Profit

At my current job, we live and die by the spreadsheet. I weigh everything, quantify recipes, and oh god, I know my formulas.
At my last job, when I wrote down recipes, it looked like a shopping list. Everything was to taste, and quantities were reserved for perhaps 20% of the recipes I was given there. By all accounts, Woodfire was in a more comfortable position than Millsy's. What gives?
Honey and I had a couple beers last night and hashed this dilemma out. This is what we came up with:
Years of experience: Tuohy has over 20 years of experience, and worked extensively in hotel kitchens. If you're going to find a costing spreadsheet, it'll be in a kitchen that is as varied and high-volume as a hotel's. I surmise that after awhile, a chef memorizes the costs of certain basic recipes, the same way that we memorize that a vinaigrette is 3 parts oil to 1 vinegar.
Premium price: Woodfire was fine dining. Millsy's? No. Sure, diners were paying a premium for unique, exciting ingredients, but as we were always told, they were also paying for them to be cooked and presented perfectly. If that's the model, then telling the cook (who is to be preparing and plating every dish to exacting standards) to make a sauce to taste assumes some variability, and the higher price covers that. In a perfect world, that means that the cook making your food can accommodate lovely, inconsistent products. Skill costs in every industry: in a restaurant, it costs the chef in wages, and in the dining room it costs the guest. But when a dish is consistently amazing, everyone's happy.
Waste, menu, and stock. We record every gram of wastage at Millsy's, so that the accountants can square our numbers. You can guess how this worked at Woodfire. Woodfire's menu also changed daily. Crate of corn in the walk-in? Guess how many places you'll see corn in the next three days. People tend to assume that a daily menu is some insurmountable task, that every dish on the menu changes daily. A daily menu means that chefs have the flexibility to find as many ways to sell what's in their walk-in before it goes off as possible.
Millsy's is also a bar, and like several of the restaurants where I've worked over here, if we run out of something, we have to buy it from the supermarket next door. It was probably easier to keep track of the kitchen costs at Woodfire.
Any other ideas?