The dynamic pricing that actually makes sense in your restaurant (and it's not Dani García's)

Dani García is not talking about this. He's talking about something else, and it's worth not mixing them up.

Demand-based dynamic pricing is what he proposed: raise a dish at 10pm on Saturday because the room is full, lower it on Monday because it's empty. Airline logic.

Cost-based dynamic pricing is what we propose here: raise or lower the selling price because what it costs to make changed, not because more or fewer people are in the room. It's the logic of market-price seafood, the formula bars and restaurants across Spain already use for fresh fish and shellfish.

A customer who pays more because the room is full is, at bottom, paying for something that doesn't benefit them. A customer who pays more because oil went up is paying the same thing it would cost them to cook it at home: more.

Yes, and here's the detail almost nobody tells you. The Community of Madrid says that if you order a dish off menu or marked S.M. (market price), the establishment must state the price or provide a menu where it appears. OCU confirmed it in July: for any market-price product there must be a sufficient reference so the consumer knows how much they will pay. Translation: you can move the price, but you can't leave it hanging.

And if your menu is only on QR, OCU reminds that restaurants must also provide a physical menu. If the QR says €9 and the board says €8, that's on you, not the customer.

To do this well you need cost traceability by supplier, not quarterly, but every time a key ingredient crosses a threshold, and you update the printed menu and the QR the same day. Also explain the change: a cost rise is tolerated better than a demand rise, but only if the customer sees the justification. And there's a ceiling: nobody wants to order their usual dish and find a different price every time.

Spain has more than 300,000 hospitality establishments, according to the Spanish Hospitality Yearbook. Our own estimate: most set menu prices by gut feel, copying the place next door or inheriting a number from three years ago, not from an up-to-date recipe cost. Before moving price with cost, the easy win is having a solid recipe cost and leaving it alone. Cost-based dynamic pricing is not step one. It's step two.

Illustrative example, with our own estimated figures.

Recipe cost for a portion of sautéed artichokes with ham: 400g of artichoke, plus ham, oil, garlic and lemon. In November, with artichoke at 1,20€/kg, cost is 1,68€. Menu price: 6,50€. Gross margin: 74%.

At the end of the season, at 3,60€/kg, triple, cost rises to 2,64€. If you don't move the menu price, margin falls to 59%: fifteen points less, on the same dish, without showing up until you close the month.

Keeping 74% would mean raising to 10,20€, a 57% jump almost no customer accepts overnight. What most people do, without calling it dynamic, is raise halfway, to €7.50, for example, or pull the dish in scarce weeks. The lesson is not to charge €10.20: it's that without measuring cost by season you don't know you're losing fifteen margin points at the usual price.

1. Review which dishes lean hardest on a single volatile ingredient, seasonal, fish, meat: those are the candidates, not the whole menu.
2. Set a threshold: a move above 5% on an ingredient that is more than 10% of the dish's cost.
3. Update the recipe cost when the threshold is hit, and change printed menu and QR the same day.
4. Leave a line the waiter can repeat: "+€1 for the seasonal artichoke rise, same margin as always".
5. Start with sides, not the house anchor dish.

There's no rule fixing how many times you can change a price; the law requires visibility and consistency between what's shown and what's charged, but it doesn't cap frequency. We don't know of documented cases in Spain of neighbourhood restaurants systematically repricing by cost outside fish: this is a reasoned proposal, not a practice at scale. And it remains a hypothesis that customers truly tell apart "up for cost, explained" from "up because we said so".