Now booking Book your Verdict →
Skip to content
The glossary

The language, defined.

A working glossary of how Couverté speaks — F&B vernacular, the product vocabulary, and the methodology terms. Every entry cross-links to the others it touches, so you can read it as a network rather than a list.

All terms

Showing 26 terms

  1. Action plan

    Methodology

    The structured output of Layer 5 of the Couverte Methodology — a ranked set of specific changes for a menu. Every action carries the same backbone: a diagnosis, a primary action, an implementation detail, an expected impact labelled as an estimate, and a measurement window. It is what turns the analysis from a description into a set of decisions.

    The action plan is the part of a Verdict an operator actually executes. It is ranked, because the order is itself a recommendation — the methodology decides what to do first.

    Each action has five required parts. A diagnosis: the classification, the weak score components, and why. A primary action: the single most impactful change — price, position, description, portion, or removal — never a list of five. An implementation detail: specific enough to hand to the F&B manager, with a name and a day attached. An expected impact: a modelled estimate, never a promise. And a measurement window: a date to look again, typically four to eight weeks out. The critic pass confirms each part is present before the plan ships.

  2. Classification

    Methodology

    One of the six boxes the Couverte Methodology sorts every menu item into. Four are the classic menu-engineering grid — Star, Plowhorse, Puzzle, Dog. Two are Couverte additions — Vulnerable Star and Conversion Candidate — that name the risk and the opportunity the classic four miss. Each classification carries its own kind of action.

    A classification is a diagnosis. Sorting a dish into a box is not the end of the analysis; it is the start of the recommendation, because each box points to a different kind of move.

    The two Couverte additions exist because four boxes hide two things that matter. A Vulnerable Star is a Star whose food cost percentage runs well above its category average — profitable today, exposed to the next ingredient price spike. A Conversion Candidate is a Plowhorse whose food cost runs below average — the low cost base is headroom, and a small price or portion move can lift it toward Star territory with little risk.

  3. Comp set

    F&B vernacular

    Your competitive set — the named venues similar enough to yours in format, price tier, and audience that their moves directly affect your operation. Usually three to eight venues. The comp set is what Layer 4 — Market Context reads each item's pricing against, and the surface that Pulse watches continuously.

    A comp set is not every restaurant near you. It is the short, deliberate list of venues a guest would realistically choose between when they choose you — close enough in concept and price that a move they make is a move you should know about.

    Defining it well matters because the comp set is the reference frame for competitive positioning. A price that looks fine in isolation can be below the market band once you read it against the right set — and that gap is margin left on the table. Couverte’s Verdict establishes the comp set; Pulse keeps watching it for the menu and pricing changes that arrive between reviews.

  4. Contribution margin

    F&B vernacular

    Revenue from a dish minus its variable cost — primarily food cost, plus any directly attributable variable expense. Expressed in euros or as a percentage. It is the cash a dish leaves on the table, and the primary margin signal in menu engineering. A dish earning a small margin on heavy volume can out-earn a high-margin dish nobody orders, which is why the methodology also weighs it by units sold.

    Contribution margin is the foundational economic figure for every dish on a menu. It is the first thing Layer 1 of the Couverte Methodology calculates, because every later judgement — classification, score, recommendation — rests on knowing what a dish actually earns.

    Read it alongside food cost percentage: a fat contribution margin can hide a dangerous cost base, and the two together tell the real story.

  5. Couverte Score

    Methodology

    The proprietary composite score the Couverte Methodology assigns to each menu item — one number, on a 0–100 scale, that meshes the analytical layers into a single figure an operator can rank a menu by. It combines five normalised components — contribution margin, popularity, food cost efficiency, ProPASH contribution, and brand alignment — each weighted by your restaurant tier.

    The Couverte Score is Layer 3 of the methodology, and the part that turns a wall of metrics into one workable figure. It takes everything Layer 1 and Layer 2 produce and meshes it into a single score per dish.

    The weights are not fixed — they shift across the four tiers. At a casual room the economics dominate; at a Michelin kitchen brand alignment is the heaviest weight, because creative coherence comes first and profit follows. Brand alignment is the component no published model includes: it asks whether a dish belongs on this restaurant’s menu at all, assessed against the stated concept, the sourcing identity, the kitchen’s technique level, and guest expectation for the price tier. The same dish scores differently at a casual room than at a Michelin kitchen — which is the point.

  6. Cover

    F&B vernacular

    A single dining guest. Used as the unit in per-cover metrics such as average check per cover or profit per cover. At a fine-dining room, where turnover is intentionally low, profit per cover is often the figure that matters more than table turns.

    A cover is the basic accounting unit of a service period. Counting covers — rather than tables or tickets — normalises the room so a four-top and two two-tops are read the same way.

    Per-cover thinking becomes central at the upper tiers: when a room is not chasing turns, the question shifts from how many covers to how much each cover spends across the full experience.

