business plan fine dining restaurant

Fine Dining Restaurant Business Plan [Sample Template]

By: Author Tony Martins Ajaero

Home » Business Plans » Food Sector » Restaurant & Bar

Are you about starting a fine dining company? If YES, here is a complete sample fine dining business plan template & feasibility report you can use for FREE .

Okay, so we have considered all the requirements for starting a fine dining business. We also took it further by analyzing and drafting a sample fine dining business marketing plan template backed up by actionable guerrilla marketing ideas for fine dining businesses. So let’s proceed to the business planning section.

Despite the fact that there are competitions in the restaurant industry in the united states, but if you are determined to start a business in the industry, you can still win a fair share of the available market within your area of specialization/niche or the location you intend launching the business.

That is why it is expedient to choose a niche that is well accepted and one of such niche areas is to start a fine dining restaurant.

Fine dining which is also known as a formal dining restaurant is a restaurant niche that offers an upscale setting and service while featuring unique and often more expensive menu options, with price range averaging over $50. It is less competitive especially when compared to fast-food restaurants.

So, if you have decided to start your own fine dining restaurant business, then you should ensure that you carry out thorough feasibility studies and market survey. This will enable you locate the business in a location where people with the purchasing power for such restaurants reside and then hit the ground running.

Business plan is yet another very important business document that you should not take for granted while launching your own fine dining restaurant. Below is a sample fine dining restaurant business plan template that can help you come up with your own workable business plan.

A Sample Fine Dining Restaurant Business Plan Template

1. industry overview.

Fine dining restaurant falls under the Chain Restaurant industry and the industry comprises chain and franchised restaurants that provide food services to patrons who order and are served while seated (i.e. waiter or waitress service), and pay after eating.

These establishments may provide this type of food service to patrons in combination with selling alcoholic and other beverages.

A fine dining restaurant has a formal atmosphere, is almost always a sit down restaurant, and has a fancier menu than most restaurants. Fine dining restaurants offer wine lists, and sometimes sommeliers to help you with your food and wine pairing.

Décor of such restaurants features higher-quality materials, with establishments having certain rules of dining which visitors are generally expected to follow, sometimes including a dress code.

Fine dining establishments are sometimes called white-tablecloth restaurants, because they traditionally feature tables covered by white tablecloths. The tablecloths symbolize the experience. The use of white tablecloths eventually became less fashionable, but the service and upscale ambiance remained.

A close observation of the Chain Restaurants industry shows that the industry experienced steady growth over the last half a decade. During the stated period, as per capita income increased and unemployment declined, consumer confidence improved, giving rise to greater spending on sit-down meals.

Even though the average industry profit margin remains slim, profit margins at most chains have increased over the last five years, as revenue has grown and costs have been kept under control.

The Chain Restaurants industry run of steady growth is projected to moderate in the coming years. It is also projected that consumers will increase their spending at restaurants as the economy continues to improve and unemployment rate drops.

The Chain Restaurants industry that fine dining restaurant is a part of is indeed a large industry and pretty much active in most countries of the world. Statistics has it that in the United States of America alone, there are about 789 registered and licensed chains of restaurants (fine dining restaurants inclusive) scattered all across the United States responsible for employing about 1,861,015 people and the industry rakes in a whopping sum of $108 billion annually.

The industry is projected to enjoy 4.3 percent annual growth within 2011 and 2016. The companies holding the largest market share in the Seafood Restaurants industry in the United States of America include Joe’s Crab Shack, Long John Silvers , Red Lobster and McCormick & Schmick’s.

A recent report published by IBISWorld shows that the Chain Restaurants industry has a low level of market share concentration. The report stated that in 2016, the four largest industry players were estimated to account for about 21.2 percent of the available market share.

The industry is made up of a vast array of chain and franchised restaurant operators and food concepts, as well as the extensive number of sites they operate. A number of chains and franchised operators have establishments that are spread nationally and even internationally.

The report further stated that in the past five years, the industry’s concentration level has fallen slightly because a number of conglomerates have offloaded underperforming chains to private equity firms. Most recently in 2014, Darden Restaurants offloaded its 600-plus Red Lobster restaurants to Golden Gate Capital for $2.1 billion.

In summary, it is safe to state that the fine dining restaurant business is a profitable industry and it is open for any aspiring entrepreneur to come in and establish his or her business in any city in the United States of America.

2. Executive Summary

Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is a world-class restaurant business with a niche in fine dining style services that will be located in San Francisco County – California. We are deliberate about our business location because San Francisco County can boast of per capita personal incomes of over $100,000, and it is among 2 of the top 12 highest-income counties in the United States.

We have been able to secure a long – term lease agreement for a standard restaurant facility in a perfect location in the heart of the city. Rosa & Elena™ ® Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC will be involved in full-service fine dining style services where customers pay, serve themselves and eat within the restaurant.

We are aware that that there are other standard fine dining restaurants all around San Francisco County – California which is why we spent time and resources to conduct our feasibility studies and market survey so as to offer much more than our competitors will be offering. We have a wide array of food and wine cum drink options for our customers, and our outlet has various payment options.

Rosa & Elena™ ® Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC will at all times demonstrate her commitment to sustainability, both individually and as a firm, by actively participating in our communities and integrating sustainable business practices wherever possible.

We will ensure that we hold ourselves accountable to the highest standards by meeting our client’s needs precisely and completely.

We are going to be a customer-centric fine dining restaurant business with a service culture that will be deeply rooted in the fabric of our organizational structure and indeed at all levels of the organization. With that, we know that we will be able to consistently achieve our set business goals, increase our profitability and reinforce our positive long-term relationships with our clientele, partners (vendors), and all our employees as well.

Rosa & Elena™ ® Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is a family owned and managed business that believe in the passionate pursuit of excellence and financial success with uncompromising services and integrity which is why we have decided to venture into the restaurant industry.

We are certain that our values will help us drive the business to enviable heights and also help us attract the number of clients that will make us highly profitable.

Rosa & Elena™ ® Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is a family business that is owned by Mrs. Mercy Davidson and her immediate family members. Mrs. Mercy Davidson is an American fine dining specialist, she has a B.Sc. in Food Science and a Diploma in Business Administration, with over 10 years’ experience in the restaurant industry, working for some of the leading brands in the United States.

Although the business is launching out with just one outlet in San Francisco County – North Carolina, but there is a plan to open other outlets in the Greater Los Angeles Area, Marin County and in other key cities in the United States of America.

3. Our Products and Services

Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is in the restaurant industry to make profits and we will ensure that we make available well-prepared local and intercontinental dishes and drinks to our clients. We are prepared to make profits from the industry and we will do all that is permitted by the law in the United States to achieve our business goals, aim and ambition. Our product and service offerings are listed below;

• American food
• Intercontinental food
• Assorted wines

4. Our Mission and Vision Statement

• Our vision is to establish Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC as the premier fine dining restaurant concept while maintaining an unwavering dedication to our people, values and principles.
• Our mission is to establish a standard fine dining restaurant business that will sell franchises all across the United States of America and other countries of the world. We want to become a household name.

Our Business Structure

The success of any business is to a larger extent dependent on the business structure of the organization and the people who occupy the available roles. Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC will work with a business structure that will give room to employees to explore their creativity, feel belonged and grow through the corporate ladder of the organization.

We will ensure that we put the right structures in place that will support the kind of growth that we have in mind while setting up the business. We will ensure that we hire people that are qualified, honest, customer centric and are ready to work to help us build a prosperous business that will benefit all the stakeholders.

As a matter of fact, profit-sharing arrangement will be made available to all our senior management staff and it will be based on their performance for a period of ten years or more. In view of that, we have decided to hire qualified and competent hands to occupy the following positions;

• Chief Chef (Owner)
• Restaurant Manager
• Human Resources and Admin Manager
• Chef / Cooks

Sales and Marketing Manager

• Accountants / Cashiers
• Waiters / Waitress

5. Job Roles and Responsibilities

Chief Chef – CEO (Owner):

• Increases management’s effectiveness by recruiting, selecting, orienting, training, coaching, counseling, and disciplining managers; communicating values, strategies, and objectives; assigning accountabilities; planning, monitoring, and appraising job results
• Creating, communicating, and implementing the organization’s vision, mission, and overall direction – i.e. leading the development and implementation of the overall organization’s strategy.
• Responsible for fixing prices and signing business deals
• Responsible for providing direction for the business
• Responsible for signing checks and documents on behalf of the company
• Evaluates the success of the organization

Admin and HR Manager

• Responsible for overseeing the smooth running of HR and administrative tasks for the organization
• Maintains office supplies by checking stocks; placing and expediting orders; evaluating new products.
• Ensures operation of equipment by completing preventive maintenance requirements; calling for repairs.
• Enhances department and organization reputation
• Defining job positions for recruitment and managing interviewing process
• Carrying out induction for new team members
• Responsible for training, evaluation and assessment of employees
• Responsible for arranging travel, meetings and appointments
• Oversee the smooth running of the daily office activities.

Restaurant Manager:

• Responsible for managing the daily activities in the fine dining restaurant (kitchen inclusive)
• Ensure that the restaurant facility is in tip top shape and conducive enough to welcome customers
• Interfaces with third – party providers (vendors)
• Reports to the Chief Executive Officer
• Attends to Customers complaints and enquiries
• Responsible for preparing different meals as requested by our clients
• Make lists and budget for cooking supplies
• Oversees the entire cooking process
• Responsible for training new cooks
• Makes sure that quality is maintained at all times
• Responsible for purchasing food ingredients for the organization
• Ensures that the kitchen is kept clean at all times
• Ensures that all kitchenware are kept at their proper position after use.
• Any other duty as assigned by the Chief Chef.
• Manage external research and coordinate all the internal sources of information to retain the organizations’ best customers and attract new ones
• Model demographic information and analyze the volumes of transactional data generated by customer purchases
• Identify, prioritize, and reach out to new partners, and business opportunities et al
• Identifies development opportunities; follows up on development leads and contacts
• Responsible for supervising implementation, advocate for the customer’s needs, and communicate with clients
• Document all customer contact and information
• Represent the company in strategic meetings
• Help increase sales and growth for the business

Accountant/Cashier:

• Responsible for preparing financial reports, budgets, and financial statements for the organization
• Provides managements with financial analyses, development budgets, and accounting reports
• Responsible for financial forecasting and risks analysis.
• Performs cash management, general ledger accounting, and financial reporting
• Responsible for developing and managing financial systems and policies
• Responsible for administering payrolls
• Ensuring compliance with taxation legislation
• Handles all financial transactions for the organization
• Serves as internal auditor for the organization

Baristas / Bartenders / Waiters / Waitress

• Interact with customers, take orders for drinks, food and snacks.
• Plan and present bar menu.
• Check identification of the guest to make sure they meet age requirements for purchase of alcohol and tobacco products.
• Mix ingredients to prepare cocktails and other drinks.
• Promptly attends to customers in a friendly and professional manner
• Ensures that customers order is properly taken and delivered
• Ensures that un-occupied tables are always set and ready for customers
• Pulls out chairs for customers as they arrive
• Handle any other duty as assigned by the Chief Chef/Restaurant manager
• Responsible for cleaning the restaurant facility at all times
• Ensure that toiletries and supplies don’t run out of stock
• Handle any other duty as assigned by the restaurant manager.

6. SWOT Analysis

Fine dining restaurants are one of the many businesses that can easily generate business sales with little stress as long as they have good delicacies and are well positioned and equipped to carry out their functions.

We are quite aware that there are several fine dining restaurants all over San Francisco County – California and even in the same location where we intend locating ours, which is why we are following the due process of establishing a business.

We know that if a proper SWOT analysis is conducted for our business, we will be able to position our business to maximize our strength, leverage on the opportunities that will be available to us, mitigate our risks and be equipped to confront our threats.

Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC employed the services of an expert HR and Business Analyst with bias in restaurants to help us conduct a thorough SWOT analysis and to help us create a Business model that will help us achieve our business goals and objectives. This is the summary of the SWOT analysis that was conducted for Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC;

Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is centrally located in a populated residential estate in the heart of San Francisco County – California; our location is in fact one of our major strengths. We are also one of the very few fine dining restaurants in the whole of San Francisco County – California that is equipped to prepare a wide range of both intercontinental and local dishes.

Another strength that counts for us is the power of our team; our workforce and management. We have a team that is made up of hardworking and dedicated individuals.

Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is a new business which is owned by an individual (family), and we may not have the financial muscle to sustain the kind of publicity we want to give our business.

• Opportunities:

Interestingly, some of the highest income counties in California are Marin County and San Francisco County, which both can boast of per capita personal incomes of over $100,000, and are 2 of the top 12 highest-income counties in the United States.

As a matter of fact, some coastal cities include some of the wealthiest per-capita areas in the U.S., notably in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Greater Los Angeles Area. Our business concept also positioned us to be a one stop shop.

The truth is that there are no standard fine dining restaurant within the area where ours is going to be located; the closest to our proposed location is about 6 miles away. In a nutshell, we do not have any direct competition within our target market area.

Some of the threats that are likely going to confront Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC are unfavorable government policies , demographic/social factors, downturn in the economy which is likely going to affect consumer spending and of course emergence of new competitors within the same location where ours is located.

7. MARKET ANALYSIS

• Market Trends

One common trend in the fine dining restaurants industry is that the more the variety of meals you can cook, the easier for you to welcome customers from different cultures and class. For this singular reason, most aspiring entrepreneurs ensure that they learn how to make a wide variety of meals before launching their business.

In keeping consumers’ appetites satisfied, fine dining restaurants have created new menu options that capitalize on the increasing awareness of health risks that are associated with a high – fat diet. These trends are expected to continue and contribute to revenue growth going forward.

8. Our Target Market

We have positioned our fine dining restaurant to service residents of San Francisco County – California and every other location where our restaurants will be located in key cities all over the United States of America. We have conducted our market research and we have ideas of what our target market would be expecting from us. We are in business to sell our food to the following groups of people;

• Busy corporate executives
• Busy businessmen and women
• Foreign Diplomats and their families
• Sports Men and Women

Our competitive advantage

Our competitive advantages are our access to multi – skilled and flexible chefs and workforce, our ability to quickly adopt new technology and proximity to key markets.

Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is launching a standard fine dining restaurant that will indeed become the preferred choice for residents of San Francisco County – California. Our fine dining restaurant is located in a corner piece property on a busy road directly opposite one of the largest residential estates in San Francisco County. We have enough parking space that can accommodate over 15 cars per time.

One thing is certain, we will ensure that we have wide varieties of both intercontinental and local dishes available in our restaurant at all times. One of our business goals is to make Rosa & Elena™ a one stop fine dining restaurant. Our excellent customer service culture, various payment options and highly secured facility will serve as a competitive advantage for us.

Lastly, our employees will be well taken care of, and their welfare package will be among the best within our category in the fine dining restaurant industry, meaning that they will be more than willing to build the business with us and help deliver our set goals and objectives.

We will also give good working conditions and commissions to freelance sales agents that we will recruit from time to time.

9. SALES AND MARKETING STRATEGY

• Sources of Income

Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is in business to prepare and serve a wide variety of both intercontinental and local dishes and drinks to residents of San Francisco County – California. We are in the industry to maximize profits and we are going to ensure that we achieve our business goals and objectives. In essence, our source of income will the preparing and selling of;

10. Sales Forecast

One thing is certain when it comes to fine dining restaurants, if your restaurant is centrally positioned and you have tasty and well – prepared delicacies, you will always attract customers cum sales and that will sure translate to increase in revenue generation for the business.

We are well positioned to take on the available market in San Francisco County – California and we are quite optimistic that we will meet our set target of generating enough profits from the first six months of operation and grow the business and our clientele base.

We have been able to examine the fine dining restaurant business, we have analyzed our chances in the industry and we have been able to come up with the following sales forecast. Below are the sales projections for Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC, it is based on the location of our business and other factors as it relates to fine dining start-ups in the United States;

• First Fiscal Year:  $320,000
• Second Fiscal Year:  $750,000
• Third Fiscal Year:  $1 million

N.B : This projection was done based on what is obtainable in the industry and with the assumption that there won’t be any major economic meltdown and there won’t be any major competitor serving same delicacies and customer care services as we do within same location. Please note that the above projection might be lower and at the same time it might be higher.

• Marketing Strategy and Sales Strategy

The marketing strategy for Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is going to be driven basically by tasty and sumptuous meals, excellent customers service and quality service delivery. We want to drive sales via our delicacies and via referral from our satisfied customers. We are quite aware of how satisfied customers drive business growth especially fine dining restaurants.

Our sales and marketing team will be recruited based on their vast experience in the industry and they will be trained on a regular basis so as to meet their targets.

Our goal is to grow Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC to become the leading fine dining restaurant in San Francisco County – California which is why we have mapped out strategies that will help us take advantage of the available market and grow to become a major force to reckon with in the industry.

Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is set to make use of the following marketing and sales strategies to attract clients;

• Open our fine dining restaurant in a grand style with a party for all.
• Introduce our fine dining restaurant business by sending introductory letters alongside our brochure to residents, corporate organizations, event planners, households and key stakeholders in San Francisco County – California
• Ensure that we make wide varieties of delicacies in our restaurant at all times.
• Make use of attractive handbills to create awareness and also to give direction to our restaurant
• Position our signage / flexi banners at strategic places around San Francisco County – California
• Position our greeters to welcome and direct potential customers
• Create a loyalty plan that will enable us reward our regular customers

11. Publicity and Advertising Strategy

Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is set to create a standard for the fine dining restaurant business in San Francisco County – California, which is why we will adopt and apply best practices to promote our business. Here are the platforms we intend leveraging on to promote and advertise Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC;

• Encourage our loyal customers to help us use Word of Mouth mode of advertisement (referrals)
• Advertise our business in relevant food and healthy lifestyle magazines, local newspaper, local TV stations and local radio station
• Promote our business online via our official website
• List our business on local directories (yellow pages)
• Sponsor relevant community programs
• Leverage on the internet and social media platforms like; Instagram, Facebook, twitter, et al to promote our brand
• Install our Billboards in strategic locations in and around San Francisco County – California
• Direct coupon mailing approach
• Distribute our fliers and handbills in target areas
• Ensure that all our staff members wear our customized clothes, and all our official cars are customized and well branded.

12. Our Pricing Strategy

At Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC, our pricing system is going to be based on what is obtainable in the fine dining restaurants industry, we don’t intend to charge more (except for premium and customized services) and we don’t intend to charge less than our competitors are offering in San Francisco County – California.

Be that as it may, we have put plans in place to offer discount services once in a while and also to reward our loyal customers especially when they refer clients to us.

• Payment Options

The payment policy adopted by Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is all inclusive because we are quite aware that different customers prefer different payment options as it suits them but at the same time, we will ensure that we abide by the financial rules and regulation of the United States of America. Here are the payment options that Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC will make available to her clients;

• Payment with cash
• Payment via credit cards / Point of Sale Machines (POS Machines)
• Payment via online bank transfer
• Payment via check
• Payment via mobile money transfer

In view of the above, we have chosen banking platforms that will enable our clients make payment for our food and drinks without any stress on their part. Our bank account numbers will be made available on our website and promotional materials.

13. Startup Expenditure (Budget)

After following due process, we were able to come up with estimates that we would need to establish our fine dining restaurant and these are the key areas where we will spend our startup capital on;

• The total fee for registering the business in the United States of America – $750.
• Legal expenses for obtaining licenses and permits as well as the accounting services (software, P.O.S machines and other software) – $1,300.
• Marketing promotion expenses for the grand opening of Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC in the amount of $3,500 and as well as flyer printing (2,000 flyers at $0.04 per copy) for the total amount of – $3,580.
• The cost for hiring Business Consultant – $2,500.
• The cost for insurance (general liability, workers’ compensation and property casualty) coverage at a total premium – $2,400.
• The cost for payment of rent for 12 months at $1.76 per square feet in the total amount of $105,600.
• The cost for construction of a standard fine dining restaurant and kitchen – $100,000.
• Other start-up expenses including stationery ($500) and phone and utility deposits ($2,500).
• Operational cost for the first 3 months (salaries of employees, payments of bills et al) – $100,000
• The cost for start-up inventory (cooking ingredients and drinks et al) – $80,000
• Storage hardware (bins, rack, shelves, food case) – $3,720
• The cost for counter area equipment (counter top, sink, ice machine, etc.) – $9,500
• The cost for store equipment (cash register, security, ventilation, signage) – $13,750
• The cost for the purchase of furniture and gadgets (Computers, Printers, Telephone, TVs, Sound System, tables and chairs et al) – $4,000.
• The cost of launching a website – $600
• The cost for our opening party – $10,000
• Miscellaneous – $10,000

We would need an estimate of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars ($350,000) to successfully set up our fine dining restaurant in the United States of America. Please note that this amount includes the salaries of all the staff member for the first month of operation.

Generating Startup Capital for Rosa & Elena™ ® Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC

Rosa & Elena™ ® Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is a private business that is solely owned and financed by Mrs. Mercy Davidson and her immediate family members. They do not intend to welcome any external business partners which is why they decided to restrict the sourcing of the startup capital to 3 major sources.

These are the areas we intend generating our startup capital;

• Generate part of the startup capital from personal savings
• Source soft loans from family members and friends
• Apply for loan from the bank

N.B: We have been able to generate about $100,000 (Personal savings $80,000 and soft loan from family members $20,000) and we are at the final stages of obtaining a loan facility of $250,000 from our bank. All the papers and documents have been signed and submitted, the loan has been approved and any moment from now our account will be credited with the amount.

14. Sustainability and Expansion Strategy

The future of a business lies in the number of loyal customers that they have, the capacity and competence of their employees, their investment strategy and the business structure. If all of these factors are missing from a business (company), then it won’t be too long before the business close shop.

One of our major goals of starting Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC is to build a business that will survive off its own cash flow without injecting finance from external sources once the business is officially running. We know that one of the ways of gaining approval and winning customers over is to retail our food and drinks a little bit cheaper than what is obtainable in the market and we are prepared to survive on lower profit margin for a while.

Rosa & Elena™ Fining Dining Restaurant, LLC will make sure that the right foundation, structures and processes are put in place to ensure that our staff welfare are well taken of. Our company’s corporate culture is designed to drive our business to greater heights and training and retraining of our workforce is at the top burner.

We know that if that is put in place, we will be able to successfully hire and retain the best hands we can get in the industry; they will be more committed to help us build the business of our dreams.

