There are three main types of people who want to open a restaurant.
Those who have been in the industry, usually chefs and cooks (but not always, sometimes it’s front of the house people), those who grew up in a restaurant environment, (i.e. parents or other family members owned or ran a restaurant), and the folks who have fallen in love with the “idea” of owning their own restaurant.
All of them have, and can run and own a successful restaurant, but I have found in 40 years of working in and with the hospitality restaurant that’s it the first two types that have better success and better success long term with running a restaurant.
I’ll be blunt and I am really not trying to talk people out of owning a restaurant, but to be realistic about what someone is getting into if they have never worked in a commercial food service establishment before.
For fans of, “The Bear” TV series while it has many realistic parts to it for at least the back of the house, apart from some glaring errors, (pretty much everyone in the industry knows what ServSafe is, whether or not your state requires it). IMO It’s still not a great representation of actually “owning” a restaurant and ALL that it entails. I think it hits the marks pretty high on the stress, the dynamics and many other things that happen in real life in a kitchen though and it’s worth a watch if you want to open a restaurant and not had ANY prior experience. But it still doesn’t cover many of the realities of the actual operations of a real restaurant, front of the house, back of the house, the day-to-day operations, the financials and the struggles with financials on a constant basis, checking in orders, employee theft, doing inventory on a frequent basis, dealing with difficult customers both online and off literally every day, dealing with vendors, scheduling staff, dealing with seasonal or economic slowdowns, the marketing online and offline, etc. etc. etc……………
While there have been some terrific food movies out there, mainly from the kitchen perspective, I have yet to see a restaurant movie that really truly reflects REAL life running a restaurant and I suspect it’s because no one “really” wants to see what’s behind the scenes on a real day-to-day basis.
It’s scary how much work, how much stress, and how much slog an owner has to get through daily, especially if they are a hands-on owner. Many chefs who become chef owners spend more time managing and dealing with day-to-day problems than cooking and I had several jobs before I got out of the business where I spent more time pushing paper than behind the line. Not fun, take my word for it. My passion is food and while I love excel spreadsheets, I got into the food business because I loved to cook, not because I wanted to become an accountant.
My first book is coming out shortly (Finding a Location for Your Restaurant) and with that I created a series of real life or lets call them, “lets get a reality check”, quizzes, so that people thinking about owning and operating a restaurant (regardless of whether they have experience in a restaurant industry or not) can get an idea of what they know, they need to know and what they WILL run into as an owner or lessee of a restaurant property.
I want to thank several hundred of my friends (both from the industry and from many other walks of life in other industries) for being guinea pigs to test these and get a baseline for the scoring.
Again, these quizzes are not meant to discourage people from wanting to run their own restaurant, but rather to provide some insight into the reality of it and many of the things that you, as an owner, WILL encounter.
I mention this in my book, but it bears mentioning here. Back in the mid 1990’s I considered buying and running a restaurant and in hindsight, I am so very, very, VERY glad I did not. It would have failed in under a year. With all that I know now, I look back at that person, who had a lot of cooking experience and some management experience and I can snark at myself honestly and say, “oh you foolish, foolish child”. because I had no clue at all about what running and owning a restaurant and doing it successfully really entailed.