Opening a Restaurant Checklist: 10 Steps Before Day One

Most opening a restaurant checklist posts stop at the permits. The permits are the part with deadlines, so they get the attention — but the things that decide whether you survive year one are further down: what you charge, who you are charging against, and whether you found out before or after you printed the menus. Here are ten steps in the order they actually bite, with the ones people skip called out.

1. Form the entity and get the EIN

An LLC or corporation before you sign anything — the lease, the vendor accounts, the POS contract. Signing a commercial lease personally is the single most expensive shortcut on this list. The EIN is free and takes about ten minutes on the IRS site; every bank account, payroll account and state registration downstream asks for it.

Do this first because almost everything else references it, and redoing a lease in the entity's name after the fact is a negotiation you will lose.

2. Write the business plan — then pressure-test the competitor section

You need a plan for the bank and the landlord. Write it. But understand which part of it is guesswork: most first-time operators name three competitors from memory, usually the three they personally eat at, and then build a price list around that sample.

That sample is almost always wrong. It skews toward places you like, in the direction you drive, at the hours you eat. The competitors that take your Tuesday lunch traffic are frequently not on the list at all.

Before the plan hardens into a lease and a menu, check it: pull everyone in your category within a few miles, look at their ratings, their price band, their hours, what they have added recently. Here is what that looks like for a real Tex-Mex restaurant in Dallas — competitor names, price moves, review shifts, and what each one implies. It is free to read and there is no signup.

3. Licenses, permits and the liquor timeline

Business license, food service permit, sales tax permit, sign permit, certificate of occupancy. Each has its own office and its own queue.

The one that ruins schedules is liquor. Depending on the state it runs anywhere from six weeks to the better part of a year, and it is frequently gated on a completed build-out and a passed inspection — meaning you are paying rent while you wait. Start it before you think you need to, and build the timeline backwards from the license, not forwards from the lease.

4. Pass the health inspection the first time

Book the pre-opening inspection early and ask for the checklist your county actually uses — most health departments publish it, and it is more specific than any generic list. The recurring first-round failures are dull and avoidable: no thermometer in a cooler, a hand sink without soap or towels, missing sneeze guard, wrong floor-to-wall coving, no certified food manager on staff.

A failed inspection is not just a re-inspection fee. It is another week or two of rent on a room that cannot serve anyone.

5. Sign the lease with your eyes open

Read for the clauses that outlive the rent number: who pays for the grease trap, the hood, the HVAC. Whether there is a personal guarantee and how many months it covers. What the CAM charges have actually been for the last three years, not what they are estimated at. Whether you can assign the lease if you sell.

Walk the block at the hours you plan to be open. A lunch-heavy street can be empty at 8pm, and the rent does not adjust for that.

6. Cost the menu before you price it

Every dish needs a plate cost — ingredients, waste, and the portion you actually serve rather than the one in the recipe. Target food cost is usually 28 to 35 percent depending on format, but the number that matters is contribution margin: what each dish puts in the till after its own cost, multiplied by how often it sells.

Price against the market, not just against your costs. A dish can be correctly costed and still be twenty percent above what everyone within two miles charges for the same thing — which is a decision you should make deliberately, not discover from a review.

7. Choose the POS you can actually leave

The POS decides how payments, tips, payroll, online orders and reporting fit together, and switching later is genuinely painful. Ask what the total monthly cost is with the add-ons you will really use, what the card processing rate is including the per-transaction fee, whether the hardware is leased or owned, and — the question people forget — whether you can export your own sales history if you leave.

8. Hire and schedule before you need them

Kitchen staff first, because they need the most lead time and the most training. Plan on paying for a soft-open week where people are on the clock and revenue is a fraction of normal. Get the labor law basics right from day one: tip credit rules if your state has them, overtime thresholds, break requirements, and a written schedule people can see.

9. Know what the competition is doing before you set prices — and after

Step 2 checked your assumptions once. The problem is that the check goes stale. The restaurant two blocks away drops its lunch special, adds delivery, extends hours to Sunday, or picks up fourteen five-star reviews in a month — and if you find out eight weeks later from a slow Tuesday, you have already lost the quarter.

This is the part of the checklist that never ends. Whether you watch it manually or have it watched for you, the habit is the same: know what changed, weekly at least, before it shows up in your own numbers. Run a free brief on your own address to see what is actually moving in your area — no signup, no card.

10. Fund the runway, not the opening

The common failure is budgeting to opening day rather than through the first slow season. Most independent restaurants take somewhere between six and eighteen months to find a steady baseline, and the first ninety days are the most expensive and least predictable of that period.

Hold enough cash to cover rent, payroll and food cost for several months of worse-than-expected revenue. If the plan only works at projected volume from week one, it is not a plan.

The short version

1. Entity and EIN, before you sign anything
2. Business plan — and check the competitor section against reality
3. Licenses and permits, liquor first
4. Health inspection, using your county's own checklist
5. Lease, read for the clauses that outlive the rent
6. Menu costing, priced against the market
7. POS you can leave
8. Hiring and scheduling with a soft-open budget
9. Competitor pricing — checked before opening and continuously after
10. Cash runway through the first slow season

Common questions

How much does it cost to open a restaurant?

It varies enormously by format and market — a counter-service spot in a second-generation space is a different order of magnitude from a full build-out with a bar. The more useful question is how many months of operating cost you can cover after opening, because that is the number that determines whether you survive a slow first quarter.

What is the most commonly missed step?

Checking the competitor set properly. Permits have deadlines and landlords have lawyers, so those get done. Nobody sends a reminder that the place down the street changed its prices, and that is the one that quietly decides your margin.

How long does the whole process take?

Plan on six to twelve months from entity formation to opening, and build the schedule backwards from your longest lead item — usually the liquor license or the build-out, whichever is worse in your jurisdiction.