Check List/Milestone

• Business Name Availability Check : Completed
• Business Registration: Completed
• Opening of Corporate Bank Accounts: Completed
• Securing Point of Sales (POS) Machines: Completed
• Opening Mobile Money Accounts: Completed
• Opening Online Payment Platforms: Completed
• Application and Obtaining Tax Payer’s ID: In Progress
• Application for business license and permit: Completed
• Purchase of Insurance for the Business: Completed
• Leasing of facility and remodeling the facility to fit into a standard fine dining restaurant: In Progress
• Conducting Feasibility Studies: Completed
• Generating capital from family members: Completed
• Applications for Loan from the bank: In Progress
• Writing of Business Plan: Completed
• Drafting of Employee’s Handbook: Completed
• Drafting of Contract Documents and other relevant Legal Documents: In Progress
• Design of The Company’s Logo: Completed
• Printing of Packaging and Promotional Materials: In Progress
• Recruitment of employees: In Progress
• Purchase of the needed furniture, racks, shelves, computers, electronic appliances, office appliances and CCTV: In progress
• Creating Official Website for the Company: In Progress
• Creating Awareness for the business both online and around the community: In Progress
• Health and Safety and Fire Safety Arrangement (License): Secured
• Opening party planning: In Progress
• Compilation of our list of meals and drinks that will be available in our restaurant: Completed
• Establishing business relationship with suppliers of cooking ingredients, coffees, wines, alcoholic and soft drinks: In Progress

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How To Write a Business Plan for Fine Dining in 9 Steps: Checklist

By henry sheykin, resources on fine dining.

• Financial Model
• Business Plan
• Value Proposition
• One-Page Business Plan
• SWOT Analysis
• Business Model
• Marketing Plan
• Bundle Business Plan & Fin Model

In the highly competitive world of fine dining, creating a successful business requires careful planning and strategic decision-making. The upscale restaurant industry in the US continues to thrive, with a growth rate of 4.3% in 2019 and projected revenue of $31 billion in 2020 , according to the National Restaurant Association.

To embark on this journey, you need to begin by thoroughly researching your target market. Understanding the preferences and spending habits of your potential customers will help you tailor your offerings to meet their desires. This initial step sets the foundation for success, as it allows you to identify the market demand and align your business accordingly.

The location of your fine dining establishment plays a crucial role in its success. Choosing a suitable location that attracts your target customer segment can significantly impact your visibility and profitability. Conduct a thorough analysis of potential locations, taking into account factors such as foot traffic, competition, and accessibility.

Next, it's essential to conduct a competitive analysis to gain insights into your competitors' strengths and weaknesses. This analysis will enable you to identify opportunities in the market and establish what sets your restaurant apart. Developing a unique value proposition is crucial in a saturated industry.

Once you have a clear understanding of your target market and competition, it's time to create a concept and theme for your fine dining establishment. This theme should align with your target customer segment and set the tone for the overall dining experience.

With your concept in place, it's time to identify your specific target customer segment and understand their preferences and needs. Tailoring your menu and beverage offerings to cater to this specific audience will ensure that they find value in your establishment.

The menu and beverage offerings play a vital role in attracting and retaining customers in the fine dining industry. Creating a menu that offers a unique and diverse selection of high-end cuisine, paired with premium wines and beverages, will further enhance the overall dining experience.

As with any business venture, calculating the startup costs is crucial. Fine dining establishments require significant investments in decor, staffing, and sourcing premium ingredients. Conduct a thorough analysis of the required expenses to ensure you have the financial means to bring your vision to life.

Finally, developing a marketing strategy is essential for creating awareness and generating buzz around your fine dining establishment. Utilize various marketing channels, such as social media, public relations, and partnerships, to reach your target audience and showcase your unique offerings.

Writing a business plan for a fine dining establishment requires careful consideration of each step to ensure its success. By following this comprehensive checklist, you can pave the way for a memorable dining experience that attracts affluent customers and generates substantial revenue.

Research The Target Market

Before starting any business, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of the target market. Specifically, for a fine dining establishment, it is essential to identify the potential customers who will be interested in your high-end cuisine and unique dining experience.

Begin your market research by examining the demographics, such as age, income level, and lifestyle, of the target audience. This will help you tailor your offerings to meet their preferences and expectations.

Furthermore, consider conducting surveys or interviews with potential customers to gather valuable insights about their dining habits, preferences, and what they look for in a fine dining experience. This will help you determine the demand for your concept and allow you to make necessary adjustments to meet their desires.

Research Tips:

• Utilize online resources, such as market research reports and industry-specific publications, to gain in-depth knowledge about the current trends and opportunities in the fine dining sector.
• Visit similar upscale restaurants in your area and observe their target audience, ambiance, and offerings. This will help you gauge the local market and identify any gaps that you can fill with your concept.
• Engage with local food enthusiasts and join industry-related events or forums to network with potential customers and gather valuable feedback.
• Consider collaborating with a professional market research firm to obtain comprehensive data and insights about your target market.

By thoroughly researching your target market, you will be able to develop a solid understanding of customer preferences and demands, enabling you to create a fine dining establishment that appeals to your desired clientele.

Determine The Location And Analyze Its Suitability

Choosing the right location for your fine dining establishment is crucial to its success. The location should be easily accessible, have a strong target market presence, and offer a suitable ambiance for a high-end dining experience. Consider the following factors when determining the location:

• Accessibility: Ensure that the location has convenient parking options or is easily accessible by public transportation. This will attract more customers and make it convenient for them to visit your establishment.
• Target Market Presence: Research the area to determine if it aligns with your target market. Look for locations where affluent individuals reside or frequently visit, as they are more likely to appreciate and patronize a fine dining establishment.
• Ambiance: Analyze the atmosphere and surrounding establishments in the chosen location. Consider whether it matches the upscale image you want to portray. Look for areas with a vibrant and stylish atmosphere that will enhance the overall dining experience for your customers.
• Competition: Take note of existing fine dining establishments in the area. Analyze their strengths, weaknesses, and target customer segment. Assess whether there is room for another fine dining establishment in the market or if you need to explore alternative locations to minimize excessive competition.
• Accessibility to Suppliers: Determine whether the location has easy access to suppliers to source premium ingredients. Being close to local markets or having transportation links to international suppliers can be advantageous for maintaining the quality and uniqueness of your cuisine.
• Consider conducting market research or engaging a professional location analysis service to gain detailed insights into the area you are considering.
• Visit the potential location at different times of the day and week to observe foot traffic, parking availability, and the general atmosphere.
• Network with local business owners and residents to gain an understanding of the area's reputation and suitability for a fine dining establishment.

Conduct A Competitive Analysis

When starting a fine dining establishment, conducting a competitive analysis is essential to understanding the market landscape and identifying your competitors. By examining the strengths and weaknesses of other upscale restaurants in your area, you can gain valuable insights and develop strategies to differentiate your business.

Begin by researching and identifying the main competitors in your target market. Look for establishments that offer a similar dining experience, cuisine, and target customer segment. Visit these restaurants and evaluate their ambiance, menu offerings, service quality, pricing, and overall customer experience.

Important factors to consider when conducting a competitive analysis:

• Menu: Analyze the types of dishes, ingredients, and culinary techniques used by your competitors. Look for unique offerings or gaps in the market that you can capitalize on.
• Customer Experience: Pay attention to the level of service, attentiveness of staff, and overall atmosphere created by your competitors. Consider how you can enhance the customer experience at your own establishment.
• Pricing: Compare the prices of food and beverages at your competitors to gauge the general pricing range in the market. This will help you determine where your own pricing strategy fits.
• Online Presence: Evaluate your competitors' websites, social media profiles, and online reviews. Take note of their online reputation, strengths, and weaknesses to identify areas where you can outshine them.

Tips for conducting an effective competitive analysis:

• Speak to locals and industry professionals to gain insights on the reputation and performance of competing fine dining establishments.
• Consider conducting secret shopper visits to experience your competitors' service firsthand. Pay attention to details such as cleanliness, wait times, and staff demeanor.
• Keep track of any unique promotions, events, or marketing campaigns your competitors are running to stay informed about their strategies.
• Identify any potential gaps in the market that your competitors may have overlooked. This could present an opportunity for you to offer something different and attract a distinct customer base.

By thoroughly analyzing your competitors, you will be able to identify areas where you can excel and develop a competitive advantage. This knowledge will help you shape your unique value proposition and position your fine dining establishment effectively in the market.

Develop A Unique Value Proposition

Developing a unique value proposition is essential for any fine dining establishment. This is what sets your restaurant apart from the competition and attracts customers to choose your establishment over others. Your unique value proposition should convey what makes your fine dining experience extraordinary and why customers should choose to dine at your restaurant.

To develop a unique value proposition, you first need to understand your target market and their preferences. Conduct market research to identify what aspects of fine dining are most important to your potential customers. This could include factors such as exceptional service, exclusive ingredients, innovative culinary techniques, or a specific theme or ambiance.

Once you have a clear understanding of your target market's preferences, you can then create a value proposition that aligns with those desires. Your value proposition should clearly communicate the unique benefits and experiences that your restaurant offers. It should highlight the features that make your establishment stand out and make it a compelling choice for potential customers.

Tips for Developing a Unique Value Proposition:

• Focus on what sets your restaurant apart: Identify the unique aspects of your fine dining establishment and emphasize them in your value proposition. This could be a specific type of cuisine, exceptional wine pairings, or a one-of-a-kind dining experience.
• Highlight your competitive advantages: Identify what makes your restaurant better than the competition and showcase these advantages in your value proposition. This could be superior ingredients, highly trained staff, or exclusive partnerships with suppliers.
• Keep it concise and clear: Your value proposition should be easy to understand and communicate the essence of your restaurant in a few sentences. Avoid using jargon or industry-specific terminology that may confuse potential customers.
• Test your value proposition: Once you have developed your initial value proposition, test it with your target market. Seek feedback and make adjustments as necessary to ensure it resonates with your potential customers.

By developing a unique value proposition, you can differentiate your fine dining establishment from competitors and attract customers who are seeking an extraordinary dining experience. Take the time to understand your target market, highlight your competitive advantages, and clearly communicate what sets your restaurant apart. This will help you attract and retain affluent customers who value the exclusivity and luxury that your establishment provides.

Create A Concept And Theme For The Fine Dining Establishment

Once you have identified your target market and analyzed the location, it is crucial to create a concept and theme that align with the expectations and preferences of your target customers. This will help differentiate your fine dining establishment from competitors and attract the desired clientele.

When creating a concept and theme, consider the following:

• Define your restaurant's identity: Determine the overall atmosphere and ambiance you want to create. Are you aiming for a formal and elegant setting or a more relaxed and contemporary vibe? Think about the desired experience you want to offer to your customers and ensure that every aspect of your restaurant, from the interior design to the staff attire, reflects this identity.
• Choose a culinary style: Decide on the type of cuisine you want to focus on. Whether it is French, Italian, Asian, or a fusion of flavors, make sure to select a culinary style that complements your target market and aligns with their preferences.
• Consider a unique selling point: To stand out in a competitive market, it is essential to offer something unique or different from other fine dining establishments. This could be a signature dish, a specialized cooking technique, or a specific theme that sets you apart. Ensure that this unique selling point resonates with your target customers and enhances their dining experience.
• Infuse your brand into the concept: Incorporate your brand values, mission, and vision into the concept and theme. Create a story around your fine dining establishment that customers can connect with and relate to. This will help strengthen your brand identity and make your restaurant more memorable.

Tips for Creating a Concept and Theme:

• Research current market trends and customer preferences to stay relevant.
• Consider seeking professional help, such as consultants or designers, to refine your concept and create a cohesive theme.
• Think about the overall experience your customers will have, from the moment they enter the restaurant to the moment they leave.
• Regularly review and adapt your concept to ensure it remains appealing to your target market and stays ahead of the competition.

By carefully crafting a concept and theme for your fine dining establishment, you can create a unique and memorable experience for your customers, setting yourself apart in the competitive market and attracting affluent clientele willing to indulge in your high-quality cuisine and luxurious atmosphere.

Identify The Target Customer Segment

Identifying the target customer segment is crucial in developing a successful business plan for a fine dining establishment. It involves understanding the specific group of individuals who are most likely to patronize your restaurant and tailoring your offerings to meet their needs and preferences.

To begin, conduct thorough market research to gain insights into the demographics, psychographics, and behaviors of your potential customers. Consider factors such as age, income level, occupation, lifestyle, and dining preferences. This information will help you create a detailed profile of your ideal customer.

Tip 1: Consider conducting surveys or focus groups to gather feedback and opinions directly from your target customer segment. This will provide valuable insights into their preferences and expectations, allowing you to refine your concept and offerings.

Tip 2: Analyze your competitors' customer base and determine if there are any gaps or underserved segments in the market. This will help you identify unique opportunities to target a specific niche within the fine dining industry.

Once you have identified the target customer segment, it is essential to align your menu offerings, ambiance, and overall dining experience to appeal to their tastes and preferences. For example, if your research reveals a preference for sustainable and locally sourced ingredients, consider incorporating these elements into your menu.

Tip 3: Keep in mind that the target customer segment for fine dining establishments often consists of affluent individuals who place a high value on exceptional service and exclusive experiences. As such, strive to offer personalized and attentive service to cater to their expectations.

Tip 4: Regularly review and update your understanding of the target customer segment as trends and preferences evolve over time. Stay connected with your customers through social media, customer feedback, and loyalty programs to ensure your offerings remain relevant and appealing.

• Conduct market research to understand the demographics, psychographics, and behaviors of potential customers.
• Create a detailed profile of the ideal customer based on the gathered information.
• Consider conducting surveys or focus groups to gather direct feedback from the target customer segment.
• Analyze competitors' customer base to identify gaps or underserved segments in the market.
• Align menu offerings, ambiance, and dining experience to appeal to the target customer segment's preferences.
• Strive to offer personalized and attentive service to cater to the target customer segment's expectations.
• Regularly review and update your understanding of the target customer segment to stay relevant.

Outline The Menu And Beverage Offerings

One of the key elements of a successful fine dining establishment is an enticing and well-curated menu. Outline the menu by considering the unique selling points of your restaurant, the target customer segment, and the availability of premium ingredients.

Start by identifying the main dishes that will be the focus of your menu. These dishes should showcase the expertise of your chefs and highlight the unique flavors and ingredients that set your restaurant apart.

Consider offering a combination of traditional and innovative dishes to cater to a range of tastes. Include options for vegetarians, vegans, or those with dietary restrictions to ensure that all customers can enjoy a memorable dining experience at your establishment.

When outlining the menu, also pay attention to the presentation and plating of each dish. This is especially important in a fine dining establishment, as the visual appeal of the food contributes to the overall experience. The menu should include detailed descriptions of each dish, highlighting the ingredients, cooking techniques, and any special features.

Next, turn your attention to designing a comprehensive beverage program that complements the menu. Fine dining establishments often boast an extensive wine list, offering a wide range of options to pair with different courses. Consider collaborating with a sommelier or wine expert to curate a diverse selection that matches the flavors and style of your cuisine.

In addition to wine, consider offering a range of craft cocktails and premium spirits. This allows customers to enjoy a pre-dinner or post-dinner drink that aligns with the sophistication of their dining experience. It can also be beneficial to include a variety of non-alcoholic options, such as mocktails or specialty teas, to cater to all preferences.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when outlining the menu and beverage offerings:

• Balance familiarity with innovation: Offer a mix of classic dishes and unique creations to appeal to a wide range of customers.
• Ensure ingredient availability: Consider the seasonality and sourcing of ingredients to ensure consistency and quality.
• Consider portion sizes and pricing: Adjust portion sizes and pricing to align with the upscale nature of your establishment.
• Train staff on menu knowledge: Ensure that waitstaff and bartenders are well-versed in the menu and beverage offerings to provide excellent customer service.
• Regularly update the menu: Keep the menu fresh and exciting by regularly introducing new dishes and beverages, while retaining customer favorites.

Calculate The Startup Costs

Calculating the startup costs for your fine dining establishment is a crucial step in the business planning process. It allows you to determine how much money you will need to invest upfront and helps you create a realistic financial plan. Here are some key points to consider when calculating your startup costs:

• Building and Renovation: Determine the cost of acquiring or leasing a suitable location for your restaurant. Take into account any necessary renovations or design changes to create the ambiance and atmosphere you desire.
• Equipment and Furnishings: Include the cost of purchasing or leasing kitchen equipment, dining furniture, and other necessary fixtures. Don't forget to include smaller items such as utensils, glassware, and table linens.
• Staffing: Consider the expenses associated with hiring and training employees, including salaries or wages, payroll taxes, and employee benefits.
• Inventory: Estimate the cost of initial food and beverage inventory needed to stock your restaurant. This should include specialty ingredients, premium wines, and high-quality beverages that align with your fine dining concept.
• Marketing and Advertising: Allocate funds for promotional activities and advertising campaigns to build awareness and attract customers to your establishment.
• Licenses and Permits: Research and determine the costs of obtaining necessary licenses and permits required to operate a fine dining restaurant in your chosen location.
• Professional Services: If needed, budget for consulting services, legal fees, or accounting services to ensure compliance with regulations and receive expert advice.
• Contingency: It's always wise to include a buffer for unexpected expenses or contingencies that may arise during the startup phase of your business.

Startup Costs Tips:

• Shop around for the best deals when purchasing equipment and furnishings. Consider buying used items in good condition to save on costs.
• Reach out to suppliers and negotiate favorable terms for ongoing inventory purchases. Building strong relationships with vendors can help you secure better pricing.
• Create a detailed budget and keep track of your expenses throughout the startup phase. This will help you stay on track and make informed financial decisions.
• Consider seeking financing options such as small business loans or attracting investors to help cover some of the startup costs.

By accurately calculating your startup costs, you can have a clear understanding of the funds required and develop a realistic financial plan. This will enable you to make informed decisions and ensure the successful launch of your fine dining establishment.

Develop A Marketing Strategy

Developing a marketing strategy is crucial for promoting your fine dining establishment and attracting the target customer segment. Here are some important steps to follow:

• Define your target audience: Identify the specific group of customers you want to attract to your fine dining establishment. Consider factors such as age, income level, and preferences to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.
• Create a compelling brand image: Develop a strong brand identity that evokes luxury, exclusivity, and exceptional dining experiences. Use high-quality visuals in your marketing materials, including your website, social media profiles, and print ads, to showcase the elegance and charm of your restaurant.
• Utilize social media: Leverage popular social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to promote your fine dining establishment. Share visually appealing photos of your dishes, behind-the-scenes moments, and special events to engage your target audience.
• Build relationships with influencers: Collaborate with influencers or food bloggers who have a strong following in the food and dining niche. Invite them to experience your restaurant and share their positive experiences with their followers, helping to increase your visibility and credibility.
• Organize special events and promotions: Plan special events, such as wine tasting nights, chef's table experiences, or themed dinners, to create buzz and attract new customers. Offer exclusive promotions, such as a prix-fixe menu or a discount for first-time guests, to incentivize trial and encourage repeat visits.
• Encourage customers to leave reviews on popular review platforms like Yelp, Google, or TripAdvisor to establish credibility and attract new customers.
• Consider partnering with local businesses or luxury hotels to cross-promote each other's offerings and tap into new customer segments.
• Regularly update your website and social media profiles with fresh content, including menu changes, seasonal features, and upcoming events, to keep customers engaged and interested.

In conclusion, writing a business plan for a fine dining establishment requires careful research and planning. By following the nine steps outlined in this checklist, you can ensure that your business is well-prepared for success. From identifying your target market and creating a unique value proposition to outlining your menu and calculating startup costs, each step is crucial in developing a solid business plan. Additionally, a comprehensive marketing strategy will help attract the affluent customer segment who values the exclusivity and luxury of fine dining, ultimately leading to revenue generation through high margins on food and drink.

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Fine Dining Restaurant Business Plan Template

Published May.22, 2015

Updated Apr.12, 2024

By: Brandi Marcene

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Table of Content

There are restaurants and then there are fine dining restaurants. To starting right this business you need fine dining restaurant business plan . Adding the term “fine dining” to a restaurant description immediately implies the eating establishment will offer upscale menu items, an elegant or chic atmosphere, and premier service. This type of restaurant also has higher prices than casual restaurants so everything that goes into creating the business should justify the higher prices that customers pay.

Explaining the Differences – business plan For A Fine Dining Restaurant

Writing a business plan for a fine dining restaurant is a first step towards startup. Though opening a fine dining restaurant is similar to opening a casual restaurant, there are marked differences. For example, the fine dining establishment caters to a very specific customer base that is willing to pay higher prices for food and drinks but expects a higher level of service and exquisite recipes in return. The fine dining restaurant must stand out from the other restaurants in the area, and possibly even attract people from further distances than they normally drive to eat out. This is accomplished by hiring a master or experienced chef, offering unique recipes, and creating a memorable atmosphere.

The business plan naturally includes standard sections like marketing and operations, but it also has to convey the ambiance the restaurant owner intends on creating. That takes experience because the business plan is a formal business document . Following are some of the ways to turn an ordinary business plan into one that entices investors by conveying a full picture of the upscale restaurant:

• Describe a unique location like a renovated pier warehouse, historical downtown building near upscale lofts, or a train station
• Explain the menu in vivid terms, providing a sample; include an explanation of the type of food served (Asian, European, American, a variety, etc.) and whether there will be a prix fixe menu or a combination of fixed fare with specials added
• Describe the overall theme and how the lounge and dining area support that theme through choice of colors, furniture style, dining table arrangements, and so on
• Present a clear description of the restaurant’s interior so that readers can imagine what they would see upon entering – designs, flowers, artwork, lighting, table settings, music, etc.
• Present a personnel plan that showcases the extraordinary talent of the master chef and his/her assistant chefs; explain where the chefs were trained and their specialties
• Describe the restaurant’s services which can include drinks in the lounge, dine-in, carry-out gourmet, catering, and so on
• Describe what will set this fine dining establishment apart from its nearest competitors, i.e. ambiance, unique recipes, use of only locally sourced ingredients, organic foods, pastry desserts, service level, etc.

Higher Prices Means Higher Expenses

Fine dining restaurants usually need special kitchen equipment to accommodate the complex recipes. It is one input into the calculation of needed capital. Other factors include higher wages for experienced wait staff, more expensive building lease rates for high-end locations, a reservation system, higher-priced liquor and wine inventories, and so on. The funding request in the business plan will consider how much capital the business owners are investing versus the total amount needed.

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Restaurant Business Plan Free Template

Get started on your restaurant journey with our comprehensive Fine and Casual Dining Restaurant Free Business Plan Template. The template covers market analysis, financial projections, and operational strategies.

Get your copy of the Restaurant Business Plan!

Your restaurant business plan is key.

Starting a restaurant is a dream come true for many aspiring entrepreneurs. It is a chance to showcase your culinary skills, create a unique dining experience, and build a successful business. However, it is also a challenging and complex endeavor that requires careful planning and execution. With so many factors to consider, it's essential to have a solid plan in place to ensure the success of your restaurant.

That's where our free restaurant business plan template comes in. Our comprehensive guide covers all the critical aspects of starting a fine dining or casual dining restaurant, including market analysis, financial projections, and operational strategies. This template is designed to help you get started quickly and efficiently, so you can focus on bringing your vision to life.

