How to Start a Restaurant in the UK

Is Starting a Restaurant Right for You?

Running a restaurant is a dream for many people and a hard trade for everyone. Demand is real in every town, but margins are thin, hours are long and many openings do not survive their first years. The restaurateurs who last combine a chef's standards with a shopkeeper's discipline: they know the cost of every plate, watch the till daily and run a kitchen that is clean and consistent at nine on a Saturday night as well as at midday on a Tuesday.

Most successful openings are led by someone who has worked in hospitality for years, as a chef, a manager or both, and who understands service, suppliers and staff before they understand leases. If you have the cooking but not the business experience, find a partner or manager who has run a floor, and if you have the business experience but not the kitchen, hire a head chef you trust and cost their menu with them. The owner who has never worked a Friday service is the one most often surprised.

Be honest about the format before you sign anything. A small café with a short menu, daytime hours and no alcohol licence is a very different business from a sixty-cover restaurant with a bar and late opening, in cost, staffing, licensing and risk. Many good operators start small, with a counter, a pop-up or a residency, prove the food and the numbers, then take on a bigger lease with evidence rather than hope. Whichever you choose, the rules below apply to cafés, bars and takeaways too.

Qualifications, Registrations and Rules

• Register as a food business. Anyone who prepares, cooks or sells food must register with the local authority at least 28 days before trading. Registration is free, cannot be refused and covers each premises separately. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland you register through the Food Standards Agency's service on GOV.UK, and in Scotland through your council, with Food Standards Scotland setting the rules. An environmental health officer inspects soon after opening.
• Food hygiene training and a food safety management system. The law requires everyone who handles food to be supervised, instructed or trained in food hygiene in proportion to their job, and most owners and chefs take a Level 2 or Level 3 food safety course. You must also have a written food safety management system based on HACCP principles, which the Food Standards Agency's Safer Food, Better Business pack provides for small businesses, with CookSafe the Scottish equivalent.
• Your food hygiene rating. After the first inspection you receive a rating under the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme. In Wales and Northern Ireland the law requires you to display the sticker at the entrance, and in England display is voluntary but customers look for it. Scotland runs its own Food Hygiene Information Scheme. A poor rating is public, so have the paperwork and records right before the officer arrives.
• Allergen information and Natasha's Law. Every food business must be able to tell customers whether any of the 14 regulated allergens are in each dish, and the information must be accurate, which means recipes, supplier specifications and a process for substitutions. Food you pack on the premises before it is ordered, such as sandwiches in a chiller, must carry a full ingredients label with allergens emphasised under the rules known as Natasha's Law.
• Alcohol, late-night food and music. In England and Wales, selling alcohol needs a premises licence from the council and a designated premises supervisor with a personal licence, and serving hot food or drink late at night is also licensable. Scotland's licensing boards issue premises licences with a named premises manager, and in Northern Ireland liquor licences are granted by the courts under separate rules. Playing recorded music usually needs TheMusicLicence from PPL PRS.
• Planning use and pavement seating. Check the premises has the right planning use. In England restaurants and cafés sit in Class E, while hot food takeaways, pubs and bars are sui generis, and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own use classes orders, so check before you sign. Extraction flues, signage and listed buildings can need consent too. Tables on the pavement need a pavement licence in England or the equivalent council permit elsewhere.

Setting Up the Business

• Limited company, usually. Most restaurants trade as a limited company registered at Companies House, because a lease, staff, suppliers' credit and an alcohol licence create liabilities you do not want attached to your home. Landlords often ask a new company's directors to back the rent personally, so read what you sign. A sole trader set-up can suit a small café run by its owner. Take an accountant's advice before you decide.
• HMRC, VAT, PAYE and tips. Register for Corporation Tax or Self Assessment when you start, and for PAYE before the first shift. VAT bites in hospitality: eat-in food, hot takeaways and alcohol are standard-rated, so once your turnover passes the threshold published on GOV.UK every menu price carries VAT. Since October 2024 the law has also required tips and service charges to go to staff in full and fairly, under a written policy.
• Bank, bookkeeping, EPOS and data. Open a business account before you spend anything, and choose an electronic point of sale system that records every sale, tracks stock and feeds your bookkeeping. Reconcile takings daily and watch wages and food cost as a share of sales every week. Bookings and loyalty schemes mean personal data, so publish a privacy notice and pay the data protection fee to the ICO if required.
• Insurance and fire safety. Public liability insurance is essential where the public eat, drink and walk about, and employers' liability is a legal requirement as soon as you employ anyone. Add product liability for the food you serve, cover for stock, contents and equipment breakdown, business interruption cover and legal expenses. You must also carry out and keep up a fire risk assessment of the premises.
• The lease and the fit-out. A restaurant lease is the biggest commitment you will make, so have a solicitor check the permitted use, the term and break clauses, rent reviews, who repairs what, whether the landlord allows extraction, signage and late opening, and any personal guarantee. Agree a rent-free period for the fit-out if you can. Plan the kitchen with a professional and use qualified trades, including a Gas Safe registered engineer for catering gas.

Start-up Costs and What You Need

Premises come first: the deposit and rent, legal fees for the lease, business rates, and the fit-out, which for a restaurant means a commercial kitchen with extraction, refrigeration, cooking ranges, dishwashing and a dining room that looks the part. Then the equipment and smallwares, the EPOS system, crockery, glassware, furniture, signage, menus and the opening stock of food and drink. Licensing applications, registrations, training, insurance, uniforms and a website all land before the first customer pays.

