§ Issues
12
Dispatches filed and counting — for the line, not the lounge.
Freshly grilled
File · inflation
10 Jun 2026 · 4 min read
The tenderloin comes off the menu before its price goes up
Third and final in a three-part series: operators in Romania, Hungary and Austria on how they set prices, defend margins, and read a guest who is spending less. We finish in Vienna.
¶ Pull quotes
From this issue →
The line, in their words.
Latest dispatches
Pull · § 01
The tenderloin comes off the menu before its price goes up
→ inflation
Pull · § 02
The Margherita stays cheap, the truffle pays for it
→ inflation
Pull · § 03
How a Bucharest operator prices through inflation
→ menu
When beef tenderloin got too expensive, Mochi didn't raise the price, it took the dish off the menu.
Sandra Jedliczka is one of the founder-owners of Mochi, arguably the best Japanese fusion restaurant in Vienna. Since opening in 2012, the portfolio has grown to include the Asian gourmet shops omk, Mochi Ramen Bar, Kikko Bā (Spanish-Japanese tapas), Cucina Itameshi (Italian-Japanese), a Mochi outpost in Bolzano, and Chicken Karate, a fast-food stand at Vorgartenmarkt. Across all of it, pricing runs on one rule: the menu price moves last. Some dishes never carry the increase and some leave the menu rather than carry it.
In this conversation:
- how Mochi works through purchasing, suppliers and recipe adjustments before a price ever moves,
- why its best-selling dishes are allowed to run below margin target as a matter of identity,
- and why lunch, not any single menu category, is where the squeezed consumer first stops showing up.
§ 02 · Recent issues
From the plancha.
Bi-weekly · All issues →
inflation
4 min read
The Margherita stays cheap, the truffle pays for it
Second in a three-part series: operators in Romania, Hungary and Austria on how they set prices, defend margins, and read a guest who is spending less. This week: Budapest.
menu
6 min read
How a Bucharest operator prices through inflation
First in a three-part series: operators in Romania, Hungary and Austria on how they set prices, defend margins, and read a guest who is spending less. We start in Bucharest.
VAT
5 min read
Cheaper vegetables, tone-deaf tomatoes, and when food festivals work for operators
What the planned Hungarian VAT cut won't do, what the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture got wrong, and where post-event sales actually show up.
AI
4 min read
The restaurants AI recommends, and why
We asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude where to eat in Budapest, Bucharest and Vienna, then asked them why. The answers show who is visible, who is missing, and why Google still sits underneath most AI restaurant discovery.
Issue
6 min read
The case for running a lunch menu you don't profit from
Three operators on how they structure midday service, who it brings in, and what it builds that dinner service can't.
plancha express
6 min read
How war hits your menu, the worst food influencer in Budapest and toilet signs from hell
Five items. Iran, influencers, toilet signs, a bakery opening, and Turkish food done right.
Page 1 of 2
Older issues →
The files.
§ 03 · The rooms in the kitchen
- 01 menu Dispatches filed under menu. 4 issues →
- 02 plancha express Dispatches filed under plancha express. 3 issues →
- 03 pricing Dispatches filed under pricing. 3 issues →
- 04 inflation Dispatches filed under inflation. 3 issues →
- 05 interview Dispatches filed under interview. 3 issues →
- 06 Google Places Dispatches filed under Google Places. 2 issues →
§ 04 · The line is talking
Operator takes.
Quotes from the line
inflation
"The tenderloin comes off the menu before its price goes up"
— Alexei Korolyov
inflation
"The Margherita stays cheap, the truffle pays for it"
— Zsofi Bajor
menu
"How a Bucharest operator prices through inflation"
— Georgiana Ilie
VAT
"Cheaper vegetables, tone-deaf tomatoes, and when food festivals work for operators"
— Zsofi Bajor, Alexei Korolyov, Georgiana Ilie, Peter Erdelyi
AI
"The restaurants AI recommends, and why"
— Peter Erdelyi, Zsofi Bajor, Georgiana Ilie, Alexei Korolyov, María Paula Ángel Benavides
On the line
"The case for running a lunch menu you don't profit from"
— Georgiana Ilie, Zsofi Bajor, Alexei Korolyov
plancha express
"How war hits your menu, the worst food influencer in Budapest and toilet signs from hell"
— María Paula Ángel Benavides, Peter Erdelyi, Zsofi Bajor, Georgiana Ilie, Alexei Korolyov
When beef tenderloin got too expensive, Mochi didn't raise the price, it took the dish off the menu.
