A menu that has not been built yet, assembled from what is working across twelve venue menus — four read on the August trip, seven from public sources, plus the Society House concept — and costed down to the station, the equipment and the product spec. Pick items and the build sheet tells you which stations you have loaded and what it takes to open them.
A menu is a set of decisions about where work lands. Every item on the card loads one or more of these, and the stations do not cost the same — grill is the slowest and most expensive per cover, pantry is the cheapest, and prep is the one that decides whether the other four can hit their times.
The most transferable finding from the research: Dave & Buster's cut front-of-house labor first, against an unchanged menu, and created service failures. They then cut menu complexity instead — and the kitchen went from 12 people at peak to 7, with faster tickets and a 5% rise in F&B revenue per check. The failure mode is cutting labor before cutting complexity.
Every component behind every candidate on the builder, with the manufacturer code or GTIN that identifies it. The plan is one vendor. Splitting a small operation across distributors buys a second minimum order, a second delivery window and a second invoice, for a saving a rep will usually match anyway — so this shows how much of the menu Ben E. Keith already covers rather than shopping it around.
The distributor item number column is deliberately blank. Those numbers sit behind a customer login and differ by distribution center. Hand your rep the manufacturer code, write their number in the blank column, and this becomes the order guide.
BEK · published means Ben E. Keith publishes a brand page for that manufacturer, checked 10 September 2026 — your rep has it. BEK · confirm means a national foodservice brand BEK does not list publicly: almost certainly gettable, but a question rather than an assumption. Nothing on this list forces a second vendor; where a single line has an obvious fallback, it is named on the row.
Model numbers and prices captured 9 September 2026 from published WebstaurantStore listings. These are web list prices, not project pricing — dealers routinely quote under list, and freight, install and start-up are extra. Quote only means the manufacturer does not publish a price at all.
Several brands publish nothing: XLT states outright that pricing varies by configuration and refuses to list it; Middleby Marshall, Taylor, FBD, Perlick and all walk-in coolers are dealer-quote only. Those are marked rather than guessed at.
A candidate menu, not a decided one. Every item is a suggestion with its evidence attached: where we saw it working and at what price, which station it loads, what it takes to produce, and what equipment it demands. Select items and the build sheet aggregates the station load and the equipment bill.
Three sources. The August trip — the published menus of High Tides, Lefty's, FastTrax, HeadPinz and District 850, which we read and priced. Dave & Buster's national menu, read in full from their own 20-page PDF. The Society House concept, whose dishes are carried through and marked as such.
Updated 19 September 2026. Five desk-researched venues were added to the comparison: PINSTACK Westlake, Sidecar Social (Addison and Frisco), Spare Time Chattanooga, Southside Social and Home Run Dugout. That takes the comparison from six menus to twelve, and every price they carry now shows on the item cards below.
Not all twelve are equally solid, and the cards say which is which. PINSTACK and Spare Time are first-party — the operator's own published price list. Sidecar Social prices are from third-party delivery platforms for the Addison store and may carry a markup; Southside Social prices are from an aggregator listing, because their own PDFs are flat images. Home Run Dugout publishes no prices at all, so it appears only to record that an item exists on their menu.
The band is much wider than the August five suggested. Wings run from $10 at Southside Social to $17.95 at Sidecar Social — a 79% spread for the same item, in the same category of venue. Burgers run $11 to $19. The top entrée runs $15 at Southside Social to $31.95 at Sidecar Social.
The useful read is not the average. It is that the two venues closest to the Wildcat customer definition — Sidecar Social and PINSTACK — sit at the top of the band, and the two Chattanooga venues sit at the bottom. Price follows positioning, not category. A target price is a decision about who is walking in, and it has to be made before the menu is costed, not after.
Every code shown is a manufacturer product code or GTIN, published publicly. Distributor item numbers — Ben E. Keith, US Foods, Sysco — sit behind a customer login and vary by distribution center, so the your item # column is deliberately left blank for the rep to fill in.
Lead with the GTIN, not the product name. A rep resolves a GTIN to their item number in seconds, and it removes the substitution risk you get ordering by description. Wings and beef are the two lines that will be substituted on you if the spec is loose — get wing size in count-per-pound and beef ratio and portion in writing.
No food-cost percentages, no plate costs, no labor minutes. Those need real quotes against real volumes and none of it is published. Target prices shown are positioned against what the twelve venues actually charge, not calculated from cost — and several of those charges are third-party figures rather than the operator's own, which the item cards label.
The plan is Ben E. Keith for the whole order. A second distributor buys a second minimum order, a second delivery window and a second invoice to reconcile — for a saving the first rep will usually match once he knows he is carrying the account. The ingredient catalog is built to that assumption: it reports how much of the menu BEK already covers, and gives you a short list to confirm rather than a bid to run.
Of the 118 components behind the candidate menu, 22 are brands BEK publishes a page for, 3 go through their meat division, and 63 are house prep, produce and dairy that ride the same truck. That leaves 30 to ask about. If your rep says no to one of them, that single line becomes a US Foods or Sysco pickup — and several of them have an obvious swap already named on the row.
Compiled 9 September 2026. Research gaps worth naming: there is no published FEC-specific ticket-time standard, no FEC food-waste data, and no named FEC operator on record discussing rapid-cook ovens — all the brand content in that category is sales material.
The concept the food program has to serve. The full presentation is still here — this page keeps the menu thinking and hands it to the kitchen.
All six are carried through into the builder and marked Society House · concept. Two of them turn out to be the strongest items on the whole card operationally, and one of them is the weakest.
The August trip produced one finding that bears directly on this concept: every venue we visited under-delivers on food relative to its own marketing. Three named no chef anywhere. Two published no menu at all. Two development briefs promising "chef-inspired" dining — written by the same consultant — shipped three entrées and five.
Society House is currently written the same way those briefs were. The difference between it and them will not be the menu copy; it will be whether the kitchen is specified to deliver it. That is what this page is for.
The concept names five: Society Old Fashioned, Smoked Manhattan, Espresso Martini, House Margarita, Blackberry Bramble. Four of the five are batchable. The old fashioned in particular is the classic draft-cocktail success case — spirit-forward, no juice, effectively indefinite shelf life in a keg. The espresso martini is the one that cannot be batched well and will cost you two to four minutes a drink at the worst possible moment.