How to Start a Restaurant?

From Howtopedia - english

Start small.

1. make some lemonade
2. put up a lemonade stand on the sidewalk
3. charge 5 cents a cup.

As profits grow, branch out into other beverages and foods. You'll be Wolgang Puck in no time.

Comments: take a look how this guys started this amazing smoothies brand. innocentdrinks.co.uk This is not a restaurant, but they started thinking small... like the "lemonade idea"

One thing for sure, a restaurant lives and dies on its procedures. Before you open, you have to be prepared with a complete detail of everything you or your employees might do. This list is often hard to come by, as new restaurateurs don't necessarily have the background or experience to figure out what's going to happen.

A good way to start is by imagining yourself standing in your restaurant, waiting for your first customers. When they walk in, what are you going to do? Also, how do they know you're open? Is it because the "Open" sign is up? How did it get that way? Is the front door unlocked? Who did that? When?

Get a sheet of paper and put 'Opening Procedures' at the top of it. Write some steps on it, leaving some space between them for the things you'll remember later. For now, put things like...

1. Unlock the front door
2. Put up the Open sign
3. Brew a pot of coffee
4. Start the cash register
5. Turn on the grill
6. Put out the pastries

So, look over your list. Imagine yourself as a new employee of the restaurant that doesn't know how to do anything. It's fair to presume that anyone hired to work can do simple things like 'put out the Open sign' without further instruction, but what about 'brew a pot of coffee'? What steps do you go through to do that? What buttons get pushed? Where's the coffee stored? Is it a special grind? If the instructions are complicated, make a separate list for brewing coffee and indicate where to find it on the 'Opening Procedures' list. If not, put them in as bullets under the step for brewing the coffee.

Go through this exercise for every thing you can think of that happens in your restaurant, even if your certain that you're the only one who will ever do it, and you know perfectly well how to do whatever it is. Sooner or later, you'll be happy you did, such as when you've been struck with the Martian death flu, and you're out for three days, unable to come to work. Someone else will have to take over the procedure, and you want to make sure they're doing it the way you want it done.