THE NEW EXPERIENCE RESTAURANT
Angela Fox and Zooey Caulfield were food and nutrition majors at State University, as well as
close friends and roommates. Upon graduation Angela and Zooey decided to open a French
restaurant in Draperton, the small town where the university was located. There were no other
French restaurants in Draperton, and the possibility of doing something new and somewhat risky
intrigued the two friends. They purchased an old Victorian home just off Main Street for their
new restaurant, which they named “The Possibility.”
Angela and Zooey knew in advance that at least initially they could not offer a full,
varied menu of dishes. They had no idea what their local customers’ tastes in French cuisine
would be, so they decided to serve only two full-course meals each night, one with beef and the
other with fish. Their chef, Pierre, was confident he could make each dish so exciting and
unique that two meals would be sufficient, at least until they could assess which menu items
were most popular. Pierre indicated that with each meal he could experiment with different
appetizers, soups, salads, vegetable dishes, and desserts until they were able to identify a full
selection of menu items.
The next problem for Angela and Zooey was to determine how many meals to prepare for
each night so they could shop for ingredients and set up the work schedule. They could not
afford too much waste. They estimated that they would sell a maximum of 60 meals each night.
Each fish dinner, including all accompaniments, requires 15 minutes to prepare, and each beef
dinner takes twice as long. There is a total of 20 hours of kitchen staff labour available each day.
Angela and Zooey believe that because of the health consciousness of their potential clientele,
they will sell at least three fish dinners for every two beef dinners. However, they also believe
that at least 10% of their customers will order beef dinners. The profit from each fish dinner will
be approximately $12, and the profit from a beef dinner will be about $16.
a) Formulate a linear programming model for Angela and Zooey that will help them
estimate the number of meals they should prepare each night.
b) solve this model graphically.
c) Estimate their maximum earnings for a night based on your solution from part (b)