Restaurant Market Analysis Business Plan Section

Market analysis is the first step in creating a successful restaurant business plan. This section covers the research and analysis of the local market, including demographics, consumer preferences, and competition. Understanding the local market is essential to creating a successful restaurant. You'll need to know what kind of cuisine is in demand, what prices are reasonable, and what your competition is offering. This information will help you to make informed decisions about your menu, pricing, and marketing strategies.

Restaurant Financial Business Plan Projections

Financial projections are a critical component of any business plan, and this is especially true for restaurants. This section includes detailed projections for start-up costs, operating expenses, and revenue. You'll need to calculate the costs of opening your restaurant, including rent, equipment, and staff salaries, and determine what kind of revenue you'll need to make to break even. Our template provides a comprehensive financial model that takes into account all the key expenses, including food and beverage costs, marketing, and overhead.

Operations Plans Business Plan Section

Operational strategies are the backbone of your restaurant. This section covers everything from menu design and kitchen management to customer service and marketing. You'll need to create a menu that appeals to your target market and is cost-effective to produce. You'll also need to manage the kitchen and dining room operations, ensuring that your food is prepared and served to the highest standards. Customer service is also critical, and you'll need to create an environment that fosters a positive dining experience. Marketing is also an essential aspect of operating a successful restaurant, and you'll need to create a strategy that leverages both traditional and digital marketing tactics to reach your target audience.

Starting a restaurant is a challenging and exciting journey, but it's essential to have a solid plan in place to ensure success. Our template covers all the critical aspects of starting a fine and casual dining restaurant, including market analysis, financial projections, and operational strategies. With our template, you'll have a roadmap to guide you through the process and help you bring your vision to life. Whether you're a seasoned restaurateur or just starting out, our restaurant business plan template will help you build a successful restaurant from the ground up.

Restaurant Business Plan Outline

Executive Summary

Business Description:

• Market Analysis
• SWOT Analysis

Marketing and Sales Strategy:

• Branding and Identity
• Website, menu, and social media platforms
• Marketing materials and promotional items
• Marketing mix: Product, Pricing, Place, Promotion

Operations Plan:

• Organizational Structure
• Location and Facility
• SOP (Standard Operating Procedures)
• Health and safety protocols:

Financial Projections:

• Startup costs and use of funds
• Key financial ratios
• Income Statement at a glance
• Income Statement annual summary
• Balance Sheet annual summary
• Cash Flow Statement annual summary

Fine & Casual Dining Restaurant Business Plan FAQs

What should i include in my market analysis for my restaurant business plan.

• Your market analysis should include research on your target audience, consumer preferences, and competition in the local market. This information will help inform your menu offerings, pricing, and marketing strategies.

How do I create accurate financial projections for my restaurant?

• To create accurate financial projections, you'll need to calculate start-up costs, operating expenses, and revenue. Consider factors such as rent, equipment, staff salaries, food and beverage costs, marketing, and overhead. Make sure your projections take these expenses into account.

What are the key operational strategies that I need to consider when starting a restaurant?

• Key operational strategies include menu design and kitchen management, customer service, and marketing. You'll need to ensure that your food is prepared and served to the highest standards, create an environment that fosters a positive dining experience, and have a marketing strategy in place to reach your target audience.

We Know a Good Business Plan When we See One

Collectively, our team has reviewed thousands of business plans and has nearly 20 years of experience making SBA loans. We've also helped more than 50,000 businesses create financial projections across many industries and geographies.

Adam served as Executive Director for a SBA microlender in Indiana for over 10 years helping businesses and reviewing thousands of business plans.

Grace has built hundreds of custom financial models for businesses as well as our projection templates which are used by thousands of businesses every year.

Kyle served as an SBA loan officer for 7 years working directly with startups and business owners to review their business plans, projections, and prepare their loan package.

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When starting a business—no matter what type of business that may be—a business plan is essential to map out your intentions and direction. That’s the same for a restaurant business plan, which will help you figure out where you fit in the landscape, how you’re going to differ from other establishments around you, how you’ll market your business, and even what you’re going to serve. A business plan for your restaurant can also help you later if you choose to apply for a business loan .

While opening a restaurant isn’t as risky as you’ve likely heard, you still want to ensure that you’re putting thought and research into your business venture to set it up for success. And that’s where a restaurant business plan comes in.

We’ll go through how to create a business plan for a restaurant and a few reasons why it’s so important. After you review the categories and the restaurant business plan examples, you can use the categories to make a restaurant business plan template and start your journey.

Why you shouldn’t skip a restaurant business plan

First-time restaurateurs and industry veterans alike all need to create a business plan when opening a new restaurant . That’s because, even if you deeply understand your business and its nuances (say, seasonal menu planning or how to order correct quantities), a restaurant is more than its operations. There’s marketing, financing, the competitive landscape, and more—and each of these things is unique to each door you open.

That’s why it’s so crucial to understand how to create a business plan for a restaurant. All of these things and more will be addressed in the document—which should run about 20 or 30 pages—so you’ll not only have a go-to-market strategy, but you’ll also likely figure out some things about your business that you haven’t even thought of yet.

Additionally, if you’re planning to apply for business funding down the line, some loans—including the highly desirable SBA loan —actually require you to submit your business plan to gain approval. In other words: Don’t skip this step!

How much do you need?

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We’ll start with a brief questionnaire to better understand the unique needs of your business.

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How to write a restaurant business plan: Step by step

There’s no absolute format for a restaurant business plan that you can’t stray from—some of these sections might be more important than others, for example, or you might find that there’s a logical order that makes more sense than the one in the restaurant business plan example below. However, this business plan outline will serve as a good foundation, and you can use it as a restaurant business plan template for when you write your own.

Executive summary

Your executive summary is one to two pages that kick off your business plan and explain your vision. Even though this might seem like an introduction that no one will read, that isn’t the case. In fact, some investors only ask for the executive summary. So, you’ll want to spend a lot of time perfecting it.

Your restaurant business plan executive summary should include information on:

Mission statement: Your goals and objectives

General company information: Include your founding date, team roles (i.e. executive chef, sous chefs, sommeliers), and locations

Category and offerings: What category your restaurant fits into, what you’re planning to serve (i.e. farm-to-table or Korean), and why

Context for success: Any past success you’ve had, or any current financial data that’ll support that you are on the path to success

Financial requests: If you’re searching for investment or financing, include your plans and goals here and any financing you’ve raised or borrowed thus far

Future plans: Your vision for where you’re going in the next year, three years, and five years

When you’re done with your executive summary, you should feel like you’ve provided a bird’s eye view of your entire business plan. In fact, even though this section is first, you will likely write it last so you can take the highlights from each of the subsequent sections.

And once you’re done, read it on its own: Does it give a comprehensive, high-level overview of your restaurant, its current state, and your vision for the future? Remember, this may be the only part of your business plan potential investors or partners will read, so it should be able to stand on its own and be interesting enough to make them want to read the rest of your plan.

Company overview

This is where you’ll dive into the specifics of your company, detailing the kind of restaurant you’re looking to create, who’s helping you do it, and how you’re prepared to accomplish it.

Your restaurant business plan company overview should include:

Purpose: The type of restaurant you’re opening (fine dining, fast-casual, pop-up, etc.), type of food you’re serving, goals you have, and the niche you hope to fill in the market

Area: Information on the area in which you’re opening

Customers: Whom you’re hoping to target, their demographic information

Legal structure: Your business entity (i.e. LLC, LLP, etc.) and how many owners you have

Similar to your executive summary, you won’t be going into major detail here as the sections below will get into the nitty-gritty. You’ll want to look at this as an extended tear sheet that gives someone a good grip on your restaurant or concept, where it fits into the market, and why you’re starting it.

Team and management

Barely anything is as important for a restaurant as the team that runs it. You’ll want to create a section dedicated to the members of your staff—even the ones that aren’t yet hired. This will provide a sense of who is taking care of what, and how you need to structure and build out the team to get your restaurant operating at full steam.

Your restaurant business plan team and management section should have:

Management overview: Who is running the restaurant, what their experience and qualifications are, and what duties they’ll be responsible for

Staff: Other employees you’ve brought on and their bios, as well as other spots you anticipate needing to hire for

Ownership percentage: Which individuals own what percentage of the restaurant, or if you are an employee-owned establishment

Be sure to update this section with more information as your business changes and you continue to share this business plan—especially because who is on your team will change both your business and the way people look at it.

Sample menu

You’ll also want to include a sample menu in your restaurant business plan so readers have a sense of what they can expect from your operations, as well as what your diners can expect from you when they sit down. This will also force you to consider exactly what you want to serve your diners and how your menu will stand out from similar restaurants in the area. Although a sample menu is in some ways self-explanatory, consider the following:

Service : If your brunch is as important as your dinner, provide both menus; you also might want to consider including both a-la-carte and prix fixe menus if you plan to offer them.

Beverage/wine service: If you’ll have an emphasis on specialty beverages or wine, a separate drinks list could be important.

Seasonality: If you’re a highly seasonal restaurant, you might want to consider providing menus for multiple seasons to demonstrate how your dishes (and subsequent purchasing) will change.

Market analysis

This is where you’ll begin to dive deeper. Although you’ve likely mentioned your market and the whitespace you hope to address, the market analysis section will enable you to prove your hypotheses.

Your restaurant business plan market analysis should include:

Industry information: Include a description of the restaurant industry, its size, growth trends, and other trends regarding things such as tastes, trends, demographics, structures, etc.

Target market: Zoom in on the area and neighborhood in which you’re opening your restaurant as well as the type of cuisine you’re serving.

Target market characteristics: Describe your customers and their needs, how/if their needs are currently being served, other important pieces about your specific location and customers.

Target market size and growth: Include a data-driven section on the size of your market, trends in its growth, how your target market fits into the industry as a whole, projected growth of your market, etc.

Market share potential: Share how much potential there is in the market, how much your presence will change the market, and how much your specific restaurant or restaurant locations can own of the open market; also touch on any barriers to growth or entry you might see.

Market pricing: Explain how you’ll be pricing your menu and where you’ll fall relative to your competitors or other restaurants in the market.

Competitive research: Include research on your closest competitors, how they are both succeeding and failing, how customers view them, etc.

If this section seems like it might be long, it should—it’s going to outline one of the most important parts of your strategy, and should feel comprehensive. Lack of demand is the number one reason why new businesses fail, so the goal of this section should be to prove that there is demand for your restaurant and show how you’ll capitalize on it.

Additionally, if market research isn’t your forte, don’t be shy to reach out to market research experts to help you compile the data, or at least read deeply on how to conduct effective research.

Marketing and sales

Your marketing and sales section should feel like a logical extension of your market analysis section, since all of the decisions you’ll make in this section should follow the data of the prior section.

The marketing and sales sections of your restaurant business plan should include:

Positioning: How you’ll describe your restaurant to potential customers, the brand identity and visuals you’ll use to do it, and how you’ll stand out in the market based on the brand you’re building

Promotion: The tools, tactics, and platforms you’ll use to market your business

Sales: How you’ll convert on certain items, and who/how you will facilitate any additional revenue streams (i.e. catering)

It’s likely that you’ll only have concepts for some of these elements, especially if you’re not yet open. Still, get to paper all of the ideas you have, and you can (and should) always update them later as your restaurant business becomes more fully formed.

Business operations

The business operations section should get to the heart of how you plan to run your business. It will highlight both internal factors as well as external forces that will dictate how you run the ship.

The business operations section should include:

Management team: Your management structure and hierarchy, and who is responsible for what

Hours: Your hours and days of operation

Location: What’s special about your location that will get people through the door

Relationships: Any advantageous relationships you have with fellow restaurateurs, places for sourcing and buying, business organizations, or consultants on your team

Add here anything you think could be helpful for illustrating how you’re going to do business and what will affect it.

Here, you’ll detail the current state of your business finances and project where you hope to be in a year, three years, and five years. You’ll want to detail what you’ve spent, what you will spend, where you’ll get the money, costs you might incur, and returns you’ll hope to see—including when you can expect to break even and turn a profit.

Financial statements: If you’ve been in business for any amount of time, include existing financial statements (i.e. profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow, etc.)

Budget: Your current budget or a general startup budget

Projections: Include revenue, cash flow, projected profit and loss, and other costs

Debt: Include liabilities if the business has any outstanding debt or loans

Funding request: If you’re requesting a loan or an investment, lay out how much capital you’re looking for, your company’s valuation (if applicable), and the purpose of the funding

Above all, as you’re putting your financials together, be realistic—even conservative. You want to give any potential investors a realistic picture of your business.

Feel like there are other important components but they don't quite fit in any of the other categories (or make them run too long)? That’s what the restaurant business plan appendix section is for. And although in, say, a book, an appendix can feel like an afterthought, don’t ignore it—this is another opportunity for you to include crucial information that can give anyone reading your plan some context. You may include additional data, graphs, marketing collateral (like logo mockups), and more.

Start Your Dream Business

The bottom line

Whether you’re writing a restaurant business plan for investors, lenders, or simply for yourself and your team, the most important thing to do is make sure your document is comprehensive. A good business plan for a restaurant will take time—and maybe a little sweat—to complete fully and correctly.

One other crucial thing to remember: a business plan is not a document set in stone. You should often look to it to make sure you’re keeping your vision and mission on track, but you should also feel prepared to update its components as you learn more about your business and individual restaurant.

This article originally appeared on JustBusiness, a subsidiary of NerdWallet.

On a similar note...

How to Open a Fine Dining Restaurant

• Restauranting
• Retail Small Business
• Real Estate
• Nonprofit Organizations
• Import/Export Business
• Freelancing & Consulting
• Food & Beverage
• Event Planning
• Construction
• Operations & Success
• Becoming an Owner

The fundamentals of opening a fine dining restaurant follow those of opening any restaurant — a solid business plan , funding, permits, and licenses. Beyond these basic tasks, successfully creating a fine dining experience requires impeccable attention to detail, from the atmosphere to the food to the service.

Opening a Fine Dining Restaurant

• Fine dining on your terms. Fine dining is a subjective term. What some consider fine dining , others consider casual. Not all fine dining is tablecloths and frilly napkins — many of the highest-rated restaurants in the country are characterized by a sleek, simple design. The definition of fine dining is a restaurant concept offering patrons the finest in food, service, and atmosphere .  So while your concept should clearly and consistently define your vision, it need not fit a specific mold. It should seek to earn and keep a place of distinction among restaurants in your area by meeting these criteria every day, in every way.
• Select a location. Location is integral to the success of any restaurant. One benefit afforded to fine dining restaurants which others seldom enjoy is that of having a bit more leeway in location choice. Fine dining restaurants are full-suite experiences — dinner reservations are often made weeks or months in advance and patrons are willing to drive to get there. Converted buildings such as barns, older homes, and other unique structures are great locations for fine dining restaurants.
• Create a fine dining menu. Your menu should set you apart from — above — the competition. Many fine dining restaurants feature a prix fixe menu , while others mix a standard menu with nightly specials. Your menu should be presented in an elegant form and printed on good quality paper.
• Purchase equipment. Equipment purchased for the kitchen should reflect the requirements set by the menu. Freshly prepared produce, homemade desserts, and bread are often hallmarks of a fine dining experience so adequate, functional space to store and prepare these foods is a necessary consideration. While all restaurants require specific commercial equipment, fine dining restaurants must also consider plates, glassware, flatware, linens, and furniture to best compliment the restaurant's overall ambiance.
• Hire a well-trained staff. Good service staff is worth its weight in gold in providing apex service. Service staff should be able to present the menu by rote, and should always have food and drink recommendations at the ready, should customers ask. A head chef exemplifying experience and passion for great food — someone inspired to create new, unique dishes and who inspires kitchen staff toward the same level of excellence — will become the linchpin of your restaurant's success.
• Connect with local farms. Organic, local fare isn’t just better for the environment and the local economy. It tastes better, looks better and provides a greater sense of connection to the food and the experience for your clientele, as well.
• Set up a reservation system . You can choose to have seating — that is, the first round of guests is seated at 5:30, the next round at 7:30. This allows better order flow control into the kitchen. Defining a table hold policy early on will be important as well.
• Partner with other local businesses. Reach out to local businesses whose clientele fit a fine dining demographic. Partnering with bed & breakfasts, resorts, and hotels to offer package deals for people seeking weekend getaways can be a solid resource of exposure.
• Rules of Running a Fine Dining Restaurant
• 10 Things to Know About Fine Dining Restaurants
• 7 Steps for Opening a Pop-Up Restaurant
• Everything You Need to Know About Starting a Pop Up Restaurant
• The Basics of Pop-Up Restaurants
• Different Types of Restaurant Concepts
• What to Consider in Designing a New Restaurant
• Tips on Restaurant Design and Interior Layout
• How to Set Up Your Restaurant Dining Room
• Small Restaurant Ideas
• The Basics of Restaurant Management
• How to Start Off-Premise Catering at a Restaurant
• What to Know About Buying Restaurant Equipment
• New Restaurant Layout Basics
• How to Start a New Restaurant
• How to Write a Restaurant Business Plan

Restaurant Business Plan Template

Written by Dave Lavinsky

Restaurant Business Plan

You’ve come to the right place to create a successful restaurant business plan.

We have helped over 100,000 entrepreneurs and business owners with how to write a restaurant business plan to help them start or grow their restaurants.

What is a Restaurant Business Plan?

A restaurant business plan is a plan to start and/or grow your restaurant business. Among other things, it outlines your business concept, identifies your target market, presents your marketing plan and details your financial projections.  

What are the Main Types of Restaurants?

There are many types of restaurant businesses which vary based on their service style. Restaurants can range in type from fast food, fast casual, moderate casual, fine dining, and bar and restaurant types.

Restaurants also come in a variety of different ethnic or themed categories, such as Mexican restaurants, Asian restaurants, American, etc.  Some restaurants also go mobile and have food trucks.  

How Do You Get Funding for Your Restaurant Business Plan?

Restaurant businesses are most likely to receive funding from banks or independent restaurant investors. Typically you will find a local bank and present your restaurant business plan to them. Most independent restaurant investors are in the restaurant business already and can be a valuable resource for advice and help with your business plan.

Another option for a restaurant business is to obtain a small business loan. SBA loans are a popular option as they offer longer loan terms with lower interest rates.  

Sample Business Plan for a Restaurant Owner

Below is a business plan example to help you create each section of a comprehensive restaurant business plan.

Executive Summary

Business overview.

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse is a new restaurant and steakhouse located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The menu of Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will include bistro-type dishes that are authentically created and crafted by acclaimed Chef Peter Logan. It will be located in the trendy part of town, known as the Plaza District. The restaurant will be surrounded by classy art galleries, live theater, high-end restaurants and bars, and expensive shopping.

Owned by emerging restaurant operators Chef Peter Logan and Anastasia Gillette, Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse’s mission is to become Oklahoma City’s best, new business for patrons to celebrate their next big event, have a nice date night, or gather with friends or family for a fun evening while dining over finely crafted entrees, desserts, and cocktails.  

Products Served

The following are the menu items to be offered by Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse:

• Soups & Salads
• Gourmet sides
• Wine, Beer & Spirits

A sample menu can be found in the Appendix of this business plan.

Customer Focus

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will target adult men and women between the ages of 21 – 65 with disposable income in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Within this demographic are millennials, young professionals, newlyweds, young families, more established families, and retirees. Because of the pricing structure of the menu, the patrons will likely be upper middle class to the wealthy population of Oklahoma City.  

Management Team

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse is owned and operated by fellow Oklahoma City natives and culinary enthusiasts, Chef Peter Logan and Anastasia Gillette. Both come with a unique skill set and complement each other perfectly. They formerly worked together at another OKC fine dining establishment and made a great team for serving guests delectable food and wine while ensuring the highest level of customer service.

Chef Peter will manage the kitchen operations of Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse, while Anastasia will oversee front of the house operations, maintain and ensure customer service, and manage all reservations.  

Financial Highlights

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse is seeking $300,000 in debt financing to open its start-up restaurant. The funding will be dedicated for the build-out and restaurant design, kitchen, bar and lounge, as well as cooking supplies and equipment, working capital, three months worth of payroll expenses and opening inventory. The breakout of the funding is below:

• Restaurant Build-Out and Design – $100,000
• Kitchen supplies and equipment – $100,000
• Opening inventory – $25,000
• Working capital (to include 3 months of overhead expenses) – $25,000
• Marketing (advertising agency) – $25,000
• Accounting firm (3 months worth and establishment/permitting of business) – $25,000

Company Overview

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse is a new restaurant and steakhouse located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will serve a wide variety of dishes and beverages and will cater to the upper middle class to wealthier population of Oklahoma City. The menu of Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will include bistro-type dishes that are authentically created and crafted by acclaimed Chef Peter Logan. It will be located in the trendy part of town, known as the Plaza District. The Plaza District is one of Oklahoma’s trendy neighborhoods and is considered the “it” area for newlyweds, millennials, professionals, and young singles. The restaurant will be surrounded by classy art galleries, live theater, high-end restaurants and bars, and expensive shopping.

Owned by emerging restaurant operators Chef Peter Logan and Anastasia Gillette, the restaurant’s mission statement is to become the best new steak restaurant in OKC. The following are the types of menu items Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will serve- shareables, steaks, soups, gourmet sides and salads.

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse History

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse is owned by two Oklahoma City natives, Chef Peter Logan and Anastasia Gillette. They have both worked around the country in fine dining establishments and have a combined twenty years in the restaurant industry. Upon working alongside each other at another fine dining establishment in Oklahoma City, the two of them became good friends and decided to venture into owning their own restaurant.

Chef Peter is the kitchen guru and critically acclaimed chef, while Anastasia manages the front of the house and is a certified Sommelier. Together, with both of their expertise and knowledge, Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse is destined to become Oklahoma City’s next big restaurant.

Industry Analysis

The restaurant industry is expected to grow to over $220 billion in the next five years.

Consumer spending is projected to grow. The Consumer Confidence Index, a leading indicator of spending patterns, is expected to also grow strongly, which will boost industry growth over the next five years. The growth in consumer confidence also suggests that more consumers may opt to segment their disposable income to eating outside the home.

Additionally, an increase in the number of households earning more than $100,000 annually further contributes to the industry growth, supporting industry operators that offer more niche, higher-end products.  This group is expected to continue to grow in size over the next five years.

The urban population represents a large market for the industry. Specifically, time-strapped individuals living in urban areas will likely frequent industry establishments to save time on cooking. The urban population is expected to increase, representing a potential opportunity for the industry.  

Customer Analysis

Demographic profile of target market.

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will target adult men and women between the ages of 21 – 65 with disposable income in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Within this demographic are millennials, young professionals, newlyweds, young families, more established families, and retirees. Because of the pricing structure of the menu, the patrons will likely be upper middle class to the wealthy population of Oklahoma City.

Customer Segmentation

The target audience for Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will primarily include the following customer profile:

• Upper middle class to wealthier population
• Millennials
• Young professionals
• Households with an average income of at least $75k
• Foodies and culture enthusiasts

Competitive Analysis

Direct and indirect competitors.

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will be competing with other restaurants in Oklahoma City. A profile of each of our direct competitors is below.

