I'm just skipping to the end and replying so some of this may already be addressed:
My first career was in restaurant kitchens, worked my way from dishwasher up to Executive Chef until ultimately I decided the stress was just too much and changed career paths. I think at the time I was also emotionally immature to where I didn't really grasp that it was the situation that was ****ed, not the entire industry, so I'd likely still be doing it if I had that bit of knowledge... but eh, that's life.
Part of this experience was being through 3 separate restaurant openings. And by openings, I mean I was helping to unbox kitchen equipment.. that early in the process.
Anywho, my first question for anyone who mentions opening a restaurant is if they have prior experience in the industry. I'm not talking worked a server or line job at one point... actual management level experience of a restaurant operation.
If the answer to the above is no, and this person is already stable in life, I'd say don't bother and stick to what you're doing.
I cannot express this enough:
IT IS A BRUTAL INDUSTRY, ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE JUST GETTING INTO IT. UNDERSTAND THAT YOU MAY PRACTICALLY BE LIVING AT THE RESTARAUNT UNTIL IT GETS ON ITS FEET, WHICH MAY BE AT LEAST 5 YEARS.
I don't know if it's still a current statistic, but 5 years used to be an acceptable benchmark for an independent restaurant to not only succeed but be like, "Wow, you made it 5 years, most don't make it this far." Margins can be very thin and turnover is incredibly high. You also won't have the backing of a franchise marketing campaign.
If you're going down this venture with