§ Issues
12
Dispatches filed and counting — for the line, not the lounge.
§ 02 · Recent issues
From the plancha.
Bi-weekly · All issues →
waste
5 min read
In the business of wasting food
Food waste is one of the least-tracked costs in hospitality. Here's what the numbers look like when you measure it.
plancha express
4 min read
Bread wars, spy pizza, and why your coffee bill just went up
Plancha Express edition, five things worth your attention before the next service.
tofu
4 min read
You're selling tofu wrong
How soy became CEE's most complicated ingredient and what that means for your menu.
google reviews
4 min read
How restaurants win on Google Reviews (without doing anything sketchy)
Most restaurants are already 4.5+. The difference now is credibility, recency, and replies. A practical playbook for asking, responding, and avoiding risky review shortcuts.
News
1 min read
Plancha is coming very soon
Plancha is coming soon: a newsletter for the people who run restaurants, hotels, and hospitality businesses across Central Europe. If you’re an owner, GM, head chef, F&a
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
This edition is about food waste not as a moral issue, but as a business one.
Most restaurants can tell you their labour cost, rent pressure, and maybe even average spend per cover. Far fewer can tell you how much food they buy and never actually sell.
The numbers are not trivial. Studies regularly estimate that 5 to 15 percent of purchased food is never served. A more concrete benchmark: the average restaurant discards 75 to 150 grams of food per cover. For a 150-cover operation, that can mean around 15 kilos a day, or more than five tonnes a year. You pay for that food when you buy it, and then often pay again to have it taken away.
We’ll look at what that waste costs, how operators in Vienna, Budapest and Bucharest are dealing with surplus, and why the first step is still the least glamorous one: measuring the problem properly.
Vienna: the bread problem
Bread is Austria's most discarded food. Households throw away 100,000 tonnes annually, 28 percent of all food waste, narrowly ahead of fruit and vegetables. Bakeries discard an additional 52,000 tonnes of unsold goods each year.
In the premium bakery sector, waste has been reframed as part of the brand story. Öfferl and Joseph Brot, both from Lower Austria, have built high-price positioning around sustainability credentials. The practice of reworking unsold bread into new loaves is real, but it doesn't resolve the structural problem: you can only rework so much. The more scalable solutions sit a tier below. Most mass-market bakeries and supermarket bakery sections now apply evening discounts in the final half-hour. Most are also listed on Too Good To Go, Austria's dominant food-saving app. The Geier bakery – a storied brand that has reinvented itself under the same banner of sustainability – takes a variation: a bag of unsold goods in the last hour for €3.99, fifty cents of which goes to the Austrian Food Bank.
Past scarcity driving current waste
Romania's relationship with food waste is more cultural.
The Christmas-and-Easter supermarket footage, carts loaded to capacity, coverage slightly contemptuous, has been a recurring media ritual for decades. For generations who came through the food shortages of the 1980s, visible abundance is a response to scarcity. This is not static; inflation, and a younger generation that didn't experience the shortages, are changing the calculus.
Elena Soare has run Urban Dada at the National Theater in Bucharest for over a decade. She is seeing it directly: "If the event is for 40 people, they order 35 menus now." Packaging leftovers, considered faintly embarrassing five years ago, is increasingly something guests ask for themselves. Her kitchen has operated this way for years regardless: the lunch menu runs to 20 or 30 portions maximum; demand beyond that gets an equivalent dish made to order. Leftover risotto becomes arancini. Dried bread rolls become croutons.
In addition to the cultural shift, policy is also changing in Romania, restaurants have until March 31 to file food waste reduction documentation with the government or face fines of around €8,000. Around 400,000 to 450,000 entities must comply.
Waste reduction as a marketing channel
Albert Wettstein, co-founder of Munch (which operates in Romania under the brand Bonapp.eco) describes the contrast directly: Romania sits closer to Istanbul than Budapest in its food culture.
This time we’re trying Plancha Express: five shorter items you can read between service and payroll. Same rule as always: no fluff, no trend theatre; just things that might change how you think about menus, margins, staff, or guest experience. Hit reply and tell us which of these you want more of (and which you never want to see again).
CEE's most heated food debate right now: why is artisanal bread so expensive?
Romanian chef and food activist Adrian Hădean opened a public debate last month with a pointed question: if Romania produces cheap wheat, why does artisanal bread cost 10 euros a kilo? He identifies two structural failures: the country exports raw grain while importing processed flour, and the state offers craft bakers almost no protection or support. Lara Schütz, an Austria-based baker and bread sommelière of Romanian origin, responded on her own Substack: wheat and flour together represent just 4 to 10 percent of a loaf's final price. The rest is processing, labour, storage, transport, and quality control. Price volatility in grain markets barely registers at the shelf. Both are making valid arguments about different things. Hădean is raising a policy question about access to food. Schütz is writing about the economics. The conversation they're edging toward but not quite having: what structural support would actually allow craft bakers to bring prices down without destroying their margins?
Operator take: If you sell bread, explain the process (time/skill), not the ingredients.
Michelin dinner 50% off for hospitality professionals in Budapest
Soybeans had a PR problem. For decades in parts of Central Europe, it meant deprivation: filler in bad salami, a symbol of scarcity. Today, the same ingredient shows up as high-margin edamame in every poke bowl from Vienna to Bucharest.
We dug into 15+ years of Google Trends data to see how interest in tofu has shifted across Austria, Hungary, and Romania, and when it peaks. Demand is rising, but it's intensely seasonal. If you're planning a menu around plant-based protein, timing matters: we'll show you exactly when to put it on the menu.
- But first, where to get the best fresh, artisanal (single-origin, free-range, small-batch, heritage varietal, etc.) tofu in CEE?
It’s probably the Erste Wiener Tofu Manufaktur at the Karmeliter market. It makes tofu fresh from Lower Austrian soybeans using traditional Chinese methods, to take away or enjoy on the spot. A bowl of crisp tofu pieces in pumpkin seed oil sauce comes highly recommended.
Brought by the Habsburgs, maligned by Ceaușescu, redeemed by the Orthodox Church
Vienna being the tofu capital of CEE is not entirely surprising, this is the city where soybeans arrived in Europe on 1 May 1873.
That morning, thousands gathered in the Prater for Vienna's first world's fair. Among them was agriculturalist Friedrich Haberlandt, who made straight for the Japanese and Chinese pavilions. Alongside lacquerwork and porcelain, these nations had brought something few Europeans had encountered: soybeans. Haberlandt was searching for inexpensive ways to improve the empire's nutrition. He planted his first seeds in a university garden in central Vienna. Before long, soy would spread across the continent.
But soy's journey through Central Europe hasn't been straightforward.
In Romania, "You never had to eat soy salami" remains a reproach that survivors of Communist food scarcity throw at those who didn't live through it.
In the 1980s, when the country was exporting everything to pay external debts, the few foods available were pseudo-charcuterie made from pink slime and soy. The ingredient became synonymous with hunger and dictatorship.
Its redemption arrived through the church.
After 1989, religious practices suppressed under communism returned, including the strict Orthodox fasts. When Romanians fast for Christmas and Easter, they go full vegan: no meat, eggs, or dairy. Tofu became a way to keep traditions while eating something beyond potatoes and beans.
Today, ramen places, sushi counters, and salad bars all display edamame. It's exotic. It's expensive. It's soy (even if most people have no idea).
Taste, both biological and moral, is highly susceptible to the effects of context, which shapes perception. “In this case,” says anthropologist Adriana Sohodoleanu, “the context is created by placing the food within different logics: soy salami belonged to the logic of the rational diet promoted by a duplicitous political regime that lacked legitimacy and consumers’ trust; soybeans/edamame, on the other hand, fit into the logic of cool consumption, the kind that constructs and sustains social identities.”
Interest is rising, but remains seasonal
We tracked 15 years of Google search data across Austria, Hungary, and Romania and the seasonal pattern has direct implications for your menu planning.
Welcome to Plancha: a practical newsletter for people who run restaurants, hotels, and hospitality businesses in Central & Eastern Europe. We’re building this because the industry deserves something better than PR dressed up as “insight”: utility first, every time. (If you want the full “what we cover / who we are / how we’ll fund this” version, our About page lays it out clearly.)
Our very first edition focuses on Google Reviews. Not because it’s particularly great fun responding online to people who leave 1-star reviews because they failed to make a reservation (“BuT tHeRe iS a FrEe TaBlE OVerR tHeRe, I cAn SeE iT, wHy WoUlDn’T yOu LeT uS sIt ThErE?!”), but because they are still influencing customer choices for a lot of restaurants.
A quick regional snapshot: ratings are crowded at the top
We pulled restaurant listings via the Google Places API (15 km radius from city centers) in Budapest, Bucharest, and Vienna.
A few useful takeaways:
- Most restaurants are “rated” (roughly 91–94% of the total restaurant universe in these cities).
- 4.5–5.0 is the biggest tier:
- Budapest: ~54% of rated restaurants sit at 4.5+
- Bucharest: ~48% at 4.5+
- Vienna: ~49% at 4.5+
- The truly low end is tiny (about 2–4% under 3.0 across these cities).
Translation: you’re competing in a market where “good ratings” are common, so recency, credibility, and how you handle the occasional bad moment matter a lot.
Review farming and potential consequences
As you can see above the jump in 5.0-rated restaurants is unusually sharp, especially in Bucharest, which may reflect a mix of factors, including possible manipulation. Google has some pretty clear policies as to what is allowed and not allowed on its platform.
Plancha is coming soon: a newsletter for the people who run restaurants, hotels, and hospitality businesses across Central Europe.
If you’re an owner, GM, head chef, F&B director, operator, or the kind of creative leader who carries a P&L in their head whether they want it or not: this is for you.
Our promise is simple: utility first. Every issue should help you make at least one better decision: about running a tighter operation, understanding your customers, or staying ahead of the forces reshaping the industry. We’ll land in your inbox, and we’ll aim to be the opposite of PR-heavy trade press: clear separation of editorial and sponsorship, data and evidence where possible, and respect for your time.
You can sign up for free now to be there when the first issue drops. If you like what we’re building, tell someone else in the industry and if you want to help shape it, drop us a mail at hello@plancha.food and tell us what you need.
§ Files
20
Rooms in the kitchen — operations, customers, industry and the rest.
§ Cadence
Bi-weekly
In your inbox, never on a service day.
§ Price
€0
Free to read. Members get the spreadsheets.
§ 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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