Pricing
How to price a restaurant menu and wine list in Italy
Wine and menu pricing for Italian restaurants: true cost, 10% IVA, markup versus contribution margin, house wine, by the glass. Stop guessing.
Written by Marco Azzari on
"Any wine sale is better than no wine sale" is a belief you can only afford if you know the true cost of the line. A lot of Italian rooms do not. Prices were set from memory, copied from the previous gestore, or multiplied by a ricarico that felt normal in 2018. IVA was never taken out. Guests now check the enoteca price at the table.
This section is the number half of the wiki.
Start here if you run a small room and you guess: how to price a wine list in Italy. Three lines first (house, best-selling glass, best-selling bottle), true cost, 10% inside.
Start here if you have to answer a GM: markup is not margin. Pour cost, contribution, food cost. The language of the review meeting.
By the glass is usually the highest-margin engine and the one on autopilot: how to price wine by the glass. House wine is the pour that happens when nobody chooses: how to price house wine. Kitchen and cellar use different cost % and operators mix them: food cost and wine cost. Guests already know your ricarico: phone-check markup.
The legal page everything else should cite: restaurant VAT (IVA) in Italy. At the table, food and wine are both 10%. The leak is a price you never rebuilt, not a special wine tax.