  7. Critic pass

    Methodology

    The review step every recommendation goes through before it is written into a Verdict. The critic cross-checks a draft action against the other models, sense-checks it against kitchen reality, and holds it to the standard of advice you could hand a manager without a footnote. QA then confirms the action plan is complete. It is the step that catches the recommendation that is technically correct and operationally wrong.

    The methodology’s first principle is that no single model can be trusted on its own. The critic pass applies that same principle to the recommendation itself.

    The critic runs four tests: does the finding survive the cross-check across models; does it fit the tier; does it survive contact with the kitchen — labour intensity, station load; and does the dish belong on this menu — the brand-alignment test. Where the critic asks whether a recommendation is right, QA confirms it is complete: every part of the action plan present and specific. A recommendation that improves margin but demands an extra prep station during peak service is flagged here, not shipped.

  8. Dog

    Methodology

    A menu item with low popularity and low contribution margin — low demand, low margin. One of the six Couverte item classifications. A Dog earns little and still occupies menu space and kitchen attention. The action is usually removal, or a rework significant enough to change both the demand and the economics.

    A Dog is the dish a menu would be better off without in its current form. It does not carry volume and it does not carry margin, so it is paying for neither of the things a menu item is there to do.

    Removal is the common recommendation, but not the only one. A rework — a different recipe, a different price, a different position — can be worth it if the dish has a reason to stay. The methodology makes that call against the classification and the brand-fit read, not by reflex.

  9. F&B

    F&B vernacular

    Food and beverage. Used interchangeably with 'restaurant' in hotel contexts, though F&B usually covers more — banqueting, room service, the bar, and any other outlet that serves food or drink. The Couverte Methodology is built specifically for hotel F&B commercial strategy.

    F&B is the umbrella term for every food-and-beverage operation a property runs. In a hotel it rarely means a single dining room — it spans the restaurant, the bar, in-room dining, breakfast service, and events.

    That breadth is why hotel F&B is its own discipline: a finding at breakfast and a finding at dinner can point in opposite directions, and Hotel F&B is one of the four tiers the methodology calibrates against.

  10. Food cost percentage

    F&B vernacular

    The cost of the ingredients in a dish divided by its selling price, expressed as a percentage. The classic popularity-and-margin grid ignores it entirely — which is how a dish with a healthy contribution margin and a dangerous food cost gets called a winner. Couverte reads food cost percentage on every item to catch exactly that.

    Food cost percentage is the cost-control side of menu economics. Where contribution margin tells you what a dish earns, food cost percentage tells you how exposed that earning is to ingredient prices.

    It is calculated in Layer 1 — Item Economics and feeds the food-cost-efficiency component of the Couverte Score. It is also the deciding test for two classifications: a Star running well above its category average becomes a Vulnerable Star, and a Plowhorse running below becomes a Conversion Candidate.

  11. Kasavana & Smith

    Methodology

    Michael Kasavana and Donald Smith — the authors of the foundational menu-engineering work, first published through the Cornell School of Hotel Administration in 1982. Their four-box grid of popularity against contribution margin is the origin of the Star, Plowhorse, Puzzle, and Dog classifications the Couverte Methodology builds on.

    Kasavana and Smith, 1982, gave the industry its first rigorous way to read a menu as a portfolio rather than a list. The four-box grid is now standard practice, and it remains the starting point for serious menu work.

    The Couverte Methodology cites it as one of several published frameworks — alongside Pavesic 1985 and Miller 1980 — and keeps the classic four boxes while adding two of its own and the food-cost and time-space layers the 1982 work did not cover. The full source list is in the methodology’s provenance section.

  13. Methodology layer

    Methodology

    One of the five analytical layers of the Couverte Methodology. Three layers are analytical — item economics, time-space efficiency, and the Couverte Score. One is contextual — market context. One is prescriptive — the action plan. Each layer covers a gap the others leave open, which is the point of running them together.

    The methodology does not pick a single model of menu analysis. It runs the credible ones as layers, because each is right about one thing and blind to the rest.

    The five layers are: Layer 1 — Item Economics (what a dish earns), Layer 2 — Time-Space Efficiency (how hard it works for its seat and hour), Layer 3 — the Couverte Score (one tier-weighted number per dish), Layer 4 — Market Context (what the market around you demands), and Layer 5 — Prescriptive Actions (the change to make, in language that fits your room). The earlier dead-end “seven” framing is not part of v1.0 — the methodology has five layers, and only five.

  14. Plowhorse

    Methodology

    A menu item with high popularity and low contribution margin — a crowd-pleaser that carries volume but not enough margin. One of the six Couverte item classifications. The action is to lift the margin without breaking the demand: a modest price increase, a portion adjustment, or a cheaper-to-plate garnish.