Located in the trendy area known as the Plaza District, The Press has reimagined our favorite foods of the surrounding regions through the lens of home.

The menu consists of appetizers, soups, burgers and sandwiches, bowls, main dishes, sides, desserts, and a large selection of alcoholic beverages. The Press serves craft beer, domestic beer, wine spritzers, house cocktails, wine, and mimosas. They also offer brunch. The menu of The Press is affordable with the most expensive dish being $16. The wine menu is also not pretentious as the wine is sold either by the glass or bottle, with the most expensive bottle being $52 for the Gruet Sparkling Brut Rose.  

Oak & Ore

Oak & Ore is a craft beer and restaurant in OKC’s Plaza District. They have a 36-tap beer selection and offer vegetarian, vegan, and gluten free dining options. Oak & Ore offers a rotating, 36-tap selection of their favorite brews from Oklahoma and around the world. Each beer is thoughtfully paired with a craft beer-inspired restaurant experience.

The food menu of Oak & Ore offers starters, salads, wings, fried chicken, sandwiches, tacos, banh mi, and sides. They also have a selection of kids dishes so the whole family can enjoy comfort food while sampling one of their delectable beers.

The Mule OKC

The Mule is a casual, hip restaurant offering a large beer and cocktail menu plus sandwiches and more. Located in the constantly growing and buzzing hub that is the Plaza District, The Mule takes the timeless favorite and contorts it into a whole menu of wild offerings.

There is also a fantastic assortment of soups offered and The Mule shakes up a seasonal list of cocktails designed by their bar staff. During the winter months, patrons can stave off the cold with their versions of hot toddies and buttered rum. For the beer drinkers, they always have a reliable line-up of fresh cold brews on draft, as well as a wide selection of can.  

Competitive Advantage

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse offers several advantages over its competition. Those advantages are:

• Gourmet dishes elegantly prepared to the finest standard.
• Selection of steaks sourced from local Oklahoma farms.
• An exclusive and unique wine menu that includes a wine selection of all price points.
• Highly sought after location: Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will be located in the trendy and attractive neighborhood known as The Plaza District.
• Trendy, welcoming, and energetic ambiance that will be perfect for a night out or a celebration.

Marketing Plan

Promotions strategy.

The marketing strategy for Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse is as follows:

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse’s location is a promotions strategy in itself. The Plaza District is a destination spot for locals, tourists, and anyone looking for the trendiest food fare in Oklahoma City. The Plaza District is home to OKC’s most popular bars and restaurants, art galleries, theaters, and boutique shopping. The millennials, young professionals, and foodies will frequent Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse for the location itself.

Social Media

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will use social media to cater to the millennials and Oklahoma City residents. Chef Peter and Anastasia plan to hire an advertising agency to take professional photographs of the menu items and location to create appealing posts to reach a greater audience. The posts will include pictures of the menu items, as well as upcoming featured options.  

SEO Website Marketing

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse plans to invest funds into maintaining a strong SEO presence on search engines like Google and Bing. When a person types in “local fine dining restaurant” or “Oklahoma City restaurant”, Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will appear in the top three choices. The website will include the full menu, location, hours, and lots of pictures of the food, drinks, and steaks.  

Third Party Delivery Sites

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will maintain a presence on sites like GrubHub, Uber Eats, Doordash, and Postmates so that people looking for local food to be delivered will see Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse listed near the top.  

Operations Plan

Operation functions:.

The company will hire the following:

• 4 sous chefs
• 2 bartenders
• 2 hostesses
• The company will hire an advertising agency and an accounting firm

Milestones:

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse aims to open in the next 6 months. The following are the milestones needed in order to obtain this goal.

7/1/202X – Execute lease for prime location in the Plaza District.

7/2/202X – Begin construction of restaurant build-out.

7/10/202X – Finalize menu.

7/17/202X – Hire advertising company to begin developing marketing efforts.

8/15/202X – Start of marketing campaign

8/22/202X – Final walk-thru of completed restaurant build-out.

8/25/202X – Hire the entire team of sous chefs, servers, and bussers.

9/1/202X – Decoration and set up of restaurant.

9/15/202X – Grand Opening of Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will be owned and operated by Chef Peter Logan and Anastasia Gillette. Each will have a 50% ownership stake in the restaurant.

Chef Peter Logan, Co-Owner

Chef Peter Logan is an Oklahoma City native and has been in the restaurant industry for over ten years. He was trained in a prestigious Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Academy in San Francisco and has worked in some of the nation’s most prestigious fine dining restaurants. His tenure has took him from the west coast to the east coast, and now he’s back doing what he loves in his hometown of Oklahoma City.

Chef Peter will manage the kitchen operations of Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse. He will train and oversee the sous chefs, manage inventory, place food inventory orders, deal with the local food vendors, and ensure the highest customer satisfaction with the food.

Anastasia Gillette, Co-Owner

Anastasia Gillette was born and raised in Oklahoma City and has garnered over ten years in the industry as well. While in college, Anastasia worked as a hostess at one of the area’s most prestigious restaurant establishments. While there, she was eventually promoted to Front of the House Manager where she oversaw the hostesses, servers, bussers, bartenders, and reservations. Her passion always led to the beverage portion of the restaurant so she obtained her Sommelier certificate in 2019. With her wine education, Anastasia is able to cultivate an interesting and elegant wine selection for the restaurant.

Anastasia will oversee front of the house operations, maintain and ensure customer service, and manage all reservations. She will also be in charge of the bar and wine ordering, training of front of the house staff, and will manage the restaurant’s social media accounts once they are set up.  

Financial Plan

Key revenue & costs.

The revenue drivers for Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse will come from the food and drink menu items being offered daily.

The cost drivers will be the ingredients and products needed to make the menu items as well as the cooking materials. A significant cost driver is the fine dining equipment, serving dishes, and beer and wine glasses. Other cost drivers will be the overhead expenses of payroll for the employees, accounting firm, and cost of the advertising agency.

Funding Requirements and Use of Funds

Bluehorn Restaurant & Steakhouse is seeking $300,000 in debt financing to open its start-up restaurant. The breakout of the funding is below:

Financial Projections

Income statement.

Balance Sheet

Cash Flow Statement

  You can download our free restaurant business plan template PDF . This restaurant business plan template can be used to create a finalized business plan for your restaurant concept.

From Concept to Success: 10 Essential Steps for Starting a Fine Dining Restaurant

Related blogs.

• Fine Dining Reimagined: The True Profitability of High-End Restaurants
• The Fine Dining Market is Booming - Is it Time for You to Join the Industry?
• 7 Must-Know KPIs for Maximizing Profits in Fine Dining Restaurants

1. Research The Market

Before starting a fine dining restaurant in any locality, researching the market is essential to ensure that the concept is feasible and viable. In-depth research and analysis can help in understanding the competition, differentiating the business from the rest, and identifying the potential target audience.

• Identify the target audience
• Assess the competition
• Check the demand for fine dining restaurant

Tips & Tricks:

• Research on various online websites, blogs, and forums for restaurant business information and knowledge.
• Conduct surveys to understand the preferences and choices of your target audience.
• Visit competitors' fine dining restaurants and explore their menus, ambiance, and pricing.

2. Develop A Business Plan

Developing a comprehensive and well-thought-out business plan is crucial for any fine dining restaurant business. Your business plan should outline the goals, strategies, and financial projections for your restaurant. Here are the chapters that you should cover in your business plan:

• Executive Summary: This section should provide an overview of your restaurant business, including the concept, target market, and financial projections.
• Company Description: This chapter should describe your restaurant's legal structure, location, and unique selling proposition.
• Market Analysis: This section should outline your target market, including demographics, psychographics, and other relevant characteristics.
• Menu and Pricing Strategy: This chapter should describe the culinary concept of your restaurant, including the menu items, prices, and target food costs.
• Marketing and Sales Strategy: This section should detail how you plan to promote and advertise your restaurant, including social media, online reviews, and traditional advertising methods.
• Operations Plan: This chapter should describe the day-to-day operations of your restaurant, including the staffing plan, kitchen layout, and equipment requirements.
• Financial Plan: This section should provide detailed financial projections for your restaurant, including expected sales, expenses, and profit margins.
• Be realistic in your financial projections and allow for contingencies in your cash flow.
• Research your competition thoroughly and develop a strategy to differentiate your restaurant from theirs.
• Be clear and concise in your business plan, using data and research to support your claims.

By developing a comprehensive business plan, you will be able to identify potential challenges, opportunities, and risks for your fine dining restaurant business. It will also help you secure funding from investors or lenders, and guide your decision-making process in the long run.

3. Design A Financial Model

When it comes to starting a fine dining restaurant, one of the most crucial steps is designing a financial model. A financial model will help you understand the costs involved in starting and running your business and will help you determine how much money you need to raise.

Here are some of the most important factors to consider when designing your financial model:

• Capital costs: This includes the cost of buying or leasing a location, as well as equipment, furniture, and supplies. You'll also need to factor in any costs associated with renovating the space to meet your needs.
• Operating costs: This includes ongoing expenses like rent, utilities, salaries, and supplies. Make sure to research average costs in your area so that you can accurately estimate these expenses.
• Revenue projections: You'll need to estimate how much revenue your restaurant will generate each month. This will depend on a variety of factors, including your menu prices, the number of guests you can accommodate, and your marketing efforts.
• Funding sources: Depending on the size and scope of your restaurant, you may need to raise a significant amount of funding. Explore all of your options, including loans, investments, and crowdfunding, to determine which options are right for you.
• It's always better to overestimate your costs and underestimate your revenue projections to avoid any unpleasant surprises down the line.

Once you've gathered all of this information, you can use it to create a financial model that will help you understand whether your business is financially viable. Make sure to create several different scenarios so that you can see how different variables (such as higher or lower revenue) will impact your finances.

• Consider hiring a professional accountant or financial consultant to help you create your financial model. They can provide valuable insights and help you avoid costly mistakes.

Remember that your financial model is a living document—you'll need to update it regularly as your business evolves and conditions change. By taking the time to create a detailed and accurate financial model, you'll be setting your restaurant up for success from the start.

4. Source Funding

Starting a fine dining restaurant can be a financially challenging task. However, with the right funding and financial planning, it can be manageable. Here are some sources of funding you can explore:

• Savings: If you have personal savings, this can be a good source of funding. It allows you to avoid taking on debt and maintain full control of your business.
• Bank Loans: You can approach local banks and inquire about small business loans. Prepare a solid business plan that outlines your projected revenue and expenses to increase your chances of getting approved.
• Investors: You can pitch your business idea to investors who are interested in investing in a new venture. Be prepared to give them a stake in the ownership of the restaurant.
• Crowdfunding: Online fundraising platforms such as Kickstarter or GoFundMe can be a viable option for raising funds from a large group of people.

It's important to remember to have a clear understanding of your financial needs and plan ahead before seeking out funding. Consider reaching out to a financial advisor or accountant to help you make the best financial decision for your business.

• Research different funding options thoroughly to determine which one is the best fit for your business.
• Maintain a good credit score to increase your chances of getting approved for a loan.
• Consider offering incentives, such as early access to the restaurant or exclusive menu items, to investors or crowdfunding supporters.

5. Secure Necessary Permits & Licenses

Securing necessary permits and licenses is crucial for any restaurant business. It is important to make sure that the business is operating legally and following all regulations. Here are some of the permits and licenses that you will need to secure before opening a fine dining restaurant:

1. Food Service Establishment Permit

A food service establishment permit is required for any business that is involved in the preparation, storage, or service of food and beverages. This permit ensures that the business is following the health and safety regulations set by the local government.

2. Business License

A business license is required for any business that operates within a specific city or county. It legitimizes the business and allows it to operate legally.

3. Liquor License

If you plan on serving alcohol at your fine dining restaurant, you will need to obtain a liquor license. The requirements for obtaining a liquor license vary depending on the state and city where the business is located.

4. Sign Permit

A sign permit is required for any signage that will be placed on the exterior of the business. This permit ensures that the signage meets all safety and aesthetic standards.

5. Building Permit

A building permit is required for any construction or renovation that is done to the building where the restaurant will be located. This permit confirms that the building is up to code and safe for occupancy.

6. Fire Safety Permit

A fire safety permit ensures that the building meets all necessary fire safety requirements and standards.

7. Music License

If you plan on playing music in your restaurant, you will need to obtain a music license. This license ensures that the restaurant is operating within copyright laws and compensating artists for the use of their music.

• Make sure to research the specific permit and license requirements for your state and city.
• Allow enough time for permit and license processing - it can take several weeks or even months.
• Consider hiring a professional to help navigate the permit and license process.

Securing the necessary permits and licenses can seem overwhelming, but it is crucial to ensure that your fine dining restaurant is operating legally and safely. Take the time to research the requirements and allow enough time for processing so that your restaurant can operate smoothly and successfully.

6. Check On Relevant Regulations & Codes

When it comes to starting a new fine dining restaurant business, you need to make sure you are aware of all the relevant regulations and codes in your area. This can be a complex process, but it's crucial to ensure that you are operating within the law and providing the highest quality experience for your guests.

Here are some key steps to take when checking on relevant regulations and codes:

• Research the local government requirements for opening a restaurant in your area.
• Check with the health department to see what standards you need to meet to ensure that your kitchen is clean and safe.
• Find out what licenses and permits you need to operate a fine dining restaurant, including liquor licenses, food service permits, and certificates of occupancy.
• Ensure that you are up to date on all zoning laws and other regulations that may impact your business.

By taking these steps, you can ensure that your fine dining restaurant is operating legally and that you are providing the highest quality service and experience to your guests.

Tips & Tricks

• Make sure to stay up to date on any changes in regulations or codes that may impact your restaurant business.
• Consider hiring a lawyer or consultant who specializes in restaurant regulations to help you navigate the process.
• Join industry associations or groups to stay informed about relevant regulations and connect with other restaurant owners and operators.

7. Lease A Space

One of the most important things to consider when opening a fine dining restaurant is finding the right location. This will have a significant impact on the success of your business. Here are some important steps to follow when looking for the ideal space to lease:

• Determine your budget: Before you start your search, you need to determine how much you can afford to spend on rent. This will help you narrow down your options and avoid wasting time on spaces that are not in your price range.
• Consider the location: Look for a space that is in a prime location with high foot traffic, easy accessibility and parking space. The location must be ideal for your niche and target customers.
• Check out the competition: Look for a space that is not too close to your competitors. Also, look for similar business around the area to help you know the buying behaviors of the area.
• Find a space that fits your needs: Consider the size, layout, and amenities of the space. Depending upon the size of your restaurant, you may need to factor in the size of the kitchen, number of dining tables or bar space, storage, and equipment availability.
• Negotiate your lease: Negotiate your lease agreement, rental rates, and terms with the landlord. Ask for concessions like free rent period, discounted rental rates, or tenant improvement allowance before signing on the dotted line.

Tips and Tricks:

• Start your search early to give yourself enough time to find your ideal space. You might need more than 6 months to get a viable space for building out a new restaurant.
• Be sure to get everything in writing when negotiating leasing rates. This will help you to avoid hidden fees and misunderstandings.
• Consider hiring a professional real estate agent to help you negotiate the best possible lease terms.

Leasing the right space for your fine dining restaurant can be a bit intimidating, but if you follow these simple steps, you can find the perfect location to launch your business. Having the ideal space will help you to attract more customers, build brand recognition, create good impressions, and ensure profitability in the long run.

8. Choose The Gastronomic Concept

Choosing the gastronomic concept of your restaurant is one of the most important steps in opening a fine dining establishment. This will determine the cuisine, style, and atmosphere of your restaurant.

Here are some factors to consider when choosing your gastronomic concept:

• Market research: Conduct market research to identify the cuisines that are popular in the area where you plan to open the restaurant. This will help you to determine what type of cuisine to offer.
• Your expertise: It is always better to serve the cuisine you are experienced with. If you are not experienced in any cuisine, then try to learn about the cultures and cuisines of different regions and try to implement them into your restaurant.
• Fusion cuisine: A great way to stand out from the competition is to offer fusion cuisine. This involves combining two or more cuisines to create unique dishes.
• Concept: The concept of the restaurant should be in line with the type of cuisine you serve. For example, a restaurant that serves Italian cuisine should have a cozy and warm atmosphere.
• Restaurant type: Your target customers will determine the type of restaurant you should open. For example, if your target customers are families, then you should consider opening a family-style restaurant.
• Try to offer something unique that is not available in nearby restaurants.
• Create a menu that is versatile and can cater to different dietary needs such as vegetarian and gluten-free options.
• Make sure that the menu items complement each other to avoid taste clashes.

Once you have finalized your gastronomic concept, it is time to create a menu that reflects your restaurant's theme. The menu should be well-curated and consist of dishes that are unique, flavorful, and visually appealing.

Here are some things to keep in mind when creating a fine dining menu:

• Keep it simple: Avoid having too many menu items. This will help your kitchen staff to focus on quality instead of quantity.
• Seasonal ingredients: Use seasonal ingredients as they are fresher, flavorful, and cost-effective.
• Consistency: All dishes on the menu should be consistent in terms of quality and presentation.
• Price: The menu should be priced competitively with other fine dining restaurants in the area.
• Flexibility: The menu should be flexible enough to accommodate changes based on customer feedback and to experiment with new dishes.

Having a well-curated menu will not only attract customers, but it will also set your restaurant apart from the competition. Make sure to hold tastings and get feedback from customers before finalizing your menu.

9. Hire Staff & Establish Operational Processes

At this stage, you have gone through the essential steps required to launch your fine dining restaurant business. A critical next step is hiring the right staff and developing effective operational processes. Here are some tips to guide you:

• Hire experienced staff: Staff members who have previous experience in the fine dining industry are more likely to understand the nuances involved in delivering an exceptional experience to your customers.
• Develop comprehensive training programs: In addition to hiring experienced staff, it is important to develop comprehensive training programs to equip your staff with the necessary knowledge and skills required to deliver excellent service.
• Establish clear SOPs: Develop Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for various aspects of your business, such as food preparation, sanitation, and customer service. These SOPs should be followed strictly, as they form the basis of your business operations.

Hiring Staff

One of the essential steps in opening a fine dining restaurant is hiring the right staff. Your staff members are the face of your business, and their behavior and attitude will have a significant impact on your customer's experience.

Here are the roles and responsibilities you need to fill:

• Chef: You need to hire an experienced head chef who can design a comprehensive menu and deliver consistently high-quality dishes.
• Waitstaff: Hire professional and polished waitstaff who can provide excellent customer service and enhance the dining experience for your customers.
• Bar Staff: If you plan to serve alcohol, you need to hire knowledgeable bartenders to create unique cocktails and serve other beverages.
• Host/hostess: Hire professional hosts/hostesses who can greet and seat customers promptly, maintaining a formal atmosphere.

Developing Operational Processes

Effective operational processes are crucial to the success of your fine dining business. They help to ensure that your business runs smoothly and consistently delivers excellent service to customers.

Here are some essential operational processes you need to develop:

• Food Preparation: Develop a rigorous food preparation process, ensuring that all dishes are freshly prepared, meet quality standards, and are delivered speedily.
• Sanitation: Maintain the highest levels of cleanliness and sanitation in your restaurant. Develop a comprehensive cleaning schedule that covers all areas of your business.
• Customer service: Develop a customer service framework that emphasizes politeness, professionalism, and empathy. Establish protocols for handling customer complaints and other feedback.
• Inventory Management: Establish an inventory management process that enables you to monitor your stock levels, reduce wastage, and improve efficiency.
• Financial management: Develop a financial management process that enables you to track your business's revenue and expenses. Use financial data to make informed decisions about your business's future.

By following these tips and developing comprehensive operational procedures, you can launch a successful fine dining restaurant business. Remember to prioritize the customer experience and maintain a focus on quality, and you'll be on your way to a thriving business.

10. Market The Restaurant

Marketing is the process of creating awareness about your business to your potential customers. Marketing is a crucial step in the success of any business, including a fine dining restaurant. Here are some steps to take to market your restaurant:

• Create a website: A website acts as a digital storefront for your business. Make sure your website is well-designed, easy to navigate, and contains basic information about your restaurant. You can also include your menu, photos of your food, and your restaurant's story on your website.
• Use social media: Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great tools for promoting your restaurant. Share photos and descriptions of your dishes, post updates about any events happening in your restaurant, and respond to customer messages and comments.
• List your restaurant on online directories: Listing your restaurant on online directories such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google My Business can help your restaurant show up in search results when potential customers are looking for restaurants in your area.
• Host events: Hosting events such as wine tastings, live music performances, or special dinners can attract new customers to your restaurant and give your regulars something to look forward to.
• Offer promotions: Offering promotions such as discounts, happy hour deals, or prix fixe menus can incentivize customers to try your restaurant and come back for more.
• Partner with other businesses: Partnering with other businesses in your area, such as hotels, theaters, or event spaces, can help increase your restaurant's exposure and attract new customers.
• Hold a soft opening trial with close family and friends to test the waters before opening to the public.
• Offer complimentary dishes or drinks to regular customers as a way of showing appreciation and building loyalty.
• Get involved with your local community by sponsoring events or donating to charity.

Marketing is an ongoing process that requires effort and creativity. By implementing these marketing strategies, you can attract more customers to your fine dining restaurant and grow your business.

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Writing a Restaurant Business Plan: 9 Sections to Include

When you start a business, having a business plan is essential. It helps you map out the direction of your business and your intentions. If you’re planning on opening a restaurant , opening a coffee shop , opening a bakery , or thinking about the cost to open a food truck , you’ll also need to have a restaurant business plan-where you can plan for direct to consumer trends . 

A business plan for types of restaurants like cafes, fine dining restaurants, and pop up restaurants , helps you differentiate your business from others. It sorts out the details in terms of the restaurant concept, design, location, and financials-like flat rate shipping costs. 

Putting thought and research into your potential business venture is crucial. With a business plan, you’ll have all the research in one place with the answers you and your investors need to move forward. It sets you up for long term success. 

So, how do you write a business plan? This article has everything you need to create a restaurant business plan and prove the viability of your idea.

Why Is a Restaurant Business Plan Important?

A restaurant business plan acts as the blueprint for any business venture. It provides an outline for your vision while also explaining in thorough detail how your business will operate. This plan can be shared with other business owners, investors, and stakeholders. 

With a detailed business plan in place, you’ll be able to ensure that no detail is overlooked, and you can successfully grow your business. If potential problems arise during the construction, staffing, licensing, or operational process, your business plan will act as a guide. 

Many restaurants will fail and some of them do because there was no business plan in place. Coming up with a well-thought-out and detailed business plan can be tough and time-consuming. However, it can make the entire process of opening a restaurant less stressful and messy. 

A solid business plan can help bring investors on board and prove that your idea is worth it. It’s what will help you figure out how you’ll reach that break even point and start profiting. 

How to Write a Business Plan for Restaurant

A solid restaurant business plan can vary based on the kind of food establishment you have. You have to take into account different factors of the business including the restaurant style, target or niche market , and location. 

