The actual rule of thumb is one third ingredients, one third labor, and one third overhead including rent. And you hope to have a tiny sliver of profit left over, by making them a hair less than a third.
But that's also just a rule of thumb, as both labor costs and rental costs have a great deal of geographic variation compared to ingredient costs.
average profits in the realm of 2% are for grocery stores not restaurants.
Lets say you're a moderately successful restaurant that sells 200 breakfasts at $10 each. At 2% profit that means the total profit on 200 breakfasts is just $40 for the whole morning.
You're just out to lunch and those are not the correct profit margins or realistic. You might be thinking about grocery stores whose net margins might be in that realm of 2-4%. I don't know where you got your understanding of how the pricing works but please don't run a restaurant.
Your mistake is that you have separated overhead and labour, when they're out of the same 1/3. 1/3 overhead including rent, 1/3 ingredients, 1/3 in the pocket.
That includes things like failed restaurants that didn't make money and closed as well as fast food restaurants that operate on margins impossible for other restaurants and essentially act as real estate companies.
If you want to run a restaurant and not join the tens of thousands that close each year you can't run them the way you're saying. Doing $2000 in business and making $40 isn't sustainable. Successful restaurants don't run that way.
Not 33%.
The actual rule of thumb is one third ingredients, one third labor, and one third overhead including rent. And you hope to have a tiny sliver of profit left over, by making them a hair less than a third.
But that's also just a rule of thumb, as both labor costs and rental costs have a great deal of geographic variation compared to ingredient costs.