A new dish is priced once, in public, and changing it afterwards is expensive in every sense. This brief exists for that moment: it reads the section the dish will sit in and reports what the city already charges there.
It is deliberately narrow. Not the whole menu, not the whole category: the part of the market your new line will land in, and the band it has to be defensible inside.
priced main courses in the dataset4,113
CollectionContinuous
AvailabilityOn request
The questions this answers
- What is the defensible opening price for this dish on day one?
- What is the usual band for this section inside our own price group?
- Does the ingredient we are building around carry a premium in this section?
- Where would our candidate price place the dish on our own menu?
What is inside
The target section, read closelyThe usual price band for that section inside your own price group, and the step from one group to the next.
Positions at three price pointsWhere three candidate prices would place the dish on your own menu, on a scale from the cheapest dish printed to the dearest.
Ingredient premium, where it appliesIf the dish is built around an ingredient the market prices at a premium, what that premium is inside the same section, with both prices printed.
How stretched the section isHow far the dearest dish in that section sits from the middle of it, read inside each menu rather than across the city.
Methodology noteThe rules restated, so the brief can be handed to someone who was not in the room.
Why this one
This is the only Level 1 report with a natural trigger: it is commissioned when a launch date exists. Send the dish and the section, and we will say what the dataset can and cannot answer before quoting.
What MenuIndex does not do
- No aggregators. Delivery platforms, reservation sites, review portals and listing directories are excluded as sources. A menu published through those channels is edited for the channel and priced for a different margin, so it is not comparable with a dine-in menu.
- No restaurant is identified. Reports describe the market. No individual business is named, quoted or ranked, in the text, in a table or in an example.
- Nothing is estimated. A price is never inferred, modelled or filled in from a similar dish, and any breakdown drawn narrowly enough to point at one business is withheld rather than published.
- No advice. A report is market intelligence, not consultancy. It states what the market prints and leaves the decision where it belongs.
This title sits in Category Price Benchmarks. Full rules in the methodology.