Plate to Plan — Launch a Regenerative Menu at Trattoria Radici

A four-round, advanced hospitality and food-innovation simulation set inside Trattoria Radici, a one-Michelin-star, 64-seat trattoria in the hills outside Bologna (Italy; FY2025 revenue €2.4M, 9% net margin / €216K, food cost 33%). Chef-owner Elena Conti has publicly committed to relaunch as a regenerative kitchen — soil-restoring local farms, near-zero waste, hyper-seasonal — and the first menu drops in 35 days.

The crisis: the chef's creative draft menu prices food cost at 41% (well past the 35% margin floor the cost controller defends), the three regenerative farms can guarantee only ~60% of forecast volume, current food waste is 9% (~€71K/yr) against a ≤4% promise, and the customer panel scored the draft 8.4/10 on novelty while flagging two dishes 'worthy but joyless'.

A food critic and a regional sustainability award jury are booked in month one.

Playing the head-chef leadership team you (1) read the pantry — diagnose exactly where creativity and economics collide, separating dishes that must be improvised from anchor dishes that can be structured (Leone's improvisation-within-structure lens); (2) source the menu — choosing per ingredient whether to commit to a regenerative farm, blend with conventional, or substitute, while honestly setting the regenerative share and designing for the 60% supply ceiling; (3) engineer the menu — using the stars/plowhorses/puzzles/dogs grid, root-to-leaf whole-ingredient cooking, pricing discipline and reworking the joyless dishes to pull food cost ≤35%, waste ≤4% and novelty ≥80 without greenwashing; and (4) launch and defend a 12-month operating model to the critic and award jury, deciding how the menu flexes weekly with supply and how front-of-house tells the story without lecturing.

The math rewards constraint-driven creativity and punishes the six classic errors — creativity over economics (41% food cost), quiet greenwashing by blending conventional behind a regenerative claim, promising a fixed menu against a volatile harvest, treating the 9% waste as a disposal line, keeping virtue-over-desirability joyless dishes, and over-pricing the check to solve a kitchen problem.

Final KPIs track Menu Margin (food cost %), Sustainability, Customer Novelty and Food Waste %.

An advanced simulation for participants used to working with the main frameworks and trade-offs of the subject, designed for executive education and experienced professionals.