WILEY Food and Beverage Cost Control

this book has to be in my openion one of the best manuals so far to cost control,,its like having a course in economics

This is a text book format. Lots of useful information. It does not however contain first hand accounts of experiences and issues encountered by "real" restaurant owners. Long on theory short on practice.

good

The book is very good for a person taking charge of a kitchen and human resources on the restaurant. However I bought this item to help me figure out how to organize (for a Point of Sale system) the inventory. The basic points are covered, but not the hard ones. For example a whole chiken is bought and now we have to divide it (wings, breast, etc.). It does not address How the item is entered, and how the sub items are entered into the inventory. Also, it does not show how when a created recipe subtracts items from the inventory. I finally have to figure all this by myself. But the book as a whole is very good.

I didn't choose this book, it was presumably chosen by the head of my college department. The book is widely used and the authors are university instructors. There is no question that they know their subject but that is not the reason why I am giving them three stars. I find the text difficult to follow because it is unnecessarily verbose. They treat the reader like a school-child rather than as an adult student. As a result, they sometimes take a whole page to describe something that could be better said in one succinct paragraph. As a result, I sometimes have to read and reread something to understand what they are trying to say. Then when I get it, it's like, "Oh, is that all you were trying to say? Why didn't you say it up front?" The converse is also the case. When something needs to be clearly explained, it isn't. In Chapter 10, the authors have a section called "Linking Cost/Volume/Profit Analysis with Goal Value Analysis". They give a spreadsheet example and a table. Then they write, "By looking at these two analyses, you can learn how the overall goals of the operation affect menu item profitability. Conversely, you can see how changes you make to menu items affect the overall profitability of the operation." That's it! Not one further word of explanation. Puhleez!! Maybe they can see it, but how do they expect the student to do so with no explanation, just a spreadsheet and a two-column table. Ms. Dopson published this section as a stand-alone article in the Journal of Hospitality Financial Management which is slightly easier to understand because it is written for adults, not kids, but even that is inadequately explained.