturday.»

Three dishes, fourteen lines. Each with its net gram weight, the tool that delivers it and what the portion costs.

Dish	Component	Net gram weight	Prep waste	Tool that delivers it	Band	Portion cost
Bandeja de la casa	Ground beef	120 g	6 g drained	Nº12 ladle, levelled	±8 g	$6,240
Bandeja de la casa	Chicharrón	70 g	—	Tongs, 2 pieces	±7 g	$2,940
Bandeja de la casa	Cargamanto beans	200 g	—	200 ml scoop, struck	±20 g	$1,200
Bandeja de la casa	Rice	130 g	—	130 g ring	±13 g	$416
Bandeja de la casa	Fried plantain	50 g	12 g of peel	2 counted pieces	±1 piece	$467
Bandeja de la casa	Avocado	30 g	18 g stone and skin	30 ml spoon	±5 g	$900
Bandeja de la casa	Egg · arepa	1 + 1	—	Counted piece	0	$1,120
Sancocho de tres carnes	Three-meat mix	260 g	22 g of bone	Tongs + 1 g scale	±12 g	$9,100
Sancocho de tres carnes	Broth	300 ml	—	150 ml ladle, twice	±25 ml	$600
Sancocho de tres carnes	Pot vegetables	150 g	30 g peeled off	Drained spider	±15 g	$958
Trucha al ajillo	Trout fillet	220 g	95 g bone and skin	1 g scale, no exceptions	±6 g	$12,100
Trucha al ajillo	Garlic sauce	45 ml	—	45 ml ladle	±5 ml	$980
Trucha al ajillo	House salad	90 g	—	Tongs, one grab	±10 g	$760

And the line that moved was not the protein. With the weights the kitchen was plating from memory, the bandeja came to 33.0% food cost and the sancocho to 33.2%: both above the 32% set by the house costing rule. The correction never touched the ground beef or the three-meat mix — it touched the avocado, the rice, the beans and the broth, the lines where 20 g do not show on the plate and do show at month's end.

Dish	Food cost before	Food cost with the standard	What gave
Bandeja de la casa	33.0%	31.6%	Avocado 40→30 g · beans 220→200 g · rice 150→130 g
Sancocho de tres carnes	33.2%	31.4%	Avocado 40→30 g · vegetables 180→150 g · broth 350→300 ml
Trucha al ajillo	31.1%	31.1%	Nothing: it already fitted

Before writing "±8 g" somebody had to measure what the levelled nº12 ladle actually delivers. Five servings in a row, same hand, same ladle:

Serving	1	2	3	4	5	Range
Ground beef (g)	118	124	121	127	119	118 – 127 g

SUPUESTO: no industry portioning tolerance is used here, because it shifts by cut, by supplier and by country. The ±8 g band on 120 g comes from the measured spread of the tool itself: the levelled ladle moves 9 g between the shortest and the longest serving, so a ±3 g band would be broken every day and would flag nothing. If Sazón de Origen wanted to work at ±3 g, writing a tighter band does not help: the line has to move to a scale, the way the trout already has. And the other way round: opening the band to ±20 g would take the bandeja back to 33% with the standard "met", which is the quietest way to lose margin — the band decides what gets seen, not what gets plated.

That is why the trout goes on a 1 g scale and not on tongs. 6 g of fillet cost $330; 20 g of beans cost $120. The tool is chosen by what the gram costs, not by what the portion weighs.

Illustrative example generated with a fictional restaurant. Not a promise of results, not a client case.

This is 3 of 4 parts. Behind the wall is **the rollout**: the matrix naming the three lines to start from, the five-line plan with owner and date, the tool list per location costed against one month without a standard, the template for the 20 weighings and **the 15 minutes on Monday**, with the rule on who never runs them and what happens if a line falls out of band two weeks running.

See the full example — free account

Works with these AIs

Claude — the best for this assistant Best for the fine work here: holding fourteen lines with weight, tool and band without dropping one, and recomputing the whole dish's food cost every time a component moves from 40 to 30 g. Ask it to think step by step before the table and to write the pass card last, once it knows which line gave.

How to use it

Gather whatever gram weights exist today —a notebook, an old sheet, nothing— and say so plainly: the assistant changes its starting point accordingly.

Load the assistant into your usual AI and answer, one at a time, its questions about dishes, hands and the tools already in the kitchen.

Receive the standard component by component and have your chef validate the protein weights before touching anything else.

Serve 5 times with each proposed tool, weigh what it delivers and fix the line that does not give the written amount.

Hang the pass card, set the weekly verification appointment and name who runs it.

Which of your data it uses

of 23

This assistant works with 8 of the 23 fields in «My Restaurant», among them Business type, Number of locations and Best-selling dishes. 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.

Business typeNumber of locationsBest-selling dishesDish descriptions (paste your menu)Team sizeMenu price rangeApproximate food cost (%)Main goal this year