If you’re a newbie to the restaurant industry, the idea of writing your own business plan can seem overwhelming. However, we can help you get started.

Below you’ll learn about some key elements you should include when writing your business plan. A business plan for a restaurant includes: 

• Executive Summary
• Business Concept
• Target Market and Competition
• Sample Menu
• Management and Employees
• Marketing and Advertising
• Financial Aspects

The Executive Summary

This summary should be the first section of your business plan. It plays two roles as it introduces and also summarizes the vision of your business. In the summary, you’ll want to introduce the key elements of your restaurant’s business plan so that the reader is invested. It’s best to add enough detail, but not too much so you can intrigue the reader. 

Within the executive summary, be sure to include the restaurant’s mission statement, the business concept, how you plan to execute the business, potential costs, and a brief ROI analysis . You can also include the core values of the business.

In the business concept section, it’s ideal to go into detail as you describe the restaurant’s concept. What kind of products or services will your restaurant offer? What is the inspiration behind the concept? How is your restaurant's concept unique?

Describe the service style you envision for your business. Identify the kind of food you’ll serve. It’s best to be as clear as possible about how your restaurant is unique compared to others. 

The restaurant industry is quite competitive as it is. Entering it with a new idea can be tricky. This is why it’s important to conduct thorough market research as this is what will help you stand out.

Complete a data-driven market analysis and identify the customers that you’ll attract with your new restaurant concept. Focus on what makes your niche different from other concepts, and how its relevance to the industry as a whole will be beneficial to you.

In this section, you’ll also want to elaborate on what other businesses exist around the location you’re targeting. These restaurants will be your biggest competitors. Include the number of competitors  in the area and explain their concepts. This information will be important for investors to understand how your business will stand out.

Your restaurant menus (see menu meaning ) will be the most important part of your business. Jotting down a list of menu items isn’t enough. You should incorporate a potential menu design and add a logo.

The sample menu in your business plan should include prices that are based on the cost analysis that you’ve done. There are different ways to find out how to price a menu , but in most cases, it will be based on potential food cost and labor cost . The prices will show investors that you’ve done your research and are confident that you can sell the menu items at the price points. 

There are countless types of menu options for you to choose from and the ideal one will be based on your restaurant concept. You can have a prix fixe menu , dessert menu , food and wine pairing menu , digital menu for wine, or table d hote menu . It’s possible to also incorporate a restaurant QR code menu.

A successful restaurant business will need to have restaurant management and staff. These include a restaurant manager , bar management team, wait staff , bar staff , and an inventory control manager .

This section of your restaurant business plan should provide an overview of the team you’ve established so far. It should also highlight any new positions that you may want to add. Include the employee and management work experience and necessary skills when presenting your team. 

Be sure to include the salary or pay that you will be giving each staff member based on their roles. With this information, your investors will get a solid understanding of the potential your restaurant has to succeed.

Within the design section of your business plan, you’ll have the opportunity to show off any ideas you have to your investors. You don’t necessarily have to include professional mock-ups, but it won’t hurt. You can express your vision through a mood board using pictures of ideas or aesthetics that you like. 

The design of your restaurant goes beyond the actual look. It should also include restaurant technology and software that can be essential for the business. If you plan to cook using a wood-burning oven, you should include it in the designs. 

Picking the location is one of the most important aspects of starting a business. This should go hand in hand with the target market that you’ve chosen. You might not have an exact location picked out yet, but you should include some to choose from. 

You should be as detailed as possible about each potential location so that you can explain why it would be the ideal place for your restaurant. Include the typical demographics of the location, the square footage, foot traffic, and any other important information. 

The restaurant marketing and sales portion of your business plan will be crucial. In this section, you should cover the position and brand identity of your business, promotional tools and tactics, as well as sales tactics. 

Your marketing plan must include a promotional strategy for before and after you open your restaurant. Potential options include marketing through social media and creating a website. On that website, you should include an about us page which can be created using an about us page template or by following about us page examples . These will give your restaurant credibility.

It’s possible for you to only have some of your marketing and advertising concepts planned out. However, as you develop more, you should add them to your plan. This will happen as you continue to develop your restaurant business. It's also crucial to use O2O marketing efforts.

The financial aspects of your restaurant business are crucial and a section that your investors will be interested in. You want to highlight the current financial state of your business, include financial projections for one, three, and five years from now, and be sure to reference cash flow and statistical averages. 

Explain what you’ve spent money on already, how much you plan to spend, and on what, how you plan to secure the funds, additional costs that may incur, and potential returns. This also includes when you plan to make a profit. This can be done with a restaurant profit and loss statement or income statement.

Frequently Asked Questions About Restaurant Business Plan

What is a restaurant business plan.

A restaurant business plan acts as the blueprint of your business activities and vision and explains each detail of business operation. Business plans are essential to have before actually starting a business because they can showcase your vision to other business partners and investors. It can also guide you as you start to get your small business off the ground. You may also consider using a business process flow chart template to identify your business processes.

Why Is It Important to Have a Restaurant Business Plan?

It’s important to have a restaurant business plan in place because it creates a roadmap for you to follow. If written correctly, it will include benchmarks for your restaurant business that will allow you to assess the progress of your business. It can also include timelines for all of your restaurant plans and encourage you to work towards achieving your goals. 

What Sections Should I Include in My Restaurant Business Plan?

The sections that you should include in your restaurant business plan are: 

What are the 3 Main Purposes of a Business Plan?

The three main purposes of a business plan are to:

• Define the business's goals and objectives
• Create a roadmap for how the business will achieve those goals
• Attract investment or funding from potential investors or lenders

What are the Common Problems of a Restaurant?

Restaurant owners face a number of challenges, including inventory shrinkage (theft), waste, and high labor costs. They must also deal with inventory turnover , employee turnover rates, which affect customer service and satisfaction.

What Makes a Business Plan Successful?

A successful business plan must be well-thought-out. This means that it should be clear and concise. By taking the time to carefully consider your business goals, you can increase your chances of success.

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How it works

How to Write a Restaurant Business Plan in 2024 (Step by Step Guide with Templates)

A restaurant business plan is a framework that guides you to plan and forecast every element of restaurant management and operations.

This includes anything from your restaurant's menu design , location, financials, employee training , and a lot more.

Creating a solid business plan is important, as it helps:

Transform your restaurant ideas into reality.

Boosts entrepreneurial success by 16% ( Harvard Business Study ).

It equips you to navigate challenges before they arise.

Attracts potential investors.

Planning is key to restaurant success. Without a plan, you're more likely to join the 26% of restaurants that fail within a year.

To set yourself up for success create a restaurant business plan.

Here's how to get started. 

What is a restaurant business plan? 

A restaurant business plan serves as a roadmap for starting and running your restaurant , making it easy for outside parties, such as investors, to understand your objectives, vision, and plan of action for your restaurant.

When it comes to the length and level of detail, ranging from brief synopses to large papers, each business plan may vary. It's good to note that investors can benefit from clear insights and additional information provided from the start. 

Every business should have a business plan, whether new or existing. Business plans help you focus on your goals and can help get back on track if you stray from them.

Steps to include in your business plan 

Your restaurant and mission statement needs to reflect your brand and goals, but you don't have to start from scratch.

The Eat App Restaurant Business Plan template , created by industry professionals and packed with insider information, is your go-to manual for creating a profitable business plan.

Your finalized business plan should have 11 essential elements, no matter how you write it. Continue reading below. 

1. Executive summary

A restaurant business plan should always begin with an executive summary. Why?

80% of venture capitalists say they read the executive summary first.

62% of investors say they would not continue reading a business plan if the executive summary did not capture their interest.

A strong executive summary can increase the likelihood of securing funding by up to 40%.

An executive summary not only acts as the introduction to your restaurant business plan samples but also as a summary of the entire idea.

The main aim of an executive summary is to draw the reader (oftentimes an investor) into the rest of your business plan.

The executive summary also helps you envision the identity of your restaurant which essentially shapes the customer experience and sets you apart from competitors.

To establish a distinct identity, you need to focus on common elements of an executive summary, including:

• A mission statement 
• Proposed concept development
• Cuisine selection
• The overall execution
• The potential costs
• Expected return on investments (ROI)

Let's take a more in-depth look at the concept development, cuisine selection, and mission statement.

1.1 Concept Development

Selecting the type of restaurant, service style, and atmosphere is the first step towards creating a unique dining experience. Whether you envision a sample menu for a:

• cozy, intimate bistro
• bustling quick-service deli
• fast-casual restaurant
• fine dining establishment

Your concept should reflect your passion and expertise in the industry.

1.2 Cuisine Selection

The cuisine you select for your restaurant can significantly influence its success.

Choosing the appropriate cuisine is vital for distinguishing your establishment from competitors and attracting your target market.

To make an informed decision, consider factors such as:

• Market demand
• Expertise and passion
• Ingredient availability
• Competition
• Profitability
• Cultural fit
• Seasonality
• Dietary restrictions and trends

In the highly competitive restaurant industry, keeping track of current and emerging cuisine trends can be a significant advantage.

1.3 Creating a mission statement

A well-constructed mission statement communicates the purpose, values, and goals of your restaurant to potential investors and customers alike.

A mission statement serves as a guiding light for decision-makers and employees, fueling their efforts to achieve your restaurant’s objectives.

To create an impactful mission statement, consider the following steps:

• Identify the purpose of the restaurant.
• Contemplate the brand’s image.
• Account for the target audience.
• Incorporate company values.
• Ensure brevity and comprehensiveness.

Related content: How to Write a Restaurant Mission Statement 

Remember, your mission statement should not only differentiate your restaurant from competitors but also resonate with your target market.

A well-conceived mission statement can provide a guiding light to keep your restaurant moving in the right direction. It helps ensure that every decision you make and every interaction you have is in line with your core values and goals.

2. Company description

This is where you carefully introduce the company in the restaurant business plan.

Include the name of the restaurant you are launching in this field along with its address, phone number, and other important information.

Then, also include the owner's information as well as a synopsis or explanation of their background. The restaurant's legal position and its short- and long-term objectives should be outlined in the second section of the company description.

To demonstrate your understanding of the changes in the local food business and the reasons why the most independent restaurant investors will be successful in this market, please submit a brief market research.

Here's an example of the page layout:

Company Description

Restaurant Name: [Restaurant Name]

Location: [Restaurant Address]

Contact: [Restaurant Phone Number] | [Restaurant Email Address]

Owner: [Owner Name]

Experience: [Owner Name] has over [Number] years of experience in the restaurant industry. They have worked in various roles, including [List of Roles]. They are passionate about food and creating a memorable dining experience for their guests.

Legal Standing: [Restaurant Name] is a [Type of Legal Entity] registered in [State/Province].

Further reading

• How to Write a Great Restaurant Description

3. Market analysis

The market analysis portion of the restaurant business plan is typically divided into three parts.

3.1 Industry analysis

What is your target market ? What demographics will your restaurant cater to?

This section aims to explain your target market to investors and why you believe guests will choose your restaurant over others.

Comprehending your target market is key to customizing your restaurant offerings to their preferences and needs.

By diving into demographics, preferences, dining habits, and trends, you can fine-tune your concept and marketing strategy to reach and appeal to your target audience effectively.

An example of analyzing your target market

 Comprehending your target market is key to customizing your restaurant offerings to their preferences and needs.

Demographics and preferences

Identifying your primary target market involves considering factors such as:

For example, a neighborhood with a high concentration of families might prefer a family-friendly restaurant with a diverse menu catering to various age groups and dietary preferences.

Conversely, a trendy urban area with a predominantly young and affluent population may gravitate towards upscale dining experiences and innovative cuisine.

Cultural and ethnic backgrounds also have a significant impact on restaurant preferences, with people from different backgrounds having distinctive tastes and customs that influence their dining choices.

By thoroughly understanding the demographics and preferences of your target market, you’ll be better equipped to create a restaurant concept that resonates with them and ultimately drives success.

Dining habits and trends

As the restaurant industry continues to evolve, staying informed about dining habits and trends is crucial for adapting your offerings and attracting customers.

For example, the rise of online ordering and delivery services has significantly influenced dining habits, with many consumers seeking the convenience of having their meals delivered to their doorstep.

Health trends have also had an impact on dining habits, with an increasing number of individuals seeking healthier options when dining out.

3.2 Competition analysis

It's easy to assume that everyone will visit your new restaurant first, so it is important to research your competition to make this a reality.

What restaurants have already established a customer base in the area?

Take note of everything from their prices, hours, and service style to menu design to the restaurant interior.

Then explain to your investors how your restaurant will be different.

3.3 Marketing analysis

Your investors are going to want to know how you plan to market your restaurant. How will your marketing campaigns differ from what is already being done by others in the restaurant industry?

How do you plan on securing your target market? What kind of offers will you provide your guests? Make sure to list everything.

The menu is the most important part of a restaurant's debut. Your restaurant wouldn't be able to operate without it.

You most likely don't have a final draft at this time, but you should aim to create a mock-up menu for your restaurant business plan. You can choose a design that you can envision yourself using and add your logo to the mock-up.

There are several resources available online if you need assistance with menu design or don't want to hire a designer.

But the price should be the most important component of your sample menu. The cost research you've completed for investors ought to be reflected in your prices. They will have a clearer idea of your restaurant's intended price range as a result. 

You'll quickly see how important menu engineering can be, even early on.

5. Employees

The company description section of the restaurant business plan briefly introduces the owners of the restaurant with some information about each. This section should fully flesh out the restaurant's business plan and management team.

The investors don’t expect you to have your entire team selected at this point, but you should at least have a couple of people on board. Use the talent you have chosen thus far to highlight the combined work experience everyone is bringing to the table.

6. Restaurant design

The design portion of your restaurant business plan is where you can really show off your thoughts and ideas to the investors. If you don’t have professional mock-ups of your restaurant rendered, that’s fine.

Instead, put together a mood board to get your vision across. Find pictures of a similar aesthetic to what you are looking for in your restaurant.

The restaurant design extends beyond aesthetics alone and should include everything from restaurant software to kitchen equipment. 

7. Location

The location you settle on for your restaurant should be well aligned with your target market (making it easier to cater to your ideal customer) and with your business plans.

At this stage in the process, it's not uncommon to not have a specific location in mind - but you should at the very least have a few options to narrow down.

Pro Tip: When you approach your investors about potential locations, make sure to include as much information as possible about each venue and why it would be ideal for your brand. 

Example for choosing an ideal location

Choosing the ideal location for your restaurant is a pivotal decision that can greatly influence your success. 

To make the best choice, consider factors such as foot traffic, accessibility, and neighborhood demographics.

By carefully evaluating these factors, you’ll be better equipped to maximize visibility and attract your target market.

7.1 Foot traffic and accessibility

Foot traffic and accessibility are important factors in selecting a location that will attract customers and ensure convenience.

A high-traffic area with ample parking and public transportation options can greatly increase the likelihood of drawing in potential customers.

Additionally, making your restaurant accessible to individuals with disabilities can further broaden your customer base and promote inclusivity.

7.2 Neighborhood demographics

Analyzing neighborhood demographics can help you determine if your restaurant’s concept and cuisine will appeal to the local population.

Factors such as income levels, family structures, and cultural diversity can all influence dining preferences and habits.

By understanding the unique characteristics of the neighborhood, you can tailor your offerings and marketing efforts to resonate with the local community.

Conducting a market analysis can be a valuable step in this process.

To gather demographic data for a particular neighborhood, you can utilize resources such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and reference maps.

Armed with this information, you can make informed decisions about your restaurant’s concept, menu, and pricing, ensuring that your establishment is well-positioned for success within the community.

Conducting market research will further strengthen your understanding of the local demographic.

8. Market overview

The market overview section is heavily related to the market research and analysis portion of the restaurant business plan. In this section, go into detail about both the micro and macro conditions in the area you want to set up your restaurant.

Discuss the current economic conditions that could make opening a restaurant difficult, and how you aim to counteract that. Mention all the other restaurants that could prove to be competition and what your strategy is to set yourself apart.

9. Marketing

With restaurants opening left and ride nowadays, investors are going to want to know how you will get word of your restaurant to the world.

The next marketing strategy and publicity section should go into detail on how you plan to market your restaurant before and after opening. As well as any plans you may have to bring a PR company on board to help spread the word.

Read more : How to write a restaurant marketing plan from scratch

10. External help

To make your restaurant a reality, you are going to need a lot of help. List any external companies or software you plan on hiring to get your restaurant up and running.

This includes everything from accountants and designers to suppliers that help your restaurant perform better, like POS systems and restaurant reservation systems.

Explain to your other potential investors about the importance of each and what they will be doing for your restaurant.

11. Financial analysis

The most important part of your restaurant business plan is the financial section. We would recommend hiring professional help for this given its importance.

Hiring a trained accountant will not only help you get your own financial projections and estimates in order but also give you a realistic insight into owning a restaurant.

You should have some information prepared to make this step easier for the accountant.

He/she will want to know how many seats your restaurant has, what the check average per table will be, and how many guests you plan on seating per day.

In addition to this, doing rough food cost calculations for various menu items can help estimate your profit margin per dish. This can be achieved easily with a free food cost calculator. 

A well-crafted restaurant business plan serves as a roadmap to success, guiding every aspect of the venture from menu design to employee training.

By carefully considering each component of the plan, aspiring restaurateurs can increase their chances of securing funding, attracting customers, and achieving their long-term goals.

Remember, a restaurant business plan is not just a document to satisfy investors; it is a living tool that should be revisited and updated regularly as the business grows and evolves.

By staying committed to the plan and adapting it as needed, restaurateurs can ensure that their culinary dreams have a solid foundation for success.

Growth Marketing Manager at Eat App

Saif Alnasur used to work in his family restaurant, but now he is a food influencer and writes about the restaurant industry for Eat App.

Reviewed by

Nezar Kadhem

Co-founder and CEO of Eat App

He is a regular speaker and panelist at industry events, contributing on topics such as digital transformation in the hospitality industry, revenue channel optimization and dine-in experience.

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The financial plan for a fine dining restaurant.

Operating a distinguished fine dining restaurant involves more than just creating exquisite dishes; it's equally about making astute financial decisions.

In this discussion, we'll delve into the intricacies of formulating a financial strategy that can elevate your restaurant to the pinnacle of culinary excellence.

From comprehending your initial investment to handling operational costs and forecasting long-term profitability, we're here to navigate you through every phase.

Embark with us on the journey to transform your fine dining aspirations into a financial triumph!

And if you're looking to obtain a comprehensive 3-year financial analysis for your establishment without delving into complex calculations, please download our bespoke financial plan designed for fine dining restaurants.

What is a financial plan and how to make one for your fine dining restaurant?

A financial plan for a fine dining restaurant is an essential roadmap that guides you through the financial intricacies of your high-end culinary establishment.

Think of it as curating a gourmet menu: You need to be aware of the resources at your disposal, the type of cuisine you wish to offer, and the costs associated with crafting your exquisite dishes. This plan is crucial when starting a new fine dining restaurant as it helps convert your culinary passion into a structured, profitable endeavor.

So, why create a financial plan?

Envision yourself about to open a sophisticated fine dining restaurant. Your financial plan will help you comprehend the costs involved - such as renting a prime location, purchasing high-quality kitchen equipment, sourcing premium ingredients, hiring skilled chefs and staff, and marketing expenses. It’s like ensuring you have the finest ingredients and enough budget before embarking on an elaborate gourmet meal.

But it's more than just summing up costs.

A financial plan can provide insights comparable to perfecting a signature dish. For example, it might show that certain rare ingredients are prohibitively expensive, leading you to find exceptional local alternatives. Or, you might discover that starting with a smaller, more experienced culinary team is more beneficial in the initial phase of your restaurant.

These insights are crucial in avoiding overspending and overstaffing.

Financial plans also serve as a tool for forecasting and identifying potential risks. Suppose your plan suggests that achieving your break-even point – where your income equals your expenses – is feasible only if you maintain a certain level of reservations and average spending per customer. This highlights a risk: What if customer turnout is lower than expected? It prompts you to think of alternative strategies, such as hosting exclusive events or offering a high-end catering service, to supplement revenue.

How does this differ for fine dining restaurants compared to other businesses? The main difference lies in the nature of the costs and revenue patterns.

That’s why our financial plan is specifically designed for fine dining restaurants . It's not a one-size-fits-all solution for different types of businesses.

Fine dining restaurants have unique expenses like premium ingredients, a more sophisticated ambiance, and higher staff training standards. Their revenue can also be more variable - consider how special events might increase bookings, while other periods might be slower. This is in contrast to, for instance, a retail store, where inventory doesn't spoil and sales trends could be more consistent.

Clearly, our financial plan takes all these specific factors into account. Thus, you can effortlessly create bespoke financial projections for your new fine dining restaurant venture.

What financial tables and metrics include in the financial plan for a fine dining restaurant?

Developing a financial plan for a new fine dining restaurant is a critical step in ensuring the success and sustainability of your high-end dining venture.

It's important to recognize that the financial plan for your future restaurant is more than mere numbers on paper; it serves as a strategic guide through the initial phases and aids in the long-term maintenance of the business.

The first essential element is the startup costs. This encompasses everything required to open your restaurant's doors for the first time.

Consider the expenses associated with leasing or purchasing a prime location, high-end kitchen equipment, initial stock of premium ingredients and wine, elegant furniture, sophisticated décor, and even the signage. These costs offer a clear understanding of the initial investment needed. We have already outlined them in our financial plan , so you can easily reference them.

Next, factor in your operating expenses. These ongoing costs occur regularly, such as salaries for skilled chefs and staff, utility bills, restocking of high-quality ingredients, and other day-to-day operational expenses. Accurately estimating these costs is crucial to determine how much your restaurant needs to earn to be profitable.

In our financial plan, we've already input all the necessary figures, so you'll have a clear idea of what these might total for a fine dining restaurant. Naturally, these can be adjusted in the 'assumptions' tab of our financial plan as needed.

One of the key tables in your financial plan is the cash flow statement (included in our plan). This illustrates the expected movement of cash in and out of your restaurant.

It provides a monthly (and yearly) breakdown, encompassing your projected revenue (the income you anticipate from your dining services) and your projected expenses (the costs of operating the restaurant). This statement is invaluable for predicting periods when you might need extra cash or when you can consider expansion or enhancements.

Another vital table is the profit and loss statement, also known as the income statement, which is also part of our financial plan.

This important financial document gives you an overview of your restaurant's profitability over a specific period. It details your revenues and deducts expenses, showing whether your establishment is making a profit or incurring a loss. This statement is crucial for understanding the financial health of your restaurant over time.

Additionally, don't overlook the break-even analysis (also included in our plan). This calculation indicates how much revenue your restaurant must generate to cover all its costs, both initial and ongoing. Knowing your break-even point is crucial as it sets a clear target for your sales goals.

