That's sounds great. But from a business point of view it's not. It creates waste because you can't actually predict what people will eat.
I owned a restaurant with exh. All cooked from scratch. To do it effectively without having a big staff bill for prep and service, the menu needs to be small.
It's a very popular restaurant. But customers do feel we should have had a big menu. But they don't realise that will run costs up......increasing prices.
I'm not suggesting you should make up loads of complete meals from scratch to cover everything that could conceivably be ordered, but I don’t know why a certain quantity of ingredients common to a number of dishes couldn't be pre-prepared in small batches at intervals – veg peeled, mushrooms chopped etc. Even if some of them went into the fridge ready for the next day's trading, they’d still be fresh and taste good, in a way that pre-prepared, processed, mass-market frozen food stuffed full of preservatives never does.
I agree with the menu-size issue, though. People have unrealistic expectations nowadays as they just subliminally assume there must be an instant app for everything – but if you explain to them, surely they start to get an idea of why you only have so many options? The sort who can't/won't understand, however much you make it clear, probably won’t end up being your core clientele anyway, and will just deviate back to F&B’s (which is fine, if that’s what they prefer).
If you know you only like fresh cooked on the premises right there in front of you grub, go to them.
Just don't go there if you really hate them. It's not hard, no-one's forcing you.
This is my whole point, though – I get that it’s probably safe to assume that a chain will do this, but while a lot of independent pubs and restaurants do continue to serve proper chef-cooked food, a lot of very similar-looking places have sadly taken the shilling and outsourced to 3663 or Brake’s. How do you tell?
I don’t know how true it is, but I read that one of the big pre-prep microwave-meal wholesalers had even deliberately given the brand name ‘Home-cooked’ to their most popular range, so that restaurants could (sort-of) truthfully ‘assure’ people that their food was indeed ‘home-cooked’.
Maybe I’ll start being bolder and call them up beforehand to ask where and how their food is prepared, but even that isn't very practical if you’re travelling on an unfamiliar route and you need to stop for a meal.
@Thunderpunt
Thank you for your very helpful input. Your restaurant sounds exactly like the kind of place that has pride and standards and which deserves to be very well-supported 
I'm kind of shocked that people expect something made from scratch in a place that charges under £10 for a meal.
Unfortunately you have to pay really quite a lot for a decent, nothing fancy, freshly cooked meal that's as good as a home-cooked one.
Plenty of traditional cafes do it and many proper pubs will have meals for a tenner or maybe a pound or two more. Steak or lobster will obviously cost more, but that’s just the cost of the raw ingredients. It’s not even like some of the microwave-meal places are particularly cheap (Wetherspoons is an exception, granted) – they just take more of the money as profit for themselves and shareholders.
Surely, what money you save on time and wages for skilled staff is somewhat negated by the cut that the producer/processor/wholesaler supply chain takes at every stage?
I have worked in many food establishments and it’s impossible to cook everything from scratch in such a small space. All restaurant chains use pre prepared food, most things are microwaved and fried, how else would they manage to have such a large menu? It saves on waste, it’s saves on money and it saves having to have a trained chef
And it also saves on having to eat quality fresh food that tastes of anything.
Maybe the large menus are the problem. If decent restaurants and food pubs could have the courage to offer a smaller menu – and plan their menus so that they have a number of ingredients common to a few otherwise-different dishes - and do what they do very well, people might actually come to realise that bigger isn't always better. Even places like McDonalds and Burger King (which I don’t include in my criticism because, although I'm not a fan, they don’t give any pretensions of being anything other than processed fast-food and their prices aren't too bad) only have very limited menus, with lots of crossover between the different items – and they seem to do quite well from it.
I think YANBU about F&B but YABU about carveries. All the carveries round here are fantastic value for money with fresh veg and lovely turkey, even if the potatoes and YPs are frozen.
But how can it be more expensive to buy a huge bag of potatoes and some oil and do big batches in the oven for the steady stream of customers than to pay a producer and wholesaler for processing, packaging and freezing what started off as the same potatoes? I understand that, if you choose the roast meal option on a Wednesday evening, from a wide selection of dishes on the menu, you will get frozen Yorkshires and potatoes (unless you’re willing to wait well over an hour after ordering, which nobody would be) – but a busy carvery at lunchtime on Sunday, where 4 out of 5 customers are having pretty much the same thing?!