    A Plowhorse pulls its weight on the floor and underperforms on the P&L. Guests order it; it just does not earn enough when they do.

    The methodology checks a Plowhorse’s food cost percentage before recommending a move. A Plowhorse with a below-average food cost is reclassified as a Conversion Candidate — the low cost base is headroom, and a small adjustment can shift the dish toward Star territory with little risk.

  15. POS

    F&B vernacular

    Point of sale — the system that records transactions. The canonical source for item-level sales data in F&B, and the dataset every menu analysis depends on: units sold per dish, over a real period, is what tells you what a menu actually does rather than what it was designed to do.

    POS data is the ground truth of a menu. A menu is a hypothesis about what guests will order; the POS records what they actually ordered.

    The Couverte Methodology needs a real window of POS history — four to eight weeks minimum, because a single weekend lies to you — to calculate menu mix, weighted contribution margin, and the classifications that follow.

  16. Prime cost

    F&B vernacular

    The combined total of food cost and labour cost — the two largest controllable expenses in a restaurant, taken together. Prime cost is the headline figure operators use to gauge whether the fundamentals of an operation are sound, because almost everything that can go structurally wrong with a restaurant's economics shows up in one of its two halves.

    Prime cost matters because food and labour are the costs an operator can actually move. Rent and utilities are largely fixed; prime cost is where management decisions land.

    Couverte’s analysis works one half of prime cost in detail — food cost percentage sits inside Layer 1 and the Couverte Score — and the Layer 5 recommendations are sense-checked against the labour half in the critic pass, so a change that improves food cost but demands an extra prep station during peak service gets flagged.

  17. ProPASH

    F&B vernacular

    Profit per available seat hour. A productivity metric that normalises profit against seating capacity and service hours, so outlets of different sizes and formats can be compared on equal terms. ProPASH is the sharper companion to RevPASH — a busy seat turning low-margin covers can post a strong RevPASH and a weak ProPASH.

    ProPASH measures how hard a dish, or a service period, works for the seat and the hour it occupies — but on profit rather than revenue. It is the figure that catches the gap RevPASH cannot see: revenue and profit do not always move together.

    It is the primary Layer 2 metric in the Couverte Methodology. At Hotel F&B, ProPASH read by daypart is where the real money shows — a buffet breakfast can be high-volume and low-margin while dinner is the opposite.

  18. Pulse

    Couverte product

    The continuous side of Couverte — Act III of the Three Acts. Where a Verdict is the deep one-time read, Pulse keeps the same rigour running every week: ongoing competitive signal from your comp set, and a weekly cadence of ranked actions delivered as the Tuesday Brief. It is consulting that does not leave.

    Pulse exists because an operation keeps moving after a consulting engagement ends. The menu drifts, costs move, the comp set rotates dishes and adjusts prices — and an annual review is blind to all of it by construction.

    Pulse closes that gap. It is built from two things: a small set of ranked actions on a weekly beat, and ongoing signal — a competitor’s price change, a cost drifting, a dish sliding out of its classification box — surfaced when it happens, while it still matters. The argument for it is compounding: a drift caught in week one is a small adjustment; the same drift caught in the next annual review is months of accumulated leak.

  19. Puzzle

    Methodology

    A menu item with low popularity and high contribution margin — a dish that pays well but nobody orders. One of the six Couverte item classifications. The margin is already there; the problem is visibility. The action is promotion: a better menu position, a sharper description, a price test to find the demand.

    A Puzzle is the most rewarding classification to fix, because the hard part is already done. The dish earns when it sells — it simply does not sell.

    What the recommendation looks like depends on your tier. At a casual room it is a mechanical, volume-focused move — reposition and reprice to test elasticity. At a Michelin kitchen the same finding becomes a narrative question: does the dish sit at the wrong moment in the tasting sequence.

  20. RevPASH

    F&B vernacular

    Revenue per available seat hour — how much top-line each seat generates per hour of service. A capacity metric widely used in hotel F&B benchmarking. RevPASH treats all revenue equally, which is its blind spot: it cannot tell a high-margin table from a low-margin one. ProPASH is the profit-aware version that closes that gap.

    RevPASH is a revenue-management metric borrowed from hotel rooms and adapted to dining rooms. It asks a simple question: of the seat-hours a room had available, how much revenue did each one earn.

    It is calculated in Layer 2 — Time-Space Efficiency, alongside seat utilisation and ProPASH. RevPASH is useful for capacity planning, but on its own it can flatter a busy, low-margin service — which is why the methodology reads it next to profit, never instead of it.

  21. Role lens

    Couverte product

    A role-aware view of the Couverte workspace — the mechanism behind Act II, Work, in the Three Acts. The same underlying analysis is presented differently depending on who is looking: an owner, an F&B manager, and a chef each see the part of a Verdict and the action plan that is theirs to act on.

    A role lens exists because a Verdict is read by more than one person, and they are not reading it for the same reason. An owner wants the headline and the priorities; an F&B manager wants the implementation detail and the dates; a chef wants the kitchen-side of a recommendation — the recipe, the portion, the station load.

    The role lens does not change the analysis — the Couverte Score, the classifications, and the ranked actions are the same underneath. It changes what each person sees first, so the workspace hands every role the slice of the work it needs to execute without wading through the rest.

  22. Star

    Methodology

    A menu item with high popularity and high contribution margin — the dishes guests love that also pay well. One of the six Couverte item classifications. The action for a Star is not to change it but to protect it: hold the price, hold the menu position, and watch the food cost so it does not quietly drift into trouble.

    A Star is the dish you most want to leave alone — and most need to keep an eye on. It is doing exactly what a menu item should do, which makes complacency the real risk.

    The Couverte Methodology watches a Star’s food cost percentage against its category average. If it runs well above, the dish is reclassified as a Vulnerable Star — profitable today, exposed to the next ingredient price spike.

  23. Three Acts

    Couverte product

    The structure of the Couverte product — Verdict, Work, and Pulse. Act I is the Verdict, the deep one-time audit. Act II is Work, the role-aware workspace where a Verdict's recommendations get executed. Act III is Pulse, the continuous weekly intelligence that keeps the analysis from going stale.

    The Three Acts describe how Couverte is meant to be used over time, not just what it sells. They are a sequence: a deep read, then the doing, then the not-stopping.

    Act I — Verdict is the consulting engagement: five deliverables in five days, a clear ranked set of decisions about your menu and market as they stand now. Act II — Work is where those decisions get executed — a workspace with role-aware views so an owner, an F&B manager, and a chef each see the part that is theirs. Act III — Pulse is the continuous cadence: the Tuesday Brief and ongoing competitive signal, the same rigour running every week. The Verdict works standalone; the later acts are the natural next steps, not a prerequisite.

  24. Tuesday Brief

    Couverte product

    The weekly intelligence delivery that carries Pulse — a small set of ranked actions and any material competitive signal, delivered to your inbox every Tuesday. It is a deliberately short brief, not a dashboard: a few highest-impact decisions, each with an owner and a date, sized so a working F&B leader can actually execute them. Earlier internal drafts called it the Weekly Brief.

    The Tuesday Brief is the weekly heartbeat of Couverte’s continuous side. Its discipline is in what it leaves out: not everything worth doing, just the few things worth doing first.

    Three real decisions a week, executed, compounds into more structured decisions in a year than most operations make with structured data in their entire existence. The brief also carries ongoing signal — a comp-set move, a cost drift, a dish sliding out of its box — surfaced while it still matters. It is the opposite failure mode of the forty-metric dashboard nobody opens twice.

  25. Verdict

    Couverte product

    Couverte's first deliverable — a one-time, property-specific audit of your menu and market, priced at €1,500. It is the consulting engagement done in five days instead of five weeks: five deliverables, produced by the full five-layer methodology, with a critic pass before any of it reaches you. It is a document and a decision, not a subscription and not a dashboard.

    The Verdict is Act I of the Three Acts. It is the deep first read of an operation — the binder review, done properly — delivered as five things over five days.

    Those five deliverables are: the item analysis (every dish scored and classified), the action plan (a ranked set of specific changes), the menu design read (position, description, and price display calibrated to your tier), the market position (your pricing against your comp set), and the review cycle (what to re-examine, and when). A Verdict will not hand you a guaranteed number — every expected impact is labelled as an estimate. It is genuinely useful standalone, and it is also the natural starting point for Pulse.

  26. Verdict tier

    Methodology

    One of the four restaurant tiers — Local / Casual, Hotel F&B, Fine Dining, and Michelin — that calibrate a Verdict. The tier you select changes the Couverte Score weights, changes which metrics lead, and changes the voice of every recommendation. A local trattoria and a Michelin tasting room do not optimise for the same thing.

    The tier is the single most important context a Verdict carries. The same finding does not mean the same thing everywhere: a low table-turn number is a crisis at a casual lunch spot and a non-issue at a Michelin kitchen.

    The four tiers each have their own scoring weights, their own leading metrics, and their own voice — drawn from how that kind of restaurant displays prices and writes menu descriptions. At Local / Casual the economics come first and recommendations are plain and practical. At Hotel F&B the read balances numbers with the guest. At Fine Dining brand alignment climbs and the voice turns precise and restrained. At Michelin brand alignment is the dominant weight and the voice defers to the kitchen’s intent.

Back to top ↑

Start with the Verdict

The vocabulary is the easy part. The Verdict is the decision.

Reading the definitions is one thing; seeing them applied to your own menu and market is another. A Verdict does that — five deliverables in five days, for €1,500.