Our financial plan also includes additional tables and metrics (such as the provisional balance sheet, financing plan, working capital requirement, ratios, charts, etc.), offering a comprehensive and detailed financial analysis for your upcoming fine dining restaurant.

Can you make a financial plan for your fine dining restaurant by yourself?

Yes, you absolutely can!

As highlighted above, we have crafted a specialized financial plan designed for the unique needs of fine dining restaurant business models .

This plan includes financial forecasts for the initial three years of your restaurant's operation.

Within this plan, there's an 'Assumptions' tab featuring pre-populated data, encompassing revenue projections, a comprehensive list of potential expenses specific to fine dining establishments, and a staffing plan. These figures are fully customizable to fit the particular needs of your venture.

Our extensive financial plan comprises all vital financial tables and ratios necessary for a fine dining restaurant, including the income statement, cash flow statement, break-even analysis, and a provisional balance sheet. The plan is designed to be accessible for loan applications and is suitable for entrepreneurs at all levels, from novices to experienced business owners, without requiring previous financial knowledge.

The process has been automated to remove the need for manual calculations or complicated Excel tasks. You simply enter your data into the appropriate fields and choose from the options provided. We have made sure the procedure is straightforward and accessible, even for those who might not be familiar with financial planning tools.

In case of any difficulties, please feel free to contact our support team. We promise a response within 24 hours to address any concerns. Moreover, we provide a complimentary review and correction service for your financial plan after you've completed all your assumptions.

What are the most important financial metrics for a fine dining restaurant?

Achieving success in the fine dining restaurant industry requires a blend of culinary excellence and astute financial management.

For a fine dining restaurant, certain financial metrics are especially critical. These include your revenue, cost of goods sold (COGS), gross profit margin, and net profit margin.

Your revenue encompasses all income from sales, offering insight into how well your culinary creations are received by the market. COGS, which covers the cost of premium ingredients and skilled labor, is essential for understanding the direct costs tied to your service.

The gross profit margin, calculated as (Revenue - COGS) / Revenue, indicates the efficiency of your restaurant operations, while the net profit margin, the portion of revenue remaining after covering all expenses, reflects your overall financial health.

Projecting sales, costs, and profits for the first year demands an in-depth analysis of several factors. Begin with an evaluation of the local market and your targeted clientele. Estimate your sales based on elements such as location, local competition, menu pricing, and dining experience.

Costs can be categorized into fixed costs (like rent for the restaurant space and utilities) and variable costs (such as ingredients, kitchen supplies, and staff wages). Adopt a cautious approach in your estimations, and take into account the potential seasonal variations in both sales and expenses.

Formulating a realistic budget for a new fine dining restaurant is essential.

This budget should include all anticipated expenses, encompassing rent, utilities, kitchen equipment, initial stock of ingredients, labor, marketing campaigns, and a contingency fund. It's crucial to set aside funds for unforeseen costs as well. Maintain a flexible budget and review it frequently, making adjustments based on real performance.

In financial planning for a fine dining restaurant, key metrics involve your break-even point, cash flow, and inventory turnover.

The break-even point helps you understand the volume of sales needed to cover your costs. Positive cash flow is vital for smooth daily operations, and a healthy inventory turnover rate indicates effective management of your kitchen stock and ingredients.

Financial planning can vary greatly between different types of restaurants.

For instance, a casual dining restaurant might focus on rapid inventory turnover and cost-effective ingredients, targeting volume sales. Conversely, a fine dining establishment may incur higher costs for premium ingredients and skilled staff, emphasizing superior pricing and guest experience.

Recognizing indications that your financial plan may be off-track or unrealistic is crucial. These signs are all listed in the “Checks” tab of our financial model, providing guidelines to promptly correct and adjust your financial plan to achieve relevant metrics.

Warning signs include consistently falling short of sales targets, rapidly diminishing cash reserves, or inventory issues, whether running out too quickly or accumulating without use. If your actual figures consistently diverge significantly from your projections, it signals a need to reevaluate your financial plan.

Finally, the key indicators of financial health in a fine dining restaurant's financial plan include a stable or increasing profit margin, a robust cash flow that comfortably covers all expenses, and consistently meeting or surpassing sales projections.

Don't worry, all these indicators are “checked” in our financial plan , and you'll be able to adjust them as needed.

You can also read our articles about: - the business plan for a fine dining restaurant - the profitability of a a fine dining restaurant

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The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City in 2024

Our critic, Pete Wells, drops his annual ranking. See what’s new, what moved and what left the list.

By Pete Wells

I should have seen it coming last year when my editors put the following headline on my attempt to name the city’s greatest places to eat: “ The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City 2023 .”

That “2023” implies doing it again in 2024. Still, when they told me that’s exactly what they wanted, my first reaction was surprise. This was followed by the realization that I had a lot of eating to do.

Twenty-two places in this edition of “The 100 Best Restaurants in NYC” are new. I’ve eaten at all 100 in the past 12 months, except for La Piraña Lechonera and the Queens Night Market, both of which are currently closed for the season. (I don’t accept free meals from restaurants I write about.)

New York is a big city, and I tried to find 100 restaurants that represent its neighborhoods, its people and the rewards it has in store for hungry, curious eaters. The list is a tour. If you take it, you’ll see all five boroughs and a wide array of cooking and serving styles.

There are hushed counters where fewer than 10 people at a time enjoy the marvels a great sushi master can conjure, and open-air stalls where jerk chicken soaks up the smoke of hardwood charcoal. And quite a few restaurants in between.

Not many people will eat at all of them. But if you read about them, I hope you will start to see New York the way I see it whenever I look at my options and ask myself where I am going to eat next.

— Pete Wells

Showing all 100 restaurants.

Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi

Le Bernardin

La Piraña Lechonera

Superiority Burger

Una Pizza Napoletana

Jeju Noodle Bar

The Four Horsemen

Trinciti Roti Shop

Jean-Georges

Casa Mono and Bar Jamón

Queens Night Market

Café Carmellini

Shion 69 Leonard Street

Gramercy Tavern

Szechuan Mountain House

Forever Jerk

Clover Hill

Gage & Tollner

Shaw-naé’s House

Yoon Haeundae Galbi

Mercado Little Spain

Great N.Y. Noodletown

Village Cafe

Falafel Tanami

Barney Greengrass

Le Crocodile

Chongqing Lao Zao

AbuQir Seafood

Birria-Landia

Hainanese Chicken House

Mark’s Off Madison

S & P Lunch

Mariscos El Submarino

Temple Canteen

Foxface Natural

Hakka Cuisine

188 Bakery Cuchifritos

Hav & Mar

Hamburger America

Laghman Express

Mapo Korean BBQ

Cka Ka Qellu

Vendors at Junction Boulevard

Shopsin’s General Store

Hyderabadi Zaiqa

Zum Stammtisch

Ewe’s Delicious Treats

Randazzo’s Clam Bar

1. tatiana by kwame onwuachi.

Randy Smith for The New York Times

Go ahead, ask Resy to ping you when a table at Tatiana becomes available. You might as well learn Icelandic while you’re at it, because you’re going to be waiting a while. Deep into its second year, after much of the hype about Mr. Onwuachi’s spirited rundown of Black cooking styles in New York (Southern, Caribbean, West African, bodega-esque) has blown over, Tatiana remains among the very few places in town where reservations are truly hard to come by. It’s quickly becoming an institution. Is it maturing, too? The truffled chopped cheese is now a satisfying and rather lush steak sandwich, a more fully realized recipe even though it may no longer quite qualify as a chopped cheese. Service can still register as under-rehearsed. Yet the people working at Tatiana, many of them newcomers in the restaurant trade, convey genuine warmth and enthusiasm, which I’ll gladly take over the chilly formalities that prevail in other restaurants that charge this much or more for dinner. Mr. Onwuachi clearly wants you to have fun at Tatiana, but I suspect he also wants you to ask why there aren’t more places like it.

When the tasting counter in Roberta’s backyard finally reopened in January, it had something to show for its unusually long pandemic break: a new chef, Victoria Blamey. She works with Carlo Mirarchi, Blanca’s owner, within the nominally Italian outlines he established in its first decade: the esoteric raw seafood plates, the unexpected vegetable courses, the spare and thrilling bowls of pasta, the remarkable cuts of meat aged on site and painstakingly cooked over Japanese charcoal. But she builds on that structure, adding the intense flavors she loves (often from fermentation, as in the yuzu sauerkraut draped over raw surf clams) and some dishes drawn from the Chilean cuisine she grew up with (like tortilla de rescoldo, a flat and nearly black bread traditionally baked in ashes). Her far-reaching and forward-looking menu is served to a soundtrack provided by an open turntable and a stack of LPs. This has to be the only restaurant in the world where you can play side B of “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” while you wait for the pheasant course.

3. Le Bernardin

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

You can drop in for a fairly quick lunch, not the whole multi-installment chef’s tasting megillah, just a simple three courses for $127, in and out, no big deal, and still the cooking will make you feel as if tectonic plates were shifting under your feet. In January, what did it for me was the fluke. Boring old fluke, served all over town, where’s the thrill in that, Eric Ripert? And then one of the servers fills the white space around the fish with a sauce the color of saffron. It smells like fennel and lobster. The inspiration is bouillabaisse, right, but (tremor) why is it so briny and (rumble) rich and hey, um, is that (people run for cover …) sea urchin?

Daniel Krieger for The New York Times

At this point Manhattan must have more Korean tasting counters than kosher delis. Atomix remains the one to beat, though, the leader in finding new ingredients (locally foraged pineapple weed and maple flower are on the spring menu), grounding its experiments in tradition and putting its meals into the larger context of Korean ceramics, fabrics and even chopstick design. The concrete dining room is more chilly than cuddly, but it has little of the pretension that afflicts some other tasting counters. Its earnestness is surprisingly appealing.

5. Via Carota

Nico Schinco for The New York Times

Maybe you waited two hours for a table, maybe you lucked into a bar stool, maybe you took a reservation at one of those in-between times that are the only ones that ever seem to be offered. (At 4:15 p.m., are you having lunch or dinner?) In any case, as you hold up the broadsheet menu with its drawings of artichokes and figs, the old favorites compete for your attention: the crisp olives stuffed with pork, bruschetta under mounds of butter with a folded silvery anchovy on each mound, the slick tangle of tonnarelli studded with explosively fragrant peppercorns, the spreadably soft garlic cloves with golden sections of fried rabbit. There may not be another restaurant in town where so many dishes are indisputable classics, where, just when you think you’ve made up your mind, your eye falls on the meatballs sweetened with raisins and pine nuts …

6. La Piraña Lechonera

Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times

Each winter, the rickety, boarded-up trailer on East 152nd Street looks as if it won’t survive the next strong breeze. And each spring, Angel Jimenez unlocks the door, heats the deep fryer, powers up the salsa music, sharpens the machete and brings the city’s greatest expression of Puerto Rican eating back to life for another season. The frituras, little shrimp-filled pastelillos and shiny golden bacalaitos, are superb. So is the cold octopus salad, crunchy with diced peppers and olives. But the reason we wait all winter for La Piraña’s return is the roast pork. Rubbed with garlic and pepper, splashed with milky garlic sauce and, if you like, some vinegar-and-chile solution swirled in an empty rum bottle, it is the closest a New Yorker can get to a plate of slow-cooked lechon up in the mountains outside San Juan.

Dish picture: Karsten Moran for The New York Times. Interior picture: Lisa Corson for The New York Times.

The city hasn’t quite caught up with Semma yet. To some extent we can blame the Unapologetic Foods group, which opens restaurants faster than Guided by Voices puts out albums. But the real issue is that we haven’t seen anything like Vijay Kumar’s interpretations of South Indian food before. Mr. Kumar doesn’t just toy with the distinction between refined and rustic; he obliterates it. The North Fork snails he sautées with tomatoes and tamarind would be cooked over a campfire in the rice paddies of Tamil Nadu, yet they get along with a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé from the Mâconnais as readily as any Burgundian escargot.

8. Superiority Burger

Diner, vegetarian hangout, greenmarket evangelist, laboratory, improv collective, museum of East Village ephemera — ever since it moved to Avenue A last year, Superiority Burger has been trying out new personas, without discarding any of the old ones. The exceptional, airy focaccia that is the focus of a sizable cult is now sold by the slice, but only at the bar on Monday and Tuesday. Grab-and-go veggie burgers, “hippy poutine” and fried tofu sandwiches that turn every preconception about bean curd on its head are available on Thursday, Friday and Saturday after 11 p.m. (During this “Night Shift,” you can also eat a pie from the celebrated Chrissy’s Pizza pop-up, as long as you ordered ahead.) There is no time of day when you can’t get gelato and sorbet in freethinking flavors like saffron-labneh or tahini with fudge swirl. Waffles and other breakfast foods now materialize on weekends. Is this any way to run a hamburger stand? Yes, it is.

Evan Sung for The New York Times

At his counter on the Bowery, Tadashi Yoshida can wow you into submission before he hands you the night’s first piece of sushi. Your omakase dinner might begin with a small cocktail of caviar and bigfin reef squid in sweet and tender strands. Mochi might follow, grilled over charcoal until crisp and chewy, then wrapped around sun-dried mullet roe, briny and intense. During certain weeks of the year there could be white sacs of cod milt. Or oysters and tilefish in a rich, breathtaking soup made from hairy crab. Mr. Yoshida’s appetizer repertoire seems to be endless. By the time he fills a brazier with live charcoal to sear the mackerel sushi that is his signature, showstopping dish, your surrender is complete.

10. Torrisi

Torrisi is now turning out the most dazzling and accomplished cooking of all the Major Food Group restaurants. (The distinction used to belong to the Grill, which this year slides to No. 55 in my ranking.) Who knows what the future holds? But Rich Torrisi, standing in one corner of the open kitchen, conducting a crew that is equally adept with Vietnamese octopus as with tortellini folded as gracefully as a silk pocket square, certainly looks like a chef who has found his forever home.

Interior picture: Ben Russell for The New York Times. Dish picture: Ed Lefkowicz for The New York Times.

The food seems slightly more familiar than it did when Ignacio Mattos brought Estela to Houston Street in 2013. One reason for this is that small-plates restaurants across the country have helped themselves to its unexpected flavor harmonies and unforced visual aesthetic. Some even lifted entire recipes. Never mind the imitators, though. An Estela dish can still knock you over with originality. Where else can you get orange segments under a floss of dried shrimp and Thai chile threads? Nowhere, yet.

12. Una Pizza Napoletana

Dish picture: Evan Sung for The New York Times. Interior picture: Daniel Krieger for The New York Times.

A couple of years ago, Una Pizza was half-empty so often that its owner, Anthony Mangieri, was thinking of pulling up stakes. Then he did an about-face — or maybe we did. Now, he and his pizza are acknowledged downtown institutions. Fans buy Una Pizza-branded apparel, extra-virgin olive oil and panettone; they begin lining up half an hour before the doors open; and they’ve made reservations among the city’s most scalpable. The source of this fevered loyalty is the five standard pies and a weekly special, all of them with a fat, tender, char-speckled Hula-Hoop of dough surrounding a low valley of tomatoes or cheese or both. There’s not much else on the menu, but the fire-roasted peppers are worthwhile and the sorbetto can be stunning.

13. Ci Siamo

I know people who refused to try Ci Siamo for a while because it’s located in Nowheresville — the concrete future-scape known as Manhattan West. Then they went, and they got lost. They complained about the schlep before, during and after the next visit. But when they found themselves planning a third meal, they were forced to admit that Hillary Sterling has put Nowheresville on the map. There are other chefs in town with a wood-burning hearth and a love of rustic Italian flavors, but Ms. Sterling’s menu may have the highest percentage of dishes that are flat-out fantastic.

Liz Barclay for The New York Times

It can be depressing when restaurants are cloned, but for Jean-Georges Vongerichten there were undeniable advantages to making a branch of ABCV out of his vegetarian hide-out, Seeds & Weeds, in the Tin Building. For one, an outright copy can be better than a halfhearted imitation. ABCV’s executive chef, Neal Harden, has spent years studying interesting ways to eat grains, roots, fungi and so on. His food is so much more advanced than it is at other, similar places that eating there can be like time-traveling and discovering that the post-livestock future turned out extremely well. If ABCV can be cloned successfully, we may not need to clone meat.

The cooking of Jiangnan, including Shanghai and the cities of the southern Yangtze Delta, gets the nuanced treatment it deserves at CheLi. Instead of, say, scorching chiles or other powerful seasonings, Jiangnan uses Shaoxing wine to provide subtle, invisible emphasis in many dishes, like chilled wine-soaked crab and stir-fried loofah. Dragonwell tea scents the soft curls of sweet Longjing shrimp, which come to the table enveloped in dry-ice fog. Delicate is probably not the best word for CheLi’s mao xue wang, a majestic stew of ham, beef, shrimp, intestines and congealed duck’s blood, all bobbing under a quarter-inch or so of chile oil. But it’s not wrong, either.

16. Jeju Noodle Bar

Cole Wilson for The New York Times

Getting a table is no easy feat, but apart from that, Jeju is one of the city’s most accessible modern Korean restaurants — a crowded category that has more than its share of tasting menus with triple-digit prices. The quietly marvelous mushroom ramen, with Parmesan foam and a squeeze of lime, is a meal in itself, and costs $27. For about the same price there are seafood appetizers, such as rosy cubes of raw kinmedai and clams in a dill- and chive-scented broth, so carefully considered they could be airlifted right into a 12-course degustation, although they’d probably have to be a tenth the size.

17. The Four Horsemen

John Kernick for The New York Times

Whatever picture floats through your mind when you think of a rock star’s restaurant, it probably doesn’t resemble the Four Horsemen, owned in part by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. There is no grandstanding, no concert memorabilia and very little debauchery unless you count the four-top of wine-business insiders in the back drinking magnums of organic, wild-fermented Champagne from Georges Laval. What the restaurant does have is a low-key obsession with excellence. You see it in the attention to brewing tea and coffee, in the basket-drained ricotta made daily in kitchen, in the unfussy seasonality of Nick Curtola’s menus, and in the way the servers seem to know all about the wines but aren’t in a rush to prove it. Like everything else at this serious little restaurant, it just seems to happen naturally.

18. Trinciti Roti Shop

Sometimes when I land at JFK, I am tempted to make the 10-minute drive to Trinciti so I can refresh myself with two or three Trini chicken curry doubles and a couple of aloo pies, slit open and filled with shrimp and tamarind chutney. But the sad truth is that I’m always too tired from traveling, and there’s no place to sit at Trinciti. Plus, you need your wits about you simply to order, particularly on the weekend, when there is one line for bake and shark, another for all the other food, and a third to pay. Friday, Saturday and Sunday are the only days you can get bake and shark — spicy, sweet, tangy and crunchy in about five different ways, it is the greatest fish sandwich in the five boroughs. So I treat Trinciti as a destination of its own, worth a separate trip.

19. Jean-Georges

By this point, Jean-Georges Vongerichten shouldn’t have any tricks left up his sleeve. But a six- or 10-course dinner at his urbane, understated restaurant on Columbus Circle is almost sure to deliver something you didn’t quite see coming. Wagyu tenderloin with braised endive might look like a simple steakhouse riff, but how can that sticky and intensely fruity hoisin sauce get along so well with a jus that carries the fragile perfume of bergamot? How can citrus segments, spicy Fresno chiles and shiso oil be piled on top of raw scallops without crushing their sweetness? Sean Considine, the pastry chef, makes sure the surprises start up again with dessert and continue through the final barrage of marshmallows, pâtes de fruits and chocolates.

Mam is still something of a rough draft, but it is looking more and more like a serious restaurant. True, the miniature kitchen, miniature dining room and miniature plastic furniture were part of what made Mam so charming in its early days on Forsyth Street, when Jerald and Nhung Dao Head were dishing out Hanoi-style bun dau mam tom to a small audience at what seemed to be a pop-up. The crowds grew as word got out about the housemade fried tofu, the blood sausage, the fish mint and other Vietnamese herbs, and the fermented shrimp sauce that made everything taste better. But crowds and small quarters are not made for each other. Last year, the Heads signed a lease on a space next door. Meanwhile, Mr. Head has been adding to his repertory, applying his obsessive, detail-oriented attention to, among other things, a pho bo that rivals his bun dau mam tom.

21. Casa Mono and Bar Jamón

According to the second law of thermodynamics, exciting young restaurants are doomed to become less exciting with age. At 20 years old, Casa Mono and its wine-bar annex next door, Bar Jamón, gracefully defy that law every day. Andy Nusser hasn’t lost his appreciation for the strong, elemental flavors of Spanish cuisine: smoky eggplant purée beneath fried baby squid; the paprika blast of the raw, spreadable pork sausage sobrasada, to be smeared on golden toast with waxy chunks of honeycomb. The nose-to-tail fad has come and gone, and Casa Mono sails on placidly, flying the flag of lambs’ tongues and pigs’ ears. The wine list has grown to about 600 Spanish bottles: serious Cava, aged Rioja and avant-gardists from all over.

Colin Clark for The New York Times

There are no bad seats at Kono, a dramatic, black-walled yakitori on an alley in Chinatown. The stools on either side of the grill, though, have the best view of the chef, Atsushi Kono. He never stops moving. All night he’s turning, poking, relocating and examining chicken skewers, placing one over searing heat, letting another rest above a cooler patch of charcoal. His hypervigilance produces degrees of tenderness and juiciness and crunchiness that can make you feel as if you’re eating chicken for the first time.

23. Queens Night Market

You sometimes hear that you can find every cuisine on earth somewhere in Queens. That’s not true yet, but the first place to check would be the lawn behind the New York Hall of Science, where the Queens Night Market runs every Saturday from April to October. Vendors this year will be making cassava leaf stew from Sierra Leone; Fujianese oyster fritters, popularly known as UFOs; ducana, the Antiguan mash of sweet potato and coconut wrapped in banana leaves; and a few dozen other local specialties. As usual, nothing will cost more than $6.

24. Café Carmellini

Rachel Vanni for The New York Times

At Locanda Verde, the Dutch, Lafayette and Carne Mare, Andrew Carmellini’s personal cooking style is buried so deep in the mix that you could eat at all of them and still not be able to say just what an Andrew Carmellini restaurant is. At Café Carmellini, you get to hear his voice. He’s cooking in an elaborate, technically adroit style that he hasn’t used much since his days working for Daniel Boulud. We tend to connect that style with dusty old recitations of haute cuisine, an association the silver domes and somewhat stilted service don’t quite dispel. But there’s nothing antiquated about Café Carmellini’s food. It’s fresh and sharp; he’s having fun showing off skills you don’t often see these days. Even when he blends French and Italian cuisines, not exactly an earth-shattering concept, he puts them together in his own way.

