How to open a restaurant in the UK, from the kitchen side

About this guide to opening a restaurant

The short answer: how to open a restaurant in the UK

To open a restaurant in the UK you settle the concept and premises, raise the money, register the food business with your local authority at least 28 days before you trade, and build the team and the menu. The step that gets skipped is costing the menu before you commit to the lease and the kit. The menu sets your gross profit, your kitchen equipment and your labour, so it should be worked out first, not last.

What the usual checklist leaves out

Search for how to open a restaurant and the results agree on the same list: concept, business plan, premises, finance, licences, staff, marketing. All of it is needed. What is missing is any account of how the menu fits into it, which is odd, because the menu is the product.

Three decisions in that list are really menu decisions:

• The premises. What a room can earn is set by what the menu returns per cover and how many covers the room can take. You cannot judge a rent without both.
• The kitchen fit-out. Equipment should follow the dishes. The reverse, buying a kitchen and then writing a menu to suit it, is how a site ends up with kit it never uses and a gap where the menu needs it.
• The staffing plan. Labour is largely a consequence of how many separately prepped components are on the menu, not of how many dishes there are.

So the kitchen side runs in a different order from the paperwork. The sections below follow it.

Step 1: decide what the menu has to earn

Before any dish is written, set the numbers it has to hit. These come from the concept: the price your guests will pay, and the gross profit the business needs to cover its costs. Work backwards from the price on the menu, exactly as the menu pricing guide does, because the room sets the price, not your cost.

Take an illustrative restaurant with an average food spend of £30.00 per cover on the menu, which is £25.00 net of VAT. At a 68 percent gross profit target, the average plate cost has to land at £8.00 across the menu, and each cover returns £17.00 in cash. Those two numbers are now the brief for every dish.

Check your own dishes against a target with the GP calculator, which works on the net price and so avoids the VAT mistake that quietly costs six points of margin.

Step 2: work out how many covers it takes to break even

This is the calculation that decides whether a site is viable, and it needs only the menu's cash per cover and your weekly fixed costs.

If weekly fixed costs, which are rent, rates, labour, utilities and everything else that is not food, come to £9,000, and each cover returns £17.00, the site needs about 530 covers a week to break even. Across a six day week that is about 88 covers a day. In a 60 seat room, that is roughly one and a half turns of every table, every day, before a penny of profit.

Two things follow. If that number looks implausible for the location, the menu or the premises is wrong, and it is far cheaper to find out now than after the fit-out. And a lift in spend per cover moves the figure fast: every extra pound of cash margin per cover lowers the covers you need. The profit per cover estimator shows what a change is worth over a year. These are illustrative figures, not a forecast for any site.

Step 3: design the menu around the kitchen you can afford

An opening menu is easy to over-build. A long menu feels generous and is the most expensive thing a new kitchen can carry: more prep, more stock, more waste, more things for a new team to get wrong in the first month.

• Start smaller than you want to. A short menu can grow once you know what sells. A long one is hard to cut without a reprint and a drop in confidence.
• Count prepped components, not dishes. Ten dishes sharing eight components are cheaper to run than six dishes with six separate prep chains. The labour guide shows how to put a figure on it.
• Give every section an anchor and a clear route up. The structure of a priced menu is a sales decision as much as a cooking one, covered in the menu engineering guide.
• Plan for the brigade you will actually have. A menu written for five cooks and run by three will fail on its first full Saturday.

That last point is where I learned it. I helped build a restaurant in Chesterfield from scratch, as sous chef and then head chef, and cooked a high standard of evening service with a small brigade there. A small team makes menu design a discipline: every dish earns its place on the pass or it goes. What I did there is on the about page.

Step 4: let the menu decide the equipment

With a draft menu, go through it dish by dish and write down where each component is cooked and held. The pattern shows you what the kitchen needs.

• Three dishes that all need the grill and nothing else free means one grill is a bottleneck.
• A dessert section that needs a pastry station nobody has the staff to run is a section to rethink, not to equip.
• An item needing a piece of kit used for one dish is a candidate to change the dish.