Sandra Jedliczka is one of the founder-owners of Mochi, arguably the best Japanese fusion restaurant in Vienna. Since opening in 2012, the portfolio has grown to include the Asian gourmet shops omk, Mochi Ramen Bar, Kikko Bā (Spanish-Japanese tapas), Cucina Itameshi (Italian-Japanese), a Mochi outpost in Bolzano, and Chicken Karate, a fast-food stand at Vorgartenmarkt. Across all of it, pricing runs on one rule: the menu price moves last. Some dishes never carry the increase and some leave the menu rather than carry it.
In this conversation:
- how Mochi works through purchasing, suppliers and recipe adjustments before a price ever moves,
- why its best-selling dishes are allowed to run below margin target as a matter of identity,
- and why lunch, not any single menu category, is where the squeezed consumer first stops showing up.
Inflation forces restaurants to decide what kind of expensive they are willing to become.
For Nóri Vidó, the line is the Margherita.
At Igen ("Yes"), her Neapolitan pizzeria in Budapest, the Margherita is 3,290 HUF (€9.2). Ham is 3,990 HUF (€11.2), quattro formaggi 4,190 HUF (€11.8), and Parma ham with arugula and parmesan 4,490 HUF (€12.6). The Margherita is not where she wants to recover lost margin: it is the dish that keeps the restaurant open to people who still want to come out, but are watching the bill.
She believes portion size and ingredient quality are untouchable, even under extreme inflationary pressure, and prefers sacrificing margins over turning her restaurants into “special occasion only” places.
Vidó runs Igen and Ide ("Here"), two pizza concepts built around different Italian traditions, and Oda ("There") at Czakó Garden, an all-day restaurant in Buda.
Her strategy is to keep prices low at the expense of profit margins.
What has actually become more expensive in the past few months?
“Labour costs, significantly. That’s now the biggest expense.”
Vidó says wages in her restaurants have risen by around 30% over the past two years. Staff feel inflation too, so wage expectations move with the rest of the economy. She describes her pay as mid-range, but says she constantly monitors market averages and tries to keep up.
Is this a genuinely new price hike, or old cost pressure finally arriving?
The current geopolitical noise has not yet created a major new price shock for her restaurants, but that could change in three months. Since many of her ingredients move through Italy, transport costs and currency still matter. But this is not yet a case of one new event forcing an immediate menu rewrite.
One unusual tailwind , in her telling: the forint firmed against the euro after the Hungarian elections in April, which, for an importer, helped.
How often do you review prices?
“We review prices every three months, but we raise them much less often.”
Pricing is not something she delegates completely. At Oda, the last price increase was in March 2025. Vidó benchmarks against competitors and tries to stay as affordable as possible.
What size of increase is “safe” before guests notice?
A note before we start. First, we've seen a real jump in sign-ups, and we're now close to 400 people. Welcome all, we're so glad you're here. Plancha is meant to be useful to people who operate hospitality businesses, not a decorative object in your inbox, which means we need to hear from you: what lands, what doesn't, what you'd actually use. Be happy, be annoyed, disagree with us: hello@plancha.food
Second, if you're reading this in your inbox, this is a good moment to click "view in browser." The website looks considerably better than it did a few weeks ago.
Now, to the series.
Inflation is back in Europe: fuel feeding into raw material costs, taxes rising, and a guest who reads the same alarming news you do and decides to order the glass instead of the bottle. It hits operators twice: once on the buying side, where even napkins costs more, and again on the spending side, where the average check softens because the customer is being careful.
So over the next three editions we're asking three operators we rate, one in Romania, one in Hungary, one in Austria, the same set of questions. Not just "what got expensive", but the harder operational stuff: how do you decide when to raise a price, which dishes absorb the increase, what you tell staff to say at the table, and how you read a guest who is spending less without saying so.
Gabriel Alexe co-owns two casual dining restaurants downtown: Bucătăria.localfood (Local Food Kitchen), opened in 2021, and Mosafir Bistro, opened in 2024. Both run short seasonal menus with cultural nods built in: the Tiramisù de Obor, a tomato-cheese-bread dish that references the Italian dessert, the Romanian obsession with tomatoes in season, and Obor, the city's largest farmers' market.
What has actually become more expensive in the past few months?
"Pretty much everything." Raw materials first, fuel prices pushed up the cost of vegetables, eggs, dairy, cheese, meat, and consumables down to napkins and dish detergent. Alexe estimates 15-20% over six to eight months, on top of increases already building before that.
Romanian wines, unfortunately, are losing a bit of ground here because, in terms of the price-to-quality ratio, they are being outcompeted by wines from Spain and Italy.
- Gabriel Alexe, Mosafir Bistro
Then there's the state: over the last 10-12 months, dividend tax, profit tax and social contributions have all gone up. "Last month alone, we paid 75,000 lei (€14,315) in taxes for one quarter." Rent is the one stable line: a five-year contract negotiated at the start, held steady by a good relationship with the landlord.
Is this a genuinely new price hike, or old cost pressure finally arriving?
