Menu costings sheet with access?

Hello all.

I am using two excel file to do menu costings. One file is a basic layout where I can set my profit requirements etc. The second file is the food list, which has columns for food title, weight, cost etc

The first file uses vLookup for the second so that I can pick items from a list. The reason I did this was so that I could update prices in the first file and it automatically update the first.

There are problems with this.

The first file has gotton out of hand because I need a separate sheet for each dish
Picking from that list is tedious, its got over 300 items in.

My new works PC has access on it. I have a limited understanding of access but understand I can link it with excel and wonder if this would be more appropriate for my needs?

What I need to achieve is:
An easier way to pick food, eg category of food followed by the item.
A way to list all the dishes I have created, their yield, cost, GP etc.
Preferably not so many sheets in a file!

I am not saying access is the answer, but could it be? Any hints and tips on moving this forward? I can battle on with my little set up, but I have been tasked with a four week cost and sales analysis of an entire menu and am trying to make it as painless as possible!

Another thought I had was if I could have a pop up box with catagories that would then determine what appears in the next pop up box based on Vlookup, which I seem to recal was called dynamic vLookup, but for the life of me I cannot remember why it was I could not do that.