> All of our restaurants offer a full-service bar where our entire menu is served. During fiscal 2022, alcoholic beverage sales represented 12% of The Cheesecake Factory restaurant sales. We offer all items on our menu, except alcoholic beverages where disallowed by regulation, for off-premise consumption, sales of which comprised approximately 25% of The Cheesecake Factory restaurant sales during fiscal 2022. [0]

Industry benchmarks for similar chains put food ingredients typically around 28–35% of the menu price and alcoholic beverages around 20–25% of the menu price. Nonetheless, making 2x profit on 25% of sales is incredible for restaurants.

At Cheesecake Factory, total food and beverage cost is 24.6%. Labor cost is 36.7%: of that waitstaff is ~50% of labor and kitchen staff is ~30% of labor. Operating cost is 26.7%. Looks like after other costs the profit was ~1.2%. Not much but that profit comes from the 25% off-premise consumption without alcohol.

Takeout for Michelin star restaurants is not a good idea. For almost all other restaurants, takeout is were the profits are. Engineering a menu and kitchen is like engineering a database, you have to ask things like are there a lot of writes and few reads or a lot of reads and few writes to determine how to structure it. When designing a restaurant and menu there needs to be equilibrium between how many seats in the dining room, what if any liqueur license to acquire, an expectation of percentage of food will be takeout, and menu items that will satisfy both dining room and takeout quality expectations. We eat with our eyes first even if it is opening a steaming hot carton of Orange Chicken from the Cheesecake Factory. There are always tradeoffs and it matters what the end goal is and more often than not the goal for both a database and kitchen is to earn as much profit as possible.

Some advice if you ever open a restaurant. The single biggest pain point when working in a kitchen opening a brand new restaurant is not enough storage. [1] You need enough containers to hold each of every element. You need enough containers to hold each of every element in cold storage for backup during service. Lastly, you need enough clean containers to switch the contents of each element into at the end of each night or to be dirty waiting for cleaning while the others are being used. The week before you open a restaurant, count how many containers you thought you needed and have in stock and triple that amount. Nothing will slow down service like not having enough containers. See, engineering a kitchen is like engineering a database.