Alexe thinks the real damage is psychological, and partly media-made. The international shocks: conflict, fuel disruption, hit hard through the coverage.
The combined effect of war in Iran, movements on the markets, all these negative things is a more cautious consumer.
The guest who went out two or three times a week now comes Saturday only. The bottle of wine becomes a glass, or water. The starter gets skipped or shared. The average spending per customer has dropped quite a lot.
How often do you review prices?
Three items before the next service:
- The new Hungarian government wants VAT on fruit and veg down from 27% to 5%. Restaurant operators will likely keep the difference, but some dishes may get easier to put on the menu.
- Austria is trying to use the Eurovision festival for food promotion. Some of it worked very well, other parts, even the farmfluencers couldn't save.
- Taste of Transylvania goes on the road this year, ending in Bucharest in October. The research on whether festivals like this are worth it for operators is clearer than you'd think.
- Follow us on Instagram
Restaurants getting a tax break in Hungary, diners are unlikely to see any of it
People are asking AI where to eat. Attest’s 2025 consumer AI report found that 13.5 percent of consumers ask AI for restaurant, bar, hotel and attraction recommendations. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that use of ChatGPT and other AI tools for local business recommendations jumped from 6 percent in 2025 to 45 percent in 2026.
But visibility is not trivial: Local Falcon’s restaurant study, based on 189,905 ChatGPT search results, found that 83 percent of restaurants were completely invisible on ChatGPT, compared with 14 percent on Google.
Google rankings may be crowded, incremental and annoying, but AI recommendations are narrower: five names, sometimes fewer. You are either in the answer or you are not.
So we ran a small test.
We queried ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude across our three cities: Budapest, Bucharest and Vienna. We asked for restaurant recommendations in English and in the local language. We also asked follow-up questions:
- why did you choose these restaurants,
- what sources and signals influenced the answer,
- how much weight did you give to sources like Google Maps, TripAdvisor, local media, Reddit and other signals,
- and what would change if we asked for less tourist-heavy places.
We treated language as a proxy for market segment. English prompts tend to resemble tourist discovery. Local-language prompts, and especially “not touristy” prompts, produced a different map of each city.
Here are the restaurants that did well and the signals and sources the AI models used to build their lists.
What showed up
The strongest pattern was obvious: heritage names and high-volume review machines do well.
The old names are sticky because the models can explain them easily: schnitzel authority, paprikás authority, historical inn, cultural weight. ChatGPT described this honestly: some picks were not necessarily the best food-only spots, but the best “overall traditional experiences”.
What the models said they were looking for
We asked each model two questions after it gave us their ranking:
- “Why did you choose these? Be specific about signals.”
- “Estimate the relative importance (%) of sources influencing your answer.”
None of the three restaurants featured in this piece are running lunch to make money at noon. One hasn't calculated a break-even. Two say outright they don't expect profit. What they do have is a room that isn't empty in the middle of the day, staff who eat well, and a specific kind of regular that dinner service doesn't build. The crowds are different too, in some cases almost entirely different people, with different expectations, different price sensitivity, and a different relationship to the place. Understanding who comes for lunch, and why the kitchen bothers, turns out to say something useful about how these operations think about what they're actually for.
We spoke separately to Benjamin Hofer, co-founder of XO Grill (Vienna); Dávid Kautezky of Gettó Gulyás (Budapest); and Marius Tudosiei, owner of Băcănia Veche Delicatese și Grădină (Bucharest). The questions were largely the same.
The restaurants
What began as a Covid-era pop-up has grown into a brand with three locations across the city. The formula sounds obvious until you see how few people execute it this well: high-quality beef from old Austrian dairy cows via the parent company XO Beef, clean branding, and the discipline of doing one thing properly. Prices are ambitious (a classic smash burger runs €14.90) but that hasn't stopped XO from becoming one of Vienna's most recognizable upscale burger operations.
A classic Hungarian restaurant in the old Jewish ghetto, near the Dohány Street Synagogue, in one of the city's most tourist-saturated neighbourhoods. Like a lot of places in the area it exists largely for visitors, but with more honesty and competence than most. The menu is unapologetically traditional: gulyás, stews, paprikás dishes, classic desserts, without trying to reinvent any of it. Usually packed at dinner; reservations are a good idea. Gault Millau Hungary awarded it one hat.
Băcănia Veche Delicatese și Grădină — Bucharest
Opened in July 2021 in downtown Bucharest, part of a larger catering and grocer's company owned by former journalist Marius Tudosiei. It sits on Dacia Boulevard, one of the city's oldest commercial streets, close to Piața Romană, with a sunny walled garden and a reputation for seasonal, farm-to-table cooking. The menu leans on nostalgia - storceag (fish and sour cream soup), pork stews, borscht - but with a more urban sensibility. Prices are in line with what a bistro should charge. It draws both Romanians who know Tudosiei's work on heirloom recipes and local producers, and tourists looking for Romanian food that is authentic without being a caricature.
