What it does
The Restaurant Consultant is the flagship app on the ALSTIG stack — the one tool that covers the widest operational ground for an independent restaurant. Twelve operational domains in one app: cost of goods, labor cost, prime cost, controllable expenses, reviews, menu engineering, recipes, inventory, vendor management, scaling, training, and daily ops review.
It exists because most restaurant operators don't need a $50K/year platform with a 90-day rollout. They need a working tool that runs the weekly review on a phone — sales-by-daypart, cost variance, prime cost trend, the things a working operator would otherwise piece together from POS exports and a spreadsheet.
The app generates a weekly P&L pulse across all 12 domains. Monday morning, you open the app and see what changed. Food cost up 1.2 points week-over-week? It flags it. Labor pushed past the 35% upper band on a slow Tuesday? It flags it. Specific, dollar-anchored, decision-ready.
Sales-by-daypart, COGS variance, prime cost trend, controllable expenses — all generated automatically from your inputs each week.
Track food cost, liquor cost, beer cost, wine cost separately. Each category has its own NRA-aligned target band built in.
Wages + payroll taxes + benefits = true labor cost. Most operators report only gross wages and underestimate by 3–7 points.
Aggregates Google reviews across the dining-room locations you manage.
Plots menu items on the Kasavana-Smith stars/plowhorses/puzzles/dogs grid by sales mix and contribution margin.
Up to 5 restaurant profiles. The free tier covers one location indefinitely.
Capacitor build — works in a browser AND on the App Store. Sync across devices.
Walk through the past week's prime cost, food cost variance, and labor cost across dayparts before the manager meeting. The whole review takes 15 minutes instead of 90.
Operators with a manager running day-to-day open the app to verify the numbers without calling. Catches drift before it becomes a problem.
Use the historical data to project the next slow season. Cash discipline and labor planning anchored on actuals, not gut.
The Restaurant Consultant is published by ALSTIG INC, founded by Ben Mouton — a 14-year independent restaurant operator. Every app on the ALSTIG stack came from a problem hit during the run — the originals proven in service at Mouton's Bistro & Bar in Cedar Park, TX, which Ben ran for fourteen years before selling in 2026. Free to start. No platform contracts.
Read the operator-direct articles → Browse the operations glossary →
The Restaurant Consultant