Opening your first restaurant? Spend the money once.
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This is for first-time owners with the capital to do it right — people opening their first place who'd rather not learn the expensive lessons on their own dime.
The expensive mistakes in an opening are made before the doors open, and most of them are made before the lease is signed. By the time a restaurant is three weeks out, the decisions that determine whether it makes money have already been made: the rent, the size of the kitchen, the seat count, the menu, the labor model. What is left is execution.
I’ve opened restaurants in this city — A Voce, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, Lilia — and run operations for The Bowery Group and Patina Restaurant Group.
When to bring me in?
The best time is while you are still choosing between spaces, because the lease and the space decide the ceiling on everything that follows. The second-best time is during construction, before the equipment order and the first hires.
If you are already three weeks from opening, I can still help — but we will be protecting the opening rather than shaping the business.
What the work covers:
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The pro forma; not a spreadsheet that proves the idea works, but one that shows what has to be true for it to work, so you can decide whether those things are actually true.
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The build-out decisions that cost money every month afterwards. Kitchen size and layout against the menu you intend to run. Seat count against the labor model. Storage against your delivery schedule.
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Hiring and training. Who to hire first, what they do, and what the training actually covers. Most openings lose half the team in the first ninety days because the culture was built after the doors opened instead of before.
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Opening week. A plan with daily targets, so the first 90 days is pure execution rather than a scramble. Standing on the floor with you for opening week can be arranged separately.
The New York part:
Opening here is not like opening anywhere else. The licensing and community-board timeline runs longer than owners plan for, and it runs in parallel with construction rather than after it. Delays are almost baked into the cake in NYC; how do you guard against it?
I am not a lawyer and I won’t pretend otherwise — get a good one who knows New York liquor and lease law. What I can do is make sure the operating plan and the timeline are built against each other rather than discovered in the wrong order. I can keep you on-track and sticking to a budget.
What it costs:
Most pre-opening work runs as a weekly engagement at $2,500 a month, because an opening is a sequence of deadlines and a standing weekly session is how deadlines get met. Owners who want a day on site every month — walking the build, sitting with the management team — take the full engagement at $4,000. If you only want a second opinion on a space or a pro forma, that is a single on-site day at $1,500.
It starts with a free 30-minute call.