The Short Menu worthbuilding.org

A short menu.
One price. The receipt is on the tray.

Nine items. Five ingredients in the thing that used to have thirty-eight. The same price at every table on earth, printed next to what it cost us to make it.

The whole menucost to makeprice
The Burgerbeef, bun, salt, onion, one sauce. That's it.$1.10$3.00
The Chickena whole muscle, not a paste. breaded, fried.$1.40$3.50
Five-Ingredient Nuggetschicken, flour, salt, oil, one spice. count them below.$0.80$2.50
The Friespotato, oil, salt. potatoes you'd recognise as potatoes.$0.35$1.50
The Saladactual leaves, dressed at the counter. no shelf life to protect.$0.90$3.00
The Colawater, sugar, the syrup, the fizz. sweetened with sugar, once.$0.15$1.00
The Coffeebeans, water, heat. named by the farm.$0.30$1.50
The Piefruit, pastry, sugar. the fruit was fruit.$0.45$1.50
The Waterwater. free, always, no purchase. the counter offers it first.$0.02free

The green number is what the food cost to make, checked against the invoice, not the brochure. The gap between the two columns is the margin, and we would rather you saw it than guessed at it. Nobody has ever left this counter wondering what they ate.

What's in a nugget

Set the slider to how many ingredients a nugget on the usual menu has. Watch which ones are food.

30

Fast food was a good idea once: a hot meal, the same everywhere, cheap, quick. Then it learned that the cheapest ingredient is the one you can't taste and can't name, and the menu grew to hide it. Thirty-eight ingredients in a nugget is not a recipe. It is a legal document.

This counter goes the other way. A short menu you can hold in your head. A price that does not change because of what city you're standing in or what your phone tells the register about you. And the receipt, itemized, on the tray, before you ask — because a place that won't tell you what its food cost is a place hoping you won't work it out.