Preface

I have opened five restaurants. Three of them are still open.

That ratio is roughly what the research would predict, which was no comfort at all the first time I was on the wrong side of it. What I remember about the two that closed is not the food. The food was good. What I remember is a series of small, boring, entirely preventable failures of arithmetic and attention — a lease clause I did not understand, a walk-in nobody counted, a labor line I defended for four months longer than the numbers deserved, a February that arrived with eleven thousand dollars in the account and fourteen thousand dollars of obligations in the next nine days.

Nobody teaches this. That is the reason for this book.

There is an enormous amount of instruction available on how to cook. There are culinary programs that will teach you five mother sauces, knife skills, and how to break down a whole animal, and they will do it superbly. There is comparatively little that will teach a talented cook how to read a profit-and-loss statement, what a triple-net lease actually obligates them to, how to price a plate so it survives a bad month, or how to write a schedule that hits a labor target without wrecking the people on it. And so a generation of extraordinarily skilled people keep opening restaurants and keep being surprised by the same things.

What this book claims

The food is the easy part. Not easy in the sense of simple — cooking well at volume, night after night, is one of the harder things a person can learn to do. Easy in the sense that it is the part of the problem that most people who open restaurants have already solved. They can cook. What closes them is cost control, labor, and cash flow.

That claim shapes everything here. This is a business book that happens to be about restaurants. It will teach you to cost a recipe to the fraction of a cent, engineer a menu into the four things a menu can be, build a schedule against a forecast, read a P&L and find the leak, and know — as a specific number, not a feeling — how many people have to walk through the door on a Tuesday for the lights to stay on.

A word about numbers

The restaurant industry has a folklore problem. The most repeated statistic about it — that ninety percent of restaurants fail in the first year — is false, and has been known to be false for decades. The real figure, from the best research available, is closer to one in four in year one, approaching six in ten by year three.

I mention this on the second page of the preface because it matters more than it looks. A book that teaches you to be rigorous about numbers has no business opening with a scary one it did not check. And because the correction is more useful than the myth: a business that fails at 90% in year one is struck by lightning. A business that fails at 26% in year one and 60% by year three is bleeding — slowly, from causes that were visible and countable the entire time. Which is exactly the argument this book makes, and exactly why cost control, week by week, is the difference between the two outcomes.

So: every number in this book is either verifiable or labeled as constructed. Benchmarks are given as ranges, because that is how they honestly exist. The running restaurant you will build a business plan for is fictional and says so. Where I could not pin down a citation, I say that too. You are going to bet real money on the skill this book teaches. It would be a strange betrayal to teach it with invented figures.

Who this is for

You need no business background, no culinary background, and no management experience. If you have eaten in restaurants, you have enough context to start. The book teaches everything else — including the accounting, which arrives in Chapter 31 built from ideas the first thirty chapters have already put in your hands, so that a profit-and-loss statement reads like a story you already know rather than a foreign document.

You will get the most out of it if you build the business plan alongside the reading. One restaurant runs through all forty chapters, and by the end you will have assembled a complete, fundable business plan for it — concept, market, menu with real costs, floor plan, staffing model, three-year financials, marketing, operations. Appendix C is the blank version, for your restaurant.

What I hope you take from it

Restaurants are one of the last businesses a person without a degree, without capital, and without connections can still build a life in. That is worth protecting. The way to protect it is not to romanticize the work — the industry has done quite enough of that — but to be extremely good at the unglamorous parts, so that the glamorous part gets to survive.

The lights stay on because somebody counted. Let's teach you to count.