One appetizer at Sailor is a tribute to the chef Judy Rodgers, an antipasto plate of anchovies, celery slices, black olives and pieces of Parmesan that was a fixture on Ms. Rodgers’s menus at Zuni Café in San Francisco. It is as close to a manifesto as we are likely to get from April Bloomfield, the gifted and non-loquacious chef at Sailor. What it might be saying: Creativity is overrated, details are everything, the best cooking is invisible, and the best cooks know when to get out of the way. You might come to the same conclusions on your own when you eat her roasted potatoes stuck to crisp wafers of toasted cheese, her warm hunks of celery root basted with melted butter, her smoked pork shoulder collapsing in on itself and her mahogany-dark caramel sauce clinging to crisp puffs of profiteroles.

For years, Persian food aficionados dreamed of finding a respectable tahdig in the city, or even an acceptable khoresh fesenjan. Today Sofreh, in Prospect Heights, makes those and other dishes in a traditional, homestyle form, while Eyval, in Bushwick, reimagines them as modern restaurant dishes. You can eat well in both restaurants, but when the mood for black lime and saffron strikes me, I’m more likely to head for Eyval. I appreciate the way Ali Saboor uses his wood oven to pin down the smoky character of Iran’s street food. I like the way his boranis repurpose yogurt as a foil for seasonal vegetables. As for the tahdig, it’s been edited down to the crunchy, golden quarter-inch at the bottom of the pan, exactly the thing that makes tahdig worth dreaming about.

Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times

Participles are all over the menus at King: “crushed celeriac,” “smashed borlotti beans,” “torn Taggiasca olives.” If it was your first time there, that menu would tell you the food is going to look handmade and a little messy, in an appealing way. You’d know, too, that the chefs, Jess Shadbolt and Clare de Boer, have noticed the way rough edges make things taste better. Much of the inspiration is southern French or northern Italian, but the, sensual allure of the food comes directly from cooks who know the value of crushing, smashing and tearing.

28. Le Coucou

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

The slender white tapers, the soaring toques and the quenelles de brochet refer to New York’s historic Le and La restaurants more than they do to anything in the France of today. (Paris hot spots like Clamato just look like Brooklyn.) The menu brings the domed plates of haute cuisine into the modern world, paying more attention to vegetables and flavors that were unknown at Le Pavillon. The tart and slightly funky counterpoint to halibut in a satiny beurre blanc is provided by a bed of fermented daikon, and the roast venison loin comes with a side of cabbage, draped in smoked cream, that’s sort of astonishing.

29. Zaab Zaab

Portrait picture: Will Englemann. Dish picture: Adam Friedlander for The New York Times

In the two years since its sharply focused larb ped udon and other Isan dishes began drawing enthusiastic crowds to Elmhurst, Zaab Zaab has changed chefs and gone on an expansion tear. Today Zaab Zaabs can be found at the Essex Market in Manhattan; a new retail-residential development in Flushing, Queens; the James Beard Foundation’s food hall on a Hudson River pier; and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, under the name Zaab Zaab Talay. Now led by Kannika Kittipinyovath, the kitchen of the Elmhurst original may have grown stingy with fresh herbs like holy basil, which once made Zaab Zaab’s kapow so thrilling. On the other hand, there’s no shortage of dill in the hor mok, bundles of catfish steamed in banana leaves. And the cooks still throw chiles around like there’s no tomorrow.

Seven years on, with Seoul Salon, Naro and Atomix in their portfolio, the first restaurant Ellia and Junghyun Park opened is still the best introduction to their vision of modern Korean dining. The prices are higher — instead of three courses for $36, you now get four for $75 — but there are rewards. The hard surfaces in the coolly minimalist shoe box of a dining room aren’t as noisy as they were, and the cooking is more self-assured and coherent. Atomix is the place to go if you want to blast off into orbit with the Parks, but Atoboy shows there is a lot of fun to be had back on earth.

31. Houseman

They are becoming hard to find, chefs who put their energy into a single restaurant the way Ned Baldwin does at Houseman. This used to be the goal of many cooks. It still is the dream for a certain kind of diner, those of us who wander Manhattan searching for a neighborhood joint where each detail has been considered, from the day’s weather to the temperature of the butter; where the roast chicken and the burger are prepared with the same care as, say, a slow-roasted short rib served with a casual Cognac-cream pan sauce and a Yorkshire pudding the size of a kitten; where, if you go back again, your next meal won’t be worse than your last — and might be a little better.

32. Shion 69 Leonard Street

Is there another sushi master in town who gets as excited about seafood as Shion Uino? “Forty-six pound grouper from my hometown,” he says, beaming, as he carves pieces of sashimi from the side of an enormous, alabaster-colored fish. A few appetizers later, he serves a tall, meaty hunk of broiled fish under a thin, crisp shell of golden skin. “White grouper, very rare!” He is a student of the Edo style, rarely adding anything to his nigiri. The appetizers are virtually unadorned, too, like the heap of chilled snow crab salad dressed, barely, with vinegar.

33. Gramercy Tavern

Interior picture: Francesco Sapienza for The New York Times. Dish picture: An Rong Xu for The New York Times.

A night at Gramercy Tavern is about as close to a sure thing as Manhattan provides. Michael Anthony’s platings always look colorful and playful. In due time, they reveal that nothing about the way they are put together is accidental. The kitchen always seems to get more out of the Union Square Greenmarket than anyone else in town. The servers never seem to be going through the motions. And, the most bankable of New York City certainties, if you eat in the dining room, you will be sent home with something for breakfast.

The restaurant’s move down the street and around the corner finally happened last summer, and none of the calamities the regulars feared came to pass. The woodwork, the Oxford-cloth shirts, the candles burning on top of the bar and the Negronis mixed at a rate that sometimes approaches one for each customer — all unchanged. There is the rabbit roasted inside a crisp sheath of pancetta, the Cornish hen grilled to a crackle, the lasagna with its sheets of pasta stacked like pages in a book. Give or take a couple of bar seats, the relocated I Sodi is exactly the same restaurant spread over two rooms instead of one, and going there is a little like seeing your favorite movie on the big screen for the first time.

The kitchen at Daniel looks far and wide, and won’t think twice about weaving ingredients like Sea Island peas, Minnesota wild rice and burrata into the menu. Still, the cuisine of France remains the through line of almost every meal you might have in the grand colonnaded dining room. Of his generation of French chefs in the United States, none illuminates the flavors of his home country more faithfully than Daniel Boulud. And nobody works harder to help you see the light, even if it takes a whole plate of the city’s best madeleines to make the bulb click on.

36. Szechuan Mountain House

Its most famous and photographed dish is called “swing pork belly,” steamed bacon strips and bands of shaved cucumber thrown over what appears to be a tabletop laundry rack. You twirl these up with your chopsticks and drag them through a dipping sauce of minced raw garlic in a bowl of chile oil. It may not be the best thing on the menu, but it is pretty great, and it illustrates the inventiveness and subtlety that sets this restaurant apart from legions of Sichuan competitors. Of course, you can get fiercely spicy versions of mapo tofu and Chongqing chicken, too, but meals at Szechuan Mountain House become more interesting when the standards appear side by side with what the menu calls, a little optimistically, “modernist cuisine.”

37. Koloman

The New York dining scene has what diplomats call a special relationship with Europe. The painstakingly high-church Mittel-European cooking of Koloman would seem absolutely bizarre in Miami. On West 29th Street, Emiko Chisholm’s domed cheese soufflé with intense mushroom jam and Markus Glocker’s teacup of duck liver parfait under a clear jelly of trockenbeerenauslese riesling from Alois Kracher are able to slip into the ground floor of an Ace Hotel and pass for casual dining, or something like it.

Interior picture: Daniel Krieger for The New York Times. Dish picture: Colin Clark for The New York Times.

A small, awkward East Village basement that couldn’t seem to get a permanent liquor license doesn’t sound like the place you’d want to plant a world-class wine bar with a powerfully technique-driven kitchen. But this is post-pandemic Manhattan, where our real-estate compromises are even crazier than before. Joshua Pinsky is one of those cooks who pours effort into making things taste better than you think they will. Then he covers up the signs of effort so the deliciousness takes you by surprise. The exception is the devil’s food cake. You can tell from the other side of the room that it’s going to be like shooting pure dopamine into your skull.

39. Rezdôra

There is a full menu, of course. You can order, say, an antipasto and a main course, and tack on a creamy housemade gelato before you go. But those other courses aren’t what you’ll remember later on. That will be the pasta. Which might be considered a reason to skip the other stuff and dive right into the pasta tasting, five in all, each one a specialty of Emilia-Romagna, starting with tiny tortellini in a 12-hour capon broth.

40. Okdongsik

Adam Friedlander for The New York Times

This 13-seat Korean counter on East 30th Street is as good an argument for one-dish restaurants as we’ll ever get, never mind that it actually serves two dishes. One of them is mandoo. They are stuffed with minced pork, tofu and glass noodles, and they are great — no afterthought. But the dish that makes Okdongsik one of the most valuable addresses in New York dining is its dweji gomtang, a clear pork broth. Each bowl, outfitted with almost-firm grains of white rice and very thin slices of simmered pork shoulder, gestures toward transcendence, or as near as you can come to it across the street from a Best Western.

An Rong Xu for The New York Times

If you spotted Misi’s floor-to-ceiling windows while cruising down Kent Avenue on a pedal-assist Citi Bike at the maximum speed of 18 miles an hour, you might mistake it for one of the generic minimalist trattorias that seem to have come out of some gentrification starter kit. But on a closer look you can see the intelligence that organizes Misi’s hard surfaces, including the glass room where cooks roll out ravioli and spaghetti alla chitarra as if they’re on display in a big pasta aquarium. There’s intelligence at work in Missy Robbins’s menu, too. It focuses almost solely on vegetables and pasta, yet the ingredients and seasonings are so appealing you never feel that anything’s missing.

42. Frenchette

West Broadway has two major brasseries, one for each side of our appetite. The Odeon, well lighted and reliable, gives us what we know we want. Frenchette, shadowy and mysterious, gives us things we may not have started to desire yet: a peculiar Loire red that will seem casual one minute and dead serious the next, meaty cod cheeks in red bread crumbs spiked with Espelette pepper, or calf’s liver pinned to a pink sheet of prosciutto and sautéed, like saltimbocca.

43. Ernesto’s

When Basque Country entered the travel plans of people who arrange their vacations around their dinner reservations, it was because of the efforts of Mugaritz, Arzak and a handful of other experimental restaurants. Their forward-thinking cuisine is not what you eat at Ernesto’s. You eat the burly, elemental food that for generations has been passed down, essentially unchanged, by taverns and asadores where sardines are cooked over an outdoor fire. This being New York, the grill on which Ryan Bartlow cooks early spring calçots, whole Montauk fish and juicy cutlets of Ibérico pork is inside the kitchen. But the brawny spirit is the same; even things like white asparagus and a tortilla española with caviar have a rustic touch.

44. Forever Jerk

Clay Williams for The New York Times

Jerk is outdoor food at heart, and the best jerk cooks around the city work on sidewalks or in the street, sometimes with the benefit of a tent or tarp, sometimes without. The king of New York jerk cooks is Oneil Reid, who designed Forever Jerk’s oversize charcoal-fueled rigs to pump smoke into chicken and pork without scorching them. His jerk is tender and juicy, a goal that eludes many chefs. The jerk sauce achieves a taut balance of sugar, sourness and spice, and even seems to have caught some of the smoke itself. The impressively large rig on the side of Flatlands Avenue in Brooklyn, also used to roast ears of corn and whole sweet potatoes, is the center of the Forever Jerk universe. The location on Guy Brewer Boulevard is an indoor restaurant, which is to say it’s not quite the same.

In the city’s Japanese restaurant scene, udon is the forgotten noodle. It isn’t as popular as ramen or as revered as soba, which can be made well only with a certain amount of practice. This may explain why the two Raku udon restaurants and their chef, Norihiro Ishizuka, aren’t more widely recognized. They do have a loyal following, though. Raku’s fans appreciate the tensile elasticity of the noodles, the sparkling lightness of the dashi, and the delicate and greaseless tempura. For such small restaurants, the menus range widely, swooping from kitsune udon, relatively easy to get here, to less commonly seen varieties like the Japanese adaptation of Chinese zhajiangmian, called ja ja.

46. Clover Hill

Many of Charlie Mitchell’s peers in the rarefied arena of multicourse, multi-hundred-dollar tastings (dinner at Clover Hill is $305 a person) think they’ve met their seasonal/local quota if they strew the petals of some wildflower picked last week around a fish dish they’ve been serving for months. In Mr. Mitchell’s kitchen, the seasons are central; this time of year, this week, is the subject of his menus. In high spring, he might lead off with a horseradish-dusted asparagus tart, the size of a communion wafer; then bring asparagus back a short while later in the company of Hokkaido scallops and puréed nettles; and surround a rich, oily piece of shark-skinned flounder with “a celebration of peas.” He’s as fond of Japanese seafood as he is of local greenery, which is a bit puzzling. But his belief in what he’s doing is total, and it comes through on every plate.

47. Aquavit

Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

Aquavit was gently pushing Swedish food and drink before anyone put the words “New Nordic cuisine” together, and has outlived several exponents of that style. Emma Bengtsson’s kitchen has kept its grip on the old ways — at lunch, the Swedish meatballs and the herring platter are still hard to equal. The rest of the menu is modern, although it avoids the avant-primitivism of Noma in favor of gentle harmonies like salmon with a saffron-tinted swirl of lobster bisque.

48. Gage & Tollner

Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

The 19th-century dining room had been out of commission for so long that when Gage & Tollner finally came back in 2021, almost everybody who came to eat was getting a first look at its marble, mahogany and converted gaslights. Now the place has a reputation again, and those who are lured by its oysters and Parker House rolls, fried chicken, crab cakes and baked alaska are likely to be return customers. That doesn’t mean heads have stopped swiveling.

49. Don Peppe

The jockey silks and other Aqueduct memorabilia on the walls don’t do much to dress up a bluntly monochromatic and overly bright dining room. If you want atmosphere, take a deep breath and smell the garlic. The kitchen must go through bales of it every day. There are no small plates at Don Peppe, where the minimum order of pasta is one pound (before cooking). So make room on the table for a sloshing platter or two of linguine with clams; shrimp Luciano with its own side of spaghetti; and anything on the menu with the name Don Peppe on it, including a salad the size of Cleveland. The food is overflowing not just with garlic, but with the aromas of Southern Italian cuisine in the deliriously intense form it took in the hands of New York City cooks.

50. Shaw-naé’s House

Show up at this Staten Island soul-food restaurant before your table is ready and you’ll be invited to sit in “the living room,” a pair of sofas facing a coffee table next to the orange glow of an electric fireplace. Will it feel like home? It may, if home is a place where a pitcher of rum punch appears at the drop of a hat, where two immersions in a deep fryer produce a whole red snapper that’s juicy down to the bone, and where everybody is eating “soul fries,” a bonkers remix of nachos in which mac and cheese, fried chicken and collard greens are piled over French fries.

51. Barbuto

It’s been 20 years since Jonathan Waxman opened Barbuto, dedicated to the idea of making it all look easy. Easy to make the one true kale salad in a world full of pretenders. Easy to blow people away by spooning salsa verde over a chicken roasted in a pizza oven. Easy to make chocolate budino that has the same relationship to regular pudding that espresso has to coffee at a Nebraska truck stop. But before you decide it must, in fact, be easy, just remember that this kind of accidentally perfect Italian food has been Mr. Waxman’s whole deal since the 1970s

52. Yoon Haeundae Galbi

Cole Saladino for The New York Times

It used to be possible to argue in a good-natured way about where to get the best Korean barbecue in K-town. Since Yoon’s short rib appeared, though, it has really been the only answer. The meat is scored in diagonal slashes, breaking down the connective tissue and carving a network of grooves for the marinade to travel in. The slashes also allow the helmet-shaped tabletop griddle to sear the meat in skinny, deeply browned ridges that are wonderful with Yoon’s ssamjang and seasoned salt

53. Foul Witch

What kind of name for an Italian restaurant is that? At least it lets Sam Pollheimer and his kitchen chase something a little more unusual than penne and tiramisù. You might want a rolled pasta called spaccatelli with braised pheasant that’s been dry-aged to a deep funk, followed by goat shoulder roasted in the wood oven with turnips. Bay leaf ice cream could be cool. But what about that black-pepper gelato with brûléed lardo?

54. Dhamaka

Exterior picture: Emon Hassan for The New York Times. Dish picture: Jenny Huang for The New York Times

A year ago, Dhamaka replaced most of its original menu with new dishes, not the move you’d expect from a place that is turning away diners every night. I’m sure some customers are still mourning their old favorites, and there were many things on the starting lineup that you simply couldn’t find anywhere else in Manhattan. But the truth is that in its first years Dhamaka focused very heavily on chile-laden meats, to the point of redundancy. It’s easier now to put together a meal that has a little rhythm and variety, and you can still arrange to finish with the Champaran meat, a mutton curry so fiery it could light a cigar.

55. The Grill

When the Grill was new, it reimagined midcentury American dining with a stylized sense of theater while managing to hit every single technical mark. The complete mess it made of an $85 chicken potpie, among other glitches at a recent meal, made last year’s top-10 ranking here impossible this year. But so much about this restaurant remains confidently excellent, starting with the cocktails and ending with the layer cakes stacked so tall they look as if they’re trying to fit in among the towers of Park Avenue.

56. Contento

If you get discouraged about the direction of the restaurant business, the fastest antidote is dinner at Contento. It can restore your faith to watch as the staff makes sincere efforts to welcome people in wheelchairs, or those who need specially designed flatware, or diners with visual impairments, or their guide dogs. But there are less obvious ways in which Contento overachieves. The wine list is longer and more interesting than most restaurants this small would attempt, and Oscar Lorenzzi’s cooking can convince you that you should be eating Peruvian food every night.

57. Mercado Little Spain

Ellen Silverman for The New York Times

One of many mysteries of José Andrés that scientists should study is the man’s ability to run New York’s most rewarding food hall when he doesn’t even live here. It is true that Mercado Little Spain is better for snacking than dining, but that’s true of almost all food halls, few of which cover as much ground. You can wander from kiosk to kiosk, grabbing a sugar-crusted xuixo for breakfast, a sack of churros with bittersweet chocolate sauce, a soft tortilla española right out of the skillet, gambas al ajillo sizzling in their fragrant oil, a glass of pretty much any kind of wine you’re in the mood for as long as it’s Spanish. The market’s newest stall, Mr. Lopez, makes the pressed sandwiches called bikinis along with chistorra dogs and smashburgers topped with jamón Ibérico.

58. Le Rock

Can anybody resist Le Rock’s snails, each in its own cup with its own hot bath of garlic butter and its own piece of toast? Or the tender leeks vinaigrette, which the servers unwrap from a cloak of dark outer leek greens as ceremoniously as if they were presenting poularde de Bresse demi-deuil? Or the baba carved tableside and then hit with a healthy glug of génèpy or Chartreuse? Well, occasionally I’ll hear from a reader who went to Le Rock with high hopes and felt ignored, lost in the shuffle, assaulted by the decibels. I’ll apologize about the service and say that in my experience the room does seem to be getting quieter. But, I tell them, any good homage to the French brasserie needs to be a little loud for verisimilitude.

59. Great N.Y. Noodletown

When the dining room is busy, which is just about always, it will be full of old Chinatown locals from Hong Kong, couples who think of Noodletown as their place, young social-media explorers ticking restaurants off their bucket list and older but equally clued-in tourists. These groups will overlap considerably with the soft-shell crab followers, the salt-and-pepper squid obsessives, the suckling pig appreciators, connoisseurs of Cantonese char siu, slurpers of wonton soup, and devotees of the restaurant’s much-imitated ginger-scallion sauce.

60. Village Cafe

The part of Brooklyn between Prospect Park and the Atlantic Ocean is a treasure land of food from the former Soviet republics. At Village Cafe, as with many other restaurants in the area, the kebabs are the backbone of the menu. But the Azerbaijani offerings extend well beyond meat on a stick: There are platters of plov, sweet with dried fruits; flatbreads stuffed with minced greens and fresh herbs; the daunting hash of livers, kidneys, hearts and testicles known as djiz-biz; and fat belts of pasta dressed with chopped lamb cooked in its own fat, a noodle dish that seems to stand exactly halfway between China and Italy.

Of all the restaurants washed up on the city’s shores by the first wave of enthusiasm over New Nordic cooking, the most original, thoughtful and lasting has been Aska. Fredrik Berselius, raised in Sweden, built his own kitchen vocabulary by combining Scandinavian flavors with ingredients farmed or foraged around New York. His intricate, gentle tasting menus show a poet’s feel for fleeting moments and the beauty lurking in nature. One long-running appetizer is a frond of fried bladderwrack daubed with drops of mussel emulsion that look like the plant’s natural balloon structures. A wavy cup assembled from shaved walnuts makes an edible shell for a walnut tart. Even his caviar dishes seem to have been discovered somewhere in Middle-earth.

62. Txikito

When Txikito struck out for Basque Country in 2008, a lot of New Yorkers were still fuzzy on the whole concept of Spanish regional cuisines. Instead of starting out slowly with an introductory Gildas for Dummies course, Alex Raij and Eder Montero immediately complicated the picture, inviting ingredients from China, Japan and beyond into the kitchen. Is there another Basque restaurant in the country where the Russian potato salad is augmented with bonito flakes and the boquerones are laid out over spearlike leaves of rau ram?

One downside of being widely imitated is that, years later, your original ideas can read like copies. This has been Craft’s fate, and if you are eating there for the first time, you probably won’t be bowled over by the dangling filament bulbs, the Chilewich place mats, and the copper pans in which meats and fish are carried to the table. But nobody has figured out how to mimic Craft’s ability to get maximal flavor with minimal means. The been-there-done-that feeling ends when you start eating.

It’s hard to know what to make of a restaurant that gets rid of its single best feature, as Lodi did by closing the bakery that produced destination-quality breads and a flauto al cioccolato so precisely made that its lamination might have been designed by an architect. True, Lodi gained a few tables. Now it is easier to stroll in for elegant cafe dishes like bison tartare and chestnut gnocchi. And yes, drinking a spritz or a sbagliato while sitting on or looking out at Rockefeller Plaza produces a distinctly pleasurable shiver of the kind that only the world’s great cities can provide. But we’re still going to need some time to forget about that flauto.

65. Falafel Tanami

The strange concrete bunker askew from the street grid looks even stranger now that a simple wooden porch has been hammered together. Yet this unprepossessing structure is a titan in Midwood’s highly competitive pita-sandwich scene. There is no shawarma here as at Olympic Pita, no schnitzel as at Corner Street Food. This leaves Tanami free to concentrate on its marvelous pita and its falafel, which have brittle fried shells protecting a hot interior that is bright green with herbs. The sheer number of bins of chopped vegetables and salads can induce panic attacks, and many customers just ask for everything. A screaming yellow streak of amba sauce is probably mandatory.

