Want to be a restaurateur?

Telling you my story. I'm a software engineer based in Bangalore, and my sister and I recently ventured into the restaurant space with a small cafe. This post covers, at a high level, everything a beginner needs to start a new restaurant business.

Choosing a commercial space

It's entirely up to you whether to buy or rent. In our case, property dealers were asking for rents as high as 1 lakh a month, so buying a commercial property made more sense as an additional investment. Do the math and market research for the area before deciding. A word of caution if buying: dealers sometimes sell residential spaces as commercial ones, and you can't convert residential to commercial due to government restrictions, so verify the details first. And pick a place that already has footfall, people tend to go to restaurants near malls or clustered with other options.

The paperwork

• Trade license, issued by your local municipality.
• FSSAI certificate, applied for on the FSSAI website. The registration fee is 100 and approval takes about four business days. Without it you can't start a food business or onboard onto Zomato or Swiggy.
• Fire NOC, which third-party agencies can help with, and there's room to negotiate.

Most importantly, all documents must be under the same name. Any discrepancy means redoing the registration process.

Building a team

We started with four staff: a manager, a chef, a chef's helper, and a waiter.

• The manager is your most important employee, running the day-to-day. Ours had worked with online platforms, so he quickly picked up the POS and the Swiggy/Zomato apps. Choose someone smart.
• The chef should cook tasty food and be willing to experiment. Restaurant food needs a lot of early experimentation to learn what local customers like. If the food isn't good, there's no point.
• The waiter/helper should be talkative, since they take orders, suggest items, and ask for reviews.

Getting onto Swiggy and Zomato

Even for a dine-in restaurant, don't neglect the delivery platforms. We didn't expect it, but two-thirds of our revenue comes from Swiggy and Zomato, and if you're smart you can take advantage of dynamic and surge pricing there.

The process: add your restaurant details in their partner forms, create a digital menu, and wait about a week. Once approved, the platform calls to tell you your launch day.

Note again: all restaurant documents and bank account details must be under one name, since the platforms fetch details from FSSAI and your bank; otherwise they won't onboard you.

Learnings

Work with a deadline and a plan. Without one there's no clarity, everything slips, and everyone coasts. I learned this from my father: he set a launch date and a day-by-day plan. Even then we slipped by a week, but having a date and a plan kept execution smooth.

You need a team; you can't launch a restaurant alone. We were four: I handled paperwork and design, my sister handled interiors and shopping, and two others managed groundwork like water supply, carpentry, and the gas connection.

I'll cover the problems we faced while starting up in the next post. Hope this gave some insight into the process. Signing off.