Why did you decide to offer a lunch menu?
XO Grill, Vienna — Benjamin Hofer
The decision came after the opening of a second branch in the 7th district, one of Vienna's more competitive dining areas. "We are definitely on the more expensive side," Hofer says.
"So at some point we realised we had to fit within the area, where right next door you can get a really good pizza for less than €10." The lunch menu, at €12.50, is a deliberate concession to context."
— Benjamin Hofer
Getto Gulyás, Budapest — Dávid Kautezky
Two reasons, in Kautezky's telling, and neither is primarily revenue. The first is marketing: keeping the room full, attracting Hungarian locals alongside tourists, and generating energy from midday. The second is practical: staff can eat, the chef can eat, and food sometimes goes home. "We don't really make money on it," he says.
"It's not typical that someone who comes for lunch returns in the evening for à la carte dining, maybe one or two examples at most. It's a different audience."
— Dávid Kautezky
Băcănia Veche, Bucharest — Marius Tudosiei
Before the pandemic, the company ran a separate lunch bistro in Bucharest's northern business district. When the restaurant opened in 2021, continuing a midday offer made sense. With one deliberate distinction: they don't call it a lunch menu. The reason is structural: in Romania, lunch tickets (a common employee benefit) are capped by law at around €9. Calling it a "lunch menu" sets a price expectation the restaurant can't meet. So they don't.
How is the menu structured, and how often does it change?
Welcome to Plancha Express, in today's edition:
- How war hits your menu and margins
- One of the world’s biggest food influencers came to Budapest and made the worst possible video
- Please stop being creative with toilet signs
- A bakery success story comes to Bucharest
- Turkish food done right in Vienna
- We now have an Instagram, follow us!
How war hits your menu and margins
The US-Israeli military operation against Iran began on February 28 and has no clear end date. Hungary, Romania and Austria are far from the conflict, but their hospitality sectors are already exposed through two channels: weaker demand and rising costs.
The first is demand. In 2024, Israeli visitors accounted for around 693,000 overnight stays in Hungary. For summer 2025, Budapest Airport had planned around 590,000 seats to Israel, part of more than 1 million seats to the Middle East (the largest such capacity in Central and Eastern Europe). With air travel in the region disrupted, a significant share of visits from the region won’t materialise, and the spending that comes with them (food, drink, transport, leisure) will neither. Uncertainty about travelling is already impacting tourism in other parts of Europe, including Cyprus and Greece.
The second is costs, starting with food. Prices are likely to rise through three main drivers. Higher oil and gas prices increase costs across farming, transport and food processing. Supply disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz push up fertiliser prices globally, raising input costs for farmers across Europe. And higher oil prices make ethanol and biodiesel more competitive, diverting crops like maize and vegetable oils away from food use. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the same combination drove EU food and beverage inflation above 19%.
Energy costs are moving in a similar direction. Dutch TTF natural gas futures, Europe's benchmark, rose above €65/MWh in early March, more than 50% above pre-conflict levels. Eurozone energy inflation turned positive in March at 4.9%, after –3.1% in February. For hotels and restaurants, which run kitchens, heating, cooling, laundry and lighting around the clock, this feeds directly into operating costs. The pass-through depends on contract structures and national regulation, but sustained pressure erodes those buffers.
The result is a two-sided squeeze. Operators can absorb the shock and lose margin, or pass it on and risk further weakening demand.
The same kind of pressure is already reshaping menus elsewhere. In Ukraine, one restaurant operator told The Counteroffensive that when electricity cuts hit, fryers go quiet because they use too much power, and kitchens switch to shawarma cooked on a vertical grill because it is cheaper to run. That is what cost shocks look like at ground level: not just higher bills, but operators redesigning what they serve around whatever can still be cooked affordably and reliably.
Operator take: If you haven't reviewed energy contract terms and Middle Eastern booking exposure in the last 30 days, do it this week, the cost trajectory is clear and the window to adjust ahead of it is narrowing.
One of the world’s biggest food influencers came to Budapest and made the worst possible video
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Rooms in the kitchen — operations, customers, industry and the rest.
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§ 06 · Who's on the line
Written by operators, for operators.
For people who run restaurants, hotels, and hospitality businesses in Central Europe.
Zsofi Bajor
I’m a Budapest-based hospitality innovator and food storyteller with a rare dual background: 15 years in television and media and a second career building real-world food concepts that change how people eat.
9 issues filed
Alexei Korolyov
9 issues filed
Georgiana Ilie
Bucharest
Journalist and anthropologist looking at how food influences our world.
9 issues filed
Peter Erdelyi
Budapest-Vienna
8 issues filed
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