66. Barney Greengrass

Circle framed picture: Karsten Moran for The New York Times. Rectangle framed picture: Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times

The place is a cyclone of smoked-fish commerce on weekends and before any major Jewish holiday. On certain other days, a diner at Barney Greengrass can achieve a state close to serenity. There are eternal questions to contemplate: Sour cream or apple sauce? Nova or sturgeon? Toasted or untoasted? There are minor rituals to be observed — the most sacred of all is laughing at the servers’ jokes. Staring at the faded antebellum scenes of the French Quarter on the wallpaper can lead to the sensation that time has stopped moving forward. By your third cup of coffee and second order of latkes, it should be clear that you are sitting at the spiritual center of the Upper West Side.

67. Le Crocodile

Gage & Tollner is where Brooklyn goes to observe birthdays and anniversaries. Le Crocodile is where it celebrates smaller milestones, like living to the end of another day when the whole damned world didn’t fly to pieces. The brasserie menu is full of standards lifted above the routine by little niceties of craft and imagination, with a few unexpectedly flourishes like a truly good vegetarian pâté and a Waldorf salad liberated from mayonnaise at last.

68. Chongqing Lao Zao

Lanna Apisukh

The many, many people loyal to this Flushing restaurant are happy to wait two hours and sometimes more for Sichuan hot pots in the fiery and numbing style of Chongqing. The spicy broth is ferociously hot; even the mild has been known to draw tears from brave women and men.

69. AbuQir Seafood

Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

Meals at AbuQir, a homage to the seafood stalls on the Mediterranean coast outside Alexandria, begin with a consultation over the whole fish and other seafood stretched out on ice in the back. You should probably walk in with a plan. But if the man who takes your order tells you the grilled scallops are excellent today, or if you were thinking baked porgy and he recommends the blackened branzino, you should throw your plan out the window. A sloshy, garlicky plate of baba ghanouj is a fine thing to dip bread into while your fish cooks; in fact, anything with eggplant is a good idea.

70. Birria-Landia

Jenny Huang for The New York Times

New York has never been a food-truck town. But the meteoric ascent of the Birria-Landia fleet, which now cruises the boulevards of the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan, points to a better and more delicious future. It comes as a relief to find that the beef is still as tender and deeply flavored as a fancy French chef’s short ribs, that the consomé hasn’t been watered down, and that the rich perfume of spices can still turn heads half a block away.

71. Shukette

Your first impulse as you take in Ayesha Nurdjaja’s menu, which bounds from dips to four or more kinds of bread straight from the oven, from salads and pickles to the table-dominating Fish in a Cage, may be to ask for one of everything. Reveling in the brighter, fresher side of the Levantine canon, Shukette takes advantage of the energizing effects of sumac, citrus, yogurt and green herbs.

72. Hainanese Chicken House

The poached chicken in the dish called Hainanese chicken rice tends to confuse people trying it for the first time. The ideal texture, which can strike novices as flabby and undercooked, is more important than the flavor, which is supposed to be mild verging on dull. The expectation is that the customer will go to town with the house sauces, which should not be dull at all, and that the chicken flavor that seems to be missing from the chicken itself will be supplied by the rice. The success of the dish, in other words, depends on a series of bank shots, which is one reason it’s exciting to find it prepared as well as it is at Hainan Chicken House. For all that, this is not a one-dish specialist but one of the most impressive Malaysian restaurants New York has seen in years. The name may sell the kitchen short.

73. Mark’s Off Madison

Portrait picture: Joshua Bright for The New York Times. Dish picture: Daniel Krieger for The New York Times.

Anybody who believes a restaurant needs to tell a simple, easily understood story clearly hasn’t been to Mark’s Off Madison. The only concept plausibly tying together the Italian American favorites and Jewish classics and diner staples on Mark Strausman’s menu is that Mr. Strausman knows a good recipe for all of them. You can eat matzo ball soup, or a tuna melt, or a block of lasagna. You can’t eat a story.

A mural in its original Bay Ridge site shows Palestinian children behind bars under the Aqsa Mosque, between the phrases “down with the occupation” and “live in peace.” As Ayat has multiplied locations, it has kept up its paired messages of peace and support for the people of Palestine. For some New Yorkers, Ayat’s family-dinner mainstays, like the lamb stew mansaf, soured with dried yogurt, and the carefully layered chicken and vegetable dish called maklouba, will open new windows into Palestinian culture. For others, obviously, they will taste like home.

75. Dirt Candy

The great thing about tasting menus is that they act as a blank page that a chef can write anything on. The tragedy is how many chefs have nothing to say. Amanda Cohen does, though. Her five-course meals are like a night of one-act plays, or even comedy sketches, on the theme of vegetables. The cooks work on each dish until it’s a self-contained routine. Crunchy Buffalo collard leaves are sprinkled with powdered hot sauce and served with celery and blue cheese dip, and a savory croissant with a mushroom mousse filling comes with a glass of cappuccino that turns out to be mushroom soup. It’s dinner disguised as a continental breakfast.

76. Llama Inn

Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

It may be easier to see Erik Ramirez’s creative streak at his other restaurant, Llama San in Greenwich Village, where he free-associates on the ways Japanese and Peruvian food do, or potentially might, intersect. At Llama Inn he mostly sticks with translating traditional dishes — beef-heart anticuchos, scallop ceviche — into modern restaurant terms. But he works well when he’s staying within the lines, and there’s no question that the space in Brooklyn is roomier and more comfortable, despite being a truncated triangle under the B.Q.E.

77. Oiji Mi

Oiji Mi summons the spirit of New York’s midcentury supper clubs more effectively than places where that’s the explicit aim, like Swoony’s or Monkey Bar. It has leather seats, velvet curtains, deeply curved banquettes and a swooping marble bar. All that’s missing is a cigarette girl. This is not exactly the expected setting for a modern Korean restaurant, but it helps bring out the plush and culture-spanning comforts of Brian Kim’s five-course, $145 menus.

78. S & P Lunch

I am not going to tell you that S & P’s tuna melt is one of the greatest sandwiches of all time, or that it will change your life, or that it is one of the 25 or 50 or 1,000 foods you have to eat before you die. But one day you might find that you must have a tuna melt and that nothing else will do. On that day, I hope you remember to go to S & P, where you will be served a version made with terrific respect, from creamy and soft tuna salad on substantial rye bread. It will be better than you hoped, without deviating in any particular from what you were picturing. And this is true of almost more things on S & P’s menu that you can count, including the Reuben, the meatloaf sandwich, the chopped liver, the pancakes and the egg and cheese on a roll with Taylor ham.

79. Mariscos El Submarino

Last year, Alonso Guzman and Amy Hernandez followed the success of Mariscos El Submarino by opening a second restaurant, Mystica, in Greenpoint. It shows growth and ambition, with its careful plating and long-cooked pork shanks, and suggests these two restaurateurs could be around a while. But Mariscos El Submarino is still their shining contribution to the city, our most detailed and comprehensive tour of Sinaloa-style raw seafood. The aguachile negro, dark with soy sauce and undeniably spicy, has become something of a cult object, but the other aguachiles deliver jolts of their own, and there are equally good arguments for the ceviches, tostadas and tomato-red seafood cocktails in tall plastic cups.

80. Temple Canteen

Circle framed picture: Hilary Swift for The New York Times. Rectangle framed picture: Christopher Lee for The New York Times.

If we wanted to quibble about the South Indian cafeteria in the basement of a temple to the Hindu god Ganesha, we might say that having to listen as order numbers are called out endlessly can gnaw at the nerves. We might also ask whether the vegetable sambar isn’t a little watery. But then we’d remember that nothing on the menu costs more than $10, that the coconut chutney does seem to get better the more of it you eat and that the variety of dosas is sort of stunning, from chewy rava dosas to ice cream cone-shaped ghee roast dosas to paper dosas so long they sprawl from one end of a cafeteria tray to the other.

81. Foxface Natural

You have probably heard that Foxface Natural is a narrow, loud restaurant on Avenue A where deer heart or elk chops or kangaroo might be on the menu on any given night. But Foxface is not simply a purveyor of oddball species; the restaurant’s defining feature may be its pursuit of ingredients that Sysco doesn’t carry. So when the chef, David Santos, cooks octopus Bolognese, the octopus will have been trapped in a clay pot in a sustainable Spanish fishery. When he roasts a turnip, it will be the elusive Gilfeather turnip, which for decades was cultivated exclusively by a secretive Vermont farmer who refused to share its history or its seeds with anyone.

Maybe you got a little confused the last time you tried to remember the difference between gibanica and zeljanica. Perhaps you hesitated when somebody asked whether you prefer sopska or srpska. Or, at a recent wine tasting, you had trouble distinguishing between the Serbian tamjanika and the Slovenian malvazija. If you have experienced these or similar symptoms, it could be an indication that you are overdue for a meal at Kafana, Alphabet City’s rustic, majestic Serbian tavern.

83. M. Wells

Few restaurants take advantage of holidays and occasions as avidly as M. Wells. In the past few months it has served rabbit mole for Easter brunch, whipped up three kinds of fondue for a party in honor of Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day, and put on a Thanksgiving dinner that started with braised turkey legs and pig trotters, though of course it didn’t end there. Certainly it’s the only restaurant in Queens that celebrates the start of maple sap season by staging a hockey game on the dining room floor. If you happen to go on a day when nothing in particular is happening, you’ll still find dishes that seem to have been conceived for a feast like mortadella mille-feuille or half of a roasted piglet head on a plate.

84. Hakka Cuisine

It’s been a while since the arrival of a new dish in Chinatown caused as big as stir as the Hakka blossom chicken at Hakka Cuisine. It looks like a chicken that was flattened in some enormous panini press and then cut into squares. Those pieces have golden chicken skin on the top and bottom, but when you pop one in your mouth you discover that the soft and springy filling is made of taro and shrimp paste. Where did the rest of the chicken go? You can look for the solution to this mystery as you work your way through the other fine and elaborate Hakka specialties and Cantonese banquet dishes.

85. Wildair

The past year was a time of retrenchment for Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske Valtierra, who closed Contra, their statement restaurant, along with Peoples, their small wine bar in the food hall below Essex Market. Wildair, once a casual extension of Contra, has become their chief laboratory for ideas like an éclair with the flavors of a pissaladière inside and a series of Saturday collaborations called Donuts with Friends (exactly what it sounds like). Wildair was a little well-behaved early in life, but now it’s living up to its name.

86. 188 Bakery Cuchifritos

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Few sights in the Bronx, or anywhere else for that matter, can stir the gears of appetite quite like the exterior of 188 Cuchifritos. There is a smiling pig in a bow tie in the sign above the door. A partial list of Dominican and Puerto Rican specialties spelled out in half a dozen different colors of neon. In one window, trays stacked with fried pork skin, chicken and other fritters being kept warm by the heat of bare, greasy lightbulbs. There are approximately 1,000 other things on the menu, but this gives you some idea what you are in for.

87. Hav & Mar

Marcus Samuelsson’s latest project is not like the other seafood restaurants. There are Black mermaids everywhere, and the flavors can come from just about anywhere, with Ethiopia making especially frequent contributions. That’s Berbere spice blend in the cured salmon; the fluffy young fermented cheese ayib is in the beet salad, and injera crisps are provided with the tuna tartare. The combinations never feel superficial or confused, and the servers always seem as if they expect a party to break out at any moment.

88. Eulalie

Chip Smith and Tina Vaughn are immune to trends. He cooks in the regional-American style that flourished at the end of the last century. Nobody’s nostalgic for it yet, but Mr. Smith can make you wonder why not; he cooks it sensitively, and with conviction. Meanwhile Ms. Vaughn runs the dining room with the authority and familiarity only a proprietor can command. Her methods, which involve learning the names and preferences of all her customers, are long out of style, and nobody has written customer-database software that comes close to doing what she does with a pen, a hard-bound reservation book and her memory.

89. Hamburger America

Will George Motz, the hamburger historian and documentarian, want to spend the rest of his life behind a hot griddle, pressing on ground meat with a spatula until he judges the time is right to cover it with a yellow blanket of American cheese? It’s hard to imagine, but he does seem to be enjoying himself. For sure everybody else in the place is having a good time eating subtly but distinctly different burgers made with good beef and historical pedigree. It’s the geeked-out burger stand New York didn’t know it needed.

90. Laghman Express

The menu is not large and mostly focused on different ways of putting together lamb, onions, bell peppers, cumin and noodles made in open view of the dining room. Some noodles are strands so long that you will search and search for a beginning or an end, others are as wide as seatbelts, and the knife-cut pearl noodles are irregular stubs resembling diamonds, squares, pencil erasers — anything, it seems, except pearls. They’re all wonderfully tense and springy and fun to chew. The dark chile-garlic oil is especially good with noodles; it’s probably good with anything.

91. Mapo Korean BBQ

Dish picture: Evan Sung for The New York Times. Exterior picture: Karsten Moran for The New York Times.

This longtime institution across from the Murray Hill station on the Long Island Rail Road is the Peter Luger of Queens: gruff, brisk, straightforward and so thick with the aroma of sizzling beef that the air is almost solid. Pork and even seafood are available, but almost everybody orders galbi, which is grilled over tabletop baskets of charcoal by efficient women wielding sharp scissors.

92. Cka Ka Qellu

The city used to be full of small, amber-lighted, nostalgic restaurants where servers wore Old World costumes, melancholy folk tunes played in the background and everything on the menu evoked the country the owners had left behind. Cka Ka Qellu uses this method to summon Albania. Both locations look like roadside inns from another century, and after putting away platters of veal sausages, creamy dips, stewed beans, soft polenta and Albanian tres leches cake, you may be disappointed to find out there are no featherbeds and fireplaces waiting upstairs.

93. Vendors at Junction Boulevard

Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times

After the city evicted all but a small fraction of the Mexican and Ecuadorean vendors from Corona Plaza, the Junction Boulevard stop took its place as the most rewarding street-food destination under the No. 7 train. At the foot of a staircase descending from the tracks, Tacos El Borrego is an impressively well-equipped stand where the most compelling choice is the tacos al pastor, hacked from a spinning trompo the size of a young bluefin tuna. Just off the intersection is Chalupas Poblanas El Tlecuile, where eight tortillas at a time are softened in hot lard and splashed with red and green salsa, then stacked up like pancakes. There are vendors ladling out atole and cafe de olla, cooks pressing fresh masa, flashing and whirring toys for sale for a couple of dollars, and on the other side of Roosevelt, a Bitcoin A.T.M.

94. Shopsin’s General Store

There are a number of restaurants across Essex Street from the I.C.P. but Shopsin’s is the only one that points this out on its website with the helpful footnote “Stands for International Center of Photography (Not Insane Clown Posse).” This is a joke that happens to be true, which you could say about most of Shopsin’s menu. The macaroni-and-cheese pancakes are famous by now, as are the somewhat Mexican-ish eggs called Blisters on My Sisters. Then we come to the Do-Rag pancake, the Bastard and the Wiggly Pete, and this is just on the first of the menu’s two single-spaced pages. Every dish, no matter how weird it sounds, will turn out to be good, at a minimum, and a surprisingly large percentage of the goofiest ones have a stealthy sort of culinary intelligence. Shopsin’s takes nothing seriously and takes everything seriously, a philosophy to contemplate while slowly drinking a Nutella Fluff malted milkshake.

95. Hyderabadi Zaiqa

Here we have an anomaly: a new, tiny, fearless, overachieving Indian restaurant that doesn’t belong to the Unapologetic Foods group. Biryani is the pride of Hyderabadi cuisine and the point of Hyderabadi Zaiqa. More than a dozen are available, from a staunchly traditional and ferociously spiced dum biryani augmented with slow-roasted goat to the Chicken 65 biryani, featuring a spicy, lava-red chicken invented several years ago at a hotel in Chennai. There are curries as well, terrific fried okra and a fish dish that is a close cousin of Chicken 65. How all this is produced is a bit of a mystery. The kitchen can’t be much bigger than a rowboat, and the dining room gets crowded if more than five people decide to eat there at the same time.

96. Caleta 111

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Expanding into the space next door transformed Caleta 111 from a narrow ceviche counter to a full-fledged and cheerful Peruvian restaurant. Now you can sit at a table set inside a long narrow boat, nursing a plum-colored chicha morada and looking through the picture window into the kitchen, overseen by Luis Caballero. He makes Chinese Peruvian classics like lomo saltado and seafood fried rice; causas that turn mashed potatoes into an art form; and choritos a la chalaca, chilled mussels dressed with a relish of fresh peppers and tomatoes. But above all, Mr. Caballero is a master of the citric, spicy, cloudy, ginger-spiked liquid that is the base of all his ceviches. One sip of his leche de tigre and you know why you are here, even if you’re not quite sure why you’re sitting in a boat.

97. Zum Stammtisch

Queens lost another remnant of its German legacy in February when Morscher’s Pork Store in Ridgewood closed. You’d never know that the old ways are fading, though, when you’re inside the timbered Bavarian confines of Zum Stammtisch in Glendale. Pilsner is still poured into steins, the giant fresh pretzel comes with two kinds of mustard, and beef goulash over spaetzle is considered an appetizer. There is nothing wrong with the schnitzel, but why resist the wursts? They’re made in the restaurant’s own smokehouse.

98. Lakruwana

Circle framed picture: Dave Sanders for The New York Times. Rectangle framed picture: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times.

The cooking of Sri Lanka that emerges from Lakruwana’s kitchen is tropical, lush, saturated with coconut and chiles. But dinner or lunch there is not just a meal. It’s a cultural immersion. Over the years the Wijesinghe family, who own the restaurant and usually stand guard in the dining room, have filled the dining room with Buddha statues, carved furniture, clay pots, weapons and shields, and about a hundred other objects shipped from Sri Lanka.

99. Ewe’s Delicious Treats

The deeper I get into Ewe’s repertory of Nigerian dishes, the more impressed I am. The egusi and ogbono stews are deeply flavored and complex, and the fish pepper soup has a strong aromatic backbone that is the sign of a careful hunt for ingredients. Chile heat is an accent, but it’s not used timidly, and don’t go looking for relief in the jollof rice, which is an event in itself. The restaurant recently got its beer and wine license, and a bottle from the refrigerator can make a useful companion when the Scotch bonnets make their presence felt.

100. Randazzo’s Clam Bar

There is chowder to start, along with freshly shucked clams and oysters. You can get lobster fra diavolo or linguine with clam sauce, red or white, and a couple dozen other classics of Italian American seafood cookery. But Randazzo’s was put on this earth to serve fried calamari. If you don’t understand how such a pedestrian dish could be the organizing principle of an entire restaurant, you probably haven’t tasted the calamari at Randazzo’s, or dipped it into the hot tomato sauce that seems to have been bubbling on the back of the stove all day, or wondered how the hunk of friselle, a kind of crouton buried under the pile of squid, somehow manages to be dry and wet at the same time.

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Big Boy restaurants celebrate 88 years in business with big specials, birthday party

If you're a big fan of the Big Boy burgers and Slim Jim sandwiches, mark your calendars for a big celebration.

In June, the Southfield-based chain that has long been noted for its iconic Big Boy statue holding up its signature double-decker burger is marking 88 years in business this summer.

A weeklong celebration is scheduled for June 10-16, with daily restaurant specials and a Big Boy birthday party to honor the chain's nearly 90 years in business. On June 15, the day the chain has designated as Big Boy Day, a Big Boy Birthday Party is taking place and the public is invited.

The party is a carnival-style celebration, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 15 at the Big Boy Arena, 34400 Utica Rd. in Fraser. At the event, the Big Boy Food Truck will offer free Big Boy burgers to the first 50 people (one per person), with $5 Big Boy and fries available with a Pepsi purchase afterward. On tap are Big Boy-themed games plus activities that include a video game truck, inflatable obstacle course, foam party, open ice skate, and carnival-style Big Boy-themed games where you win prizes.

During the weeklong celebration, fans of the restaurant's signature Big Boy, a double-decker sandwich with two beef patties between two bottom buns, are in for a big treat.

On June 12, the classic Big Boy burger is 99 cents (served with fries and a pop, the regular price averages $13.78) with a Pepsi purchase. The offer is valid for dine-in or carryout.

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“As we celebrate the iconic Big Boy and kick off our Birthday Celebration Week, we are filled with pride and gratitude for the incredible journey our brand has taken for the last 88 years,” said Big Boy CEO Tamer Afr in a news release. “The Big Boy Sandwich has become a beloved classic, a symbol of quality and tradition that has delighted generations of our customers."

Big Boy Restaurant was founded in 1936 in Glendale, California. Based in Southfield, the Big Boy Restaurant Group operates and manages Big Boy and Bob's Big Boy restaurant franchises, with most in Michigan. Other locations are in California, Ohio, Nevada, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Thailand.

Here are the other specials Big Boy is offering June 10-16 at participating restaurants:

• June 10: Supercharged Bingo Monday with $25 and $50 gift card prizes, free Big Boy and fries, and custom Big Boy Bingo Winner Keychains. Senior breakfast is $5 (regular price is $6.99) all day.
• June 11: Kids eat free with the purchase of an adult meal and get a free kids' dessert. A special edition Big Boy Birthday comic book is offered with a chance to win an Xbox in a special sweepstakes.
• June 12: Big Boy burger is 99 cents, dine-in or carryout, with a purchase of a Pepsi. Served with fries, the regular price with a drink is $13.78.
• June 13: Sandwich and fries are $7, dine-in or carry-out.
• June 14: Free slice of pie with any purchase of $8.99 or more for dine-in only.
• June 15: Celebrate National Big Boy's birthday with $5 Big Boy and fries with a purchase of a Pepsi offer started after noon at all Michigan and Ohio restaurants.
• June 16: Half off any dessert after 4 p.m. for dine-in only.

Note : Some California and North Dakota restaurants have different special offers.

Specials vary by participating location. For a list of participating locations visit: bigboy.com .

During the celebration week, the Big Boy Food Truck will be on tour, stopping at six Michigan locations.The first 50 people at each location receive a free Big Boy sandwich. A special food truck menu features a $5 Big Boy, fries and pop combo and Slim Jim sandwiches and chicken nuggets.

Food truck tour stops are in these cities with updates and schedules provided on Big Boy's social media outlets:

• June 10: Ypsilanti
• June 11: Ann Arbor
• June 12: Kalamazoo
• June 13: Lansing
• June 14: Romeo
• June 15: Fraser

During its celebration week, Big Boy fans can share their Big Boy stories on social media for a chance to win a merchandise basket or take a picture next to a Big Boy statue and use the #NationalBigBoyDay hashtag and tag @itsyourbigboy for a chance to win a free Big Boy for a year.

Bumpy Cakes: Sanders treats to return as owners find new production partner

Contact Detroit Free Press food and restaurant writer Susan Selasky and send food and restaurant news to: [email protected]. Follow @SusanMariecooks on Twitter.   Subscribe to the Free Press .

1710 Tavern

Review Highlights

“ The restaurant has two dining areas, one for fine dining and the other with a more casual patio atmosphere. ” in 3 reviews

“ The lobster risotto to die for. ” in 2 reviews

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314 S Water Lane

Tappahannock, VA 22560

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