The Number

Search “how much food per person” and you get a chart that treats every dish as though it were the only thing on the table. Multiply that across a menu with five sides and you have bought food for a room twice the size — and you will still run out of the one dish everybody wanted.

Three ideas instead of a chart

• The hunger budget. A person has one appetite for the evening and every course spends from the same account. A fourth side does not make anyone hungrier; it divides the same stomach into more pieces. The product costs that out — in food, in pans, in burners, and in things to reheat at the worst possible moment.
• Yield. Nobody eats raw weight. A bone-in roast serves a little over half what it weighed in the shop, shell-on shrimp about half, a whole fish rather less. This, not appetite, is why hosts run out of the main.
• The appetite curve. Standing food is eaten hardest in the first forty-five minutes and then falls off a cliff, so appetizers are counted by the half hour rather than by the guest. Before a seated dinner the whole thing is capped: past five pieces a head, people arrive at the table already fed, which is the most common way a good dinner lands flat.

The bar is in here too

Bottles, beer, spirits, glassware, garnish, and zero-proof sized for everyone at hour three rather than for the two people who do not drink. Plus batching with the dilution water counted as an ingredient — because a batch made without it is twenty percent stronger and considerably worse than the drink you tested.

What’s free

Every Number This Site Runs On is the free reference: the figures and reasoning stay open. The Board Calculator, Bar Calculator and Scaling Calculator also stay free for single questions. The Number is the working file: one guest count carries through the kitchen and bar, your quantities stay with you while you shop, and the file tells you what runs out first when the evening changes. The free pages cover the reference and the individual arithmetic. This file carries your numbers through the night.

One self-contained HTML file that works offline forever. Also included in The Host’s Operating System.