Running costs are where restaurants live or die. Wages, food and drink purchases, rent, rates, energy, waste collection, card fees, booking and delivery platform commissions, laundry, maintenance and marketing recur every week, and the busy opening weeks are followed by a quieter spell once the novelty fades. Budget a reserve to cover several months of fixed costs and your own living expenses, buy second-hand equipment where sensible, and price every item on your list yourself.

Pricing Your Menu

Menu pricing starts with the plate cost. Weigh and cost every ingredient in a dish, including the garnish, the oil and the waste from trimming, and compare that cost with the selling price excluding VAT to get the gross margin. Decide the overall food cost and gross margin the business needs to cover wages, rent and everything else, then price dishes so the menu as a whole achieves it, accepting that a steak carries a lower margin and a soup a higher one.

Drinks, coffee and desserts usually carry the best margins and often decide whether a service was profitable, so train staff to offer them. Keep the menu short enough to buy and prepare well, review prices when supplier costs move rather than once a year, and remember that menu prices shown to customers must include VAT. A discretionary service charge is common for table service, and the law now requires every penny of tips and service charges to reach staff.

Deposits and no-show fees are now normal for larger bookings and busy nights, and they protect you from the empty table that cost you the whole evening's margin. State the policy clearly when the booking is made and on the website, and apply it fairly. For delivery platforms, price the menu to cover the commission rather than quietly losing margin on every order, and ask whether the platform brings new regulars or just discounts customers you already had.

Finding Your First Customers

• A soft launch before the real one. Open quietly for a few days with a shorter menu, invited friends, family and neighbours, and reduced prices or a free dish in exchange for honest feedback. It lets the kitchen find its rhythm, the floor learn the EPOS and the booking system fail somewhere that does not matter, before public reviews start to stick.
• Local press, bloggers and social media. A new opening is news locally. Send the local paper, community websites and food writers in your area a short story with good photographs, and invite a few to eat. On Instagram and TikTok, show the food, the people and the room honestly and often, because that is where many diners now decide where to eat.
• Your Google Business Profile and reviews. Someone on the pavement searching for somewhere to eat sees Google's map, photographs, rating and hours before anything else. Claim the profile, keep the hours exactly right, add the menu and real photographs, and ask happy diners to leave a review while they are still at the table. Reply to every review, including the unfair ones, calmly.
• Delivery and booking platforms, used with care. Delivery platforms bring orders from people who would never have walked past, but they take a commission on each one, own the customer relationship and can swamp a small kitchen on a Friday night. Use them deliberately: a delivery menu priced to cover the commission, limited hours, and a push to order direct next time.
• Regulars, neighbours and the local trade. The restaurants that survive are built on regulars. Learn names, remember orders, look after the offices, shops and residents within a few streets with a lunch deal or a loyalty card, and host local groups on your quiet nights. A full room on a Tuesday is worth more than a queue on opening night.

Your Website and Online Presence

A hungry visitor wants the menu, the hours and a way to book or order, on a phone, in seconds. Your menu should be real pages with prices and allergen information rather than a PDF that will not open, the hours must match your Google Business Profile exactly, and booking or ordering should take a minute. Add photographs of the food and the room, directions and parking, your food hygiene rating and private hire details, and keep it current.

Get the site live before opening night, even as a single page with the opening date, the menu concept and a way to join the list, because press coverage and social media posts need somewhere to send people and local search rankings take months to build. A coming soon page does that job, and the startup website checklist covers what the full site needs before launch. We design websites for restaurants, cafés and bars and understand what a hungry visitor is looking for.

When you are ready for a website, our startup restaurant website design page explains what a new restaurant needs on day one, our restaurant website design page covers the full picture for an established business, and restaurant website design prices sets out what it costs. Startup websites start from £2,400, and our startup website checklist lists what to have ready.

Mistakes New Restaurants Make

• Signing the lease before checking the planning use, the alcohol licensing position and whether the landlord permits extraction and late opening.
• Opening without the food safety management system written, the team trained and the allergen information for every dish checked against the recipes.
• Pricing the menu by copying competitors instead of from plate costs and the margin the business needs, then wondering why busy nights lose money.
• Spending the whole budget on the fit-out and opening with no reserve for the quiet weeks after the launch excitement fades.
• Handing the customer relationship to delivery and booking platforms, paying commission on regulars who would have come anyway.
• Letting the Google Business Profile hours, the website menu and the real opening times drift apart, so people arrive to a locked door.

Your First 90 Days

1. Settle the format, the menu concept and the number of covers, and build a budget and cash flow forecast covering several months of running costs after opening.
2. Find premises with the right planning use, check the licensing history and extraction, and have a solicitor review the lease before you commit to anything.
3. Set up the company or sole trader registration with an accountant's advice, open the business bank account and register for PAYE and, when required, VAT.
4. Register the food business with the local authority at least 28 days before opening, complete food hygiene training and write your HACCP-based food safety management system.
5. Apply for the premises licence and personal licence if you will sell alcohol, allowing time for consultation, and arrange any pavement licence and TheMusicLicence.
6. Arrange public liability, employers' liability, product liability, contents and business interruption insurance, and complete your fire risk assessment.
7. Cost every dish, set the menu prices including VAT, write the allergen matrix and build the menu into the EPOS and the website at the same time.
8. Recruit and train the team, write the tips policy and the booking and no-show policy, and run a soft launch for friends and neighbours before the public opening.
9. Get the website live with real menu pages, hours, booking and photographs, claim the Google Business Profile and keep the branding consistent across signage, menus and social media.
10. After ninety days, review food cost, wage cost and takings by day and service, read every review, adjust the menu and prices, and keep marketing.