About
Anyone can tell you the food is good.
Rather fewer can tell you which dishes are paying for the kitchen that made them. That's the half we work on, and it shows up in the month-end rather than in a document.
Salt & Ledger is an F&B advisory practice in Singapore. We work with owner-operators and small groups: restaurants, bars, cafés and bakeries, cloud kitchens, and outlets sitting inside larger operations.
People bring us in at two points. Before a lease is signed, which is the cheap moment. Or after the numbers have stopped working, which isn't. Both come down to the same question: what does this outlet have to take each month, and what's stopping it?
The two halves of the name are the two halves of the job. Costing a menu properly means knowing what a third site does to your overhead, and what an hour of labour actually costs you on a Friday against a Tuesday. Most people can do one half or the other. The answers only mean something together.
We're not a design studio and we're not a marketing agency. We won't have opinions about your logo. What we care about is whether the thing can pay for itself, and if it can't yet, what specifically has to change.
The work tends to be unglamorous. Recipe sheets, delivery dockets, rosters, a spreadsheet of what every supplier charged you last quarter. That's generally where the money has gone.
The practice
- Restaurants, bars, cafés, cloud kitchens
- Pre-opening through to monthly reporting
- Singapore, with regional work
- Independent of suppliers and contractors
On the floor
We work the service.
Not a walk-through at three in the afternoon when the kitchen is quiet. We're there for a full Friday and a full Tuesday, front and back, watching where the minutes go and what gets thrown away. You can't read any of that in a set of accounts. Your team already knows most of it. Usually nobody has asked them.
How we work
Four stages. Stop after any of them.
Each stage produces something you keep, whether or not you carry on to the next one.
The Read
We work a full service, read twelve months of accounts, and cost the menu line by line. You keep the findings whether or not you carry on with us.
The Plan
What changes, what it costs, and what it returns by which month. One document, with an owner and a date against every line. Plenty of clients take it from there.
Implementation
We stay on site while the changes land, because a plan handed over at the door is a plan that gets filed.
Handover
Your team runs the reporting without us. If they still need us after six months, we haven't finished the job.
What we hold to
Four things we won't do.
Take a supplier commission
We tender your buying. We are paid by you and only by you, so the recommendation is not for sale.
Tell you it'll be fine
Sometimes the honest answer is that the site doesn't work at that rent. We'd rather say so in week two than month nine.
Quote a number we can't show
Every figure we give you comes with the working behind it. If we can't show you the calculation, we don't put it in the report.
Stay longer than the job
The handover is priced in from the start. If your team still can't run the reporting without us, we haven't finished.
Start here
Tell us about the outlet.
Where it is, what it does on a good week, and what's worrying you. We'll come back with what we'd look at first and roughly what it would cost.