The Restaurant Playbook

The median full-service restaurant keeps 2.8 cents of every sales dollar. The median counter-service restaurant keeps 4.0. The kind of restaurant you open decides which of those numbers you are up against, and how much room you have when a week goes wrong.

This is the operator's manual for a first-time owner who has not yet chosen what to open. Part One scores eight formats, from the food truck to fine dining, on one scorecard and gives a method for choosing among them. The rest of the book follows two restaurants that sit side by side in the same strip center, a counter-service barbecue restaurant and a 70-seat Italian dining room, with numbers that stay continuous from the first chapter to the last.

• Published data, named with source and year: margins, first-year failure rates, wages, turnover, rents, meat prices, and what restaurants actually sell for
• Build, take over a closed restaurant, or buy an open one, and how to rebuild a seller's earnings from tax returns, bank deposits, and invoices
• The lease clauses that decide outcomes, and what rent a restaurant can carry in its first year
• Plate costing, yield, and menu pricing, including wine and the bar
• Break-even in guests a day, and a smaller restaurant built for a site with ordinary sales
• An opening budget, the loan, and a reserve tested against a slow start
• Tips, schedules, turnover, a Saturday dining room, and when an owner can afford a manager
• The second location, the sale, and two ninety-day plans

Every chapter ends with a worked Run the Numbers table, a costly mistake with its price attached, and four actions you can take this week. Four appendices add a resource directory, ten AI prompts, the full checklist toolkit, and a glossary of the trade.

All examples are illustrative estimates, not typical results. Many restaurants earn less, and a large share earn nothing. Verify every number and regulation in your own market.