Cost control · P&L · Profit advice
Every restaurant needs a chef. Not every restaurant can afford a corporate one.
No Chef reads your invoices, builds your P&L, and asks you two questions a day to find the money you're leaving on the table. From $49 a month.
- 42%
- of restaurants weren't profitable last yearNRA State of the Industry 2026
- 2.8%
- median net margin for a full-service independentNRA State of the Industry 2026
- 25–35%
- net profit lift from cutting food cost one pointThe 100 basis point rule, at a 2.8% median margin
See it work on a real invoice
No account, no sales call. Drop in any restaurant invoice — or use ours — and see what comes back.
Drop an invoice here
PDF or a photo. It's read in memory and never stored.
It asks. You answer. It gets smarter.
Your transaction data knows what happened. Only you know why. One to three questions a day, under sixty seconds, and every answer changes the advice you get afterwards.
Saturday food cost ran 4.1 points over your 8-week average.
Saturday's food cost was 4.1 points high. What happened?
What you get back
Pulled the 62-cover private event out of your Saturday baseline. Your normal Saturday food cost is 29.8%, not 33.9% — and the event itself ran at 41% food cost, which is under-priced for the labour it took.
Event priced $310 low
Your numbers stay yours.
Privacy is the number one reason operators hesitate on AI — ahead of accuracy and cost. So here's the architecture, not a reassurance.
Ratios leave. Dollars never do.
Food cost as a percent of your own sales. Labour as a percent of your own sales. That's the shape of what contributes — no amounts, no vendors, no prices, no recipes, no name.
Nothing shows below ten locations.
A peer figure appears only when ten or more distinct locations sit behind it, winsorized at the 5th and 95th percentile. Under ten, you see a published industry figure with its source named — and the app says so.
One switch, and no lock-in.
Opt out in a single toggle and keep every other feature. Export every table plus your original invoice files as a ZIP whenever you like — one click, no support ticket.
Know where you stand.
Profitable operators run labour at 34.2% of sales. Loss-making ones run 42.9%. That 8.7-point gap is most of the difference between a restaurant that works and one that doesn't — and it's the kind of thing you can only see against peers.
Food cost
You 31.4% · profitable 28.9% · loss-making 34.1%
Illustrative cohort. In your account these are your figures, and the gap is converted into annual dollars against your own sales.
Labour cost
You 36.8% · profitable 34.2% · loss-making 42.9%
Illustrative cohort. In your account these are your figures, and the gap is converted into annual dollars against your own sales.
Prime cost
You 68.2% · profitable 63.1% · loss-making 77%
Illustrative cohort. In your account these are your figures, and the gap is converted into annual dollars against your own sales.
Replace the stack — the honest version.
We're not going to tell you to cancel QuickBooks. These are published list prices for a single location, and the two lines No Chef actually replaces are marked.
| What it is | Typical product | Per month | With No Chef |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accounting / GL | QuickBooks Online Plus | $99 | Keep it. Stays. No Chef posts alongside your GL, it does not replace it. |
| Restaurant cost control | Restaurant365 Core, per location | $289–$459 | Replaced. Invoice capture, inventory, vendor pricing, P&L. |
| Recipe & menu costing | MarginEdge / standalone recipe tool | $79–$330 | Replaced. Recipe cost rollups, menu engineering, theoretical food cost. |
| Bookkeeper clean-up time | 2–4 hours a month at $60/hr | $120–$240 | Keep it. Coding invoices by hand. Reduced, rarely eliminated. |
| What No Chef takes off the bill | Cost control + recipe costing | $368–$789 | $49–$199 |
List prices as published by each vendor for a single location, checked February 2026. Your quote may differ — most of this category negotiates.
No invented customers here.
We're early, and we'd rather show you an empty space than a stock photo with a made-up quote under it. Real names, real numbers and real logos go here as soon as operators agree to be named. Until then, judge us on the invoice demo above — it runs on your invoice, not ours.
Try it on your own invoicePricing
Fourteen days free with a card, cancel from inside the app, and we email before the trial converts. Additional locations are added as a line on the same subscription.
Line Cook
$49/mo
Invoice capture, vendor price alerts, item and recipe costing. One location.
Sous
$99/mo
Adds the full P&L, benchmarks, the daily question loop, and the AI advisor. Free accountant seat.
Executive
$199/mo
Adds multi-location roll-ups, priority support, and the largest AI allowance.
Resources
All resourcesCost control · 6 min
How to catch a vendor price increase before it costs you a year
Price creep rarely arrives as a letter. It arrives as a 4% bump on one line of a 40-line invoice. Here is the arithmetic that makes it visible, and the email that fixes it.
Benchmarks · 5 min
Prime cost, explained without the accounting
Prime cost is the one number that tells you whether a restaurant works. What it includes, what a healthy figure looks like, and why weekly beats monthly.
Menu · 6 min
Menu engineering without the jargon
Popularity against contribution margin gives you four groups of dishes and four different decisions. Here is what to actually do with each.
Questions
No, and be suspicious of anything that says it does. No Chef sits alongside your general ledger. It reads your invoices, costs your recipes, builds an operating P&L you can act on daily, and exports QuickBooks-compatible journal entries so your bookkeeper's month-end doesn't change.
On something we don't connect to yet?
You don't need an integration to start — daily sales take fifteen seconds by hand, and Toast and Square import by CSV. But tell us what you're on. We build in demand order and requests are counted as votes.
Built for 11pm, on a phone, with wet hands.
One invoice, five minutes, and you'll know something about your costs you didn't know this morning.