Do this before the kitchen is designed. It is far cheaper to change a dish on paper than to change a kitchen layout after it is installed.

Step 5: cost and specify every dish before you open

Every dish needs a costing built from the ingredients up, at the yielded price, and a written spec the whole team can cook to. Without both, plate cost on opening night is a guess, and the gap between the guess and the real figure is margin you lose invisibly for weeks.

• Build the plate cost with the recipe costing calculator, using usable weight rather than invoice weight.
• Put the figure through the food cost calculator to see its cash margin and where it sits on the matrix.
• Write the spec in grams and steps, with the hold time and the failure points, so it can be cooked the same way by the third person to try it.

Setting this up properly is what a development sprint is for: a brief with the target plate cost, margin, prep time and skill level, then costed and specified dishes trialled before launch. For a single site the same work is a smaller version of it.

Step 6: set up suppliers and allergen data

Open supplier accounts and agree price lists before you cost the final menu, so the numbers hold on the first order and not only on paper. Ask each supplier for allergen information on every product at the same time, because you will need it for every dish. An ingredient you cannot source reliably at your volume is a dish you cannot sell reliably.

Allergen information has to be available for every dish you serve, and a dish listed without it is a liability, not a shortcut. If you will sell any food prepacked on the premises, there are additional labelling rules under Natasha's Law, set out in the allergens guide, so check them with your local authority's environmental health team.

Step 7: register the food business, and plan the date around it

You must register a new food business with your local authority at least 28 days before you start trading. Registration is free and cannot be refused. Food Standards Agency Some councils also set an upper limit on how early you can register, so work it back from a realistic opening date and not an optimistic one, and check with yours. GOV.UK, Starting a food business

You also need a documented food safety system based on HACCP principles, and a premises licence if you will sell alcohol. These are the parts of opening that can fix the date and that nothing else on this page can speed up, so start them as soon as the lease is signed.

Step 8: trial before the public sees it

Run the full menu at service speed with people who will give honest feedback, and measure what you can: ticket times, which dishes slow the pass, plate costs against the costing, waste at the end of the night. A trial is where a dish that works at a test bench fails because the section cannot run it at 8pm.

Set the menu to change on what the trial shows. A dish that fails is a cheap discovery at this point and a costly one three weeks after opening. Plan more dishes than you intend to launch, so a failure does not leave a gap.

The first twelve weeks after opening

Opening costings are theory, and the first weeks are where theory meets the till.

• Stock take weekly, from day one. Gaps between the theoretical and actual figure show up quickly, and the eleven leaks guide is where they usually are.
• Read the sales mix once there is enough trading to mean something. Which dishes sell, and which earn, tells you what to promote, reprice or drop.
• Resist adding dishes. The pressure to expand the menu in the first month is real. A sales-led reason to add a dish is fine; an anxiety-led one adds cost.
• Review prices once you have real costs. Then work on growing the sales without giving the profit away.

A menu audit after the first few months does this formally, scoring every dish on cash margin and share of sales against the plan you started with.

Common mistakes when opening a restaurant

• Choosing the premises before costing the menu. The rent has to be justified by what the menu returns per cover.
• Buying the kitchen before writing the menu. Equipment should follow the dishes.
• A menu that is too long at launch. More prep, more waste and more failure points for a new team.
• Costing on invoice weight, not yielded weight. Every protein looks cheaper than it is.
• Opening without a trial. The first customers become the test.
• Treating food GP as the only number. A new kitchen can hit its food GP and still lose money on labour. The labour guide covers that.

If your concept is a pub or a hotel restaurant rather than an independent, the same order applies, with different numbers. The restaurants and pubs and gastropubs pages set out how.

Opening a restaurant in the UK: FAQs

Keep reading. Once the menu is drafted, check each section against menu profitability by section, starting with main courses, and read allergens and Natasha's Law before it is printed.