Week 4 Autopsy: Reading the menu like financials

Week 4 — treating a public menu as a financial document, and submitting the Specimen Dossier.

17 August 2026

Before the session#

Find the fullest version of your specimen’s menu you can — a cached page, a delivery-app archive, photos in old reviews. Price out the ingredients of three dishes as best you can and work out roughly what share of the sale price they’d eat.

In the session#

A long menu with cheap-looking prices is usually a kitchen trying to be everything to everyone, and that shows up in cost percentages before it shows up in reviews — Renata walks through why, then you apply it to your own specimen and flag anything that doesn’t fit the pattern, which is usually the more interesting case.

Afterwards#

The Specimen Dossier is due: your case file, your location audit and your menu reading, assembled into the first checkpoint the course marks. It doesn’t need a theory of the closure yet — it needs to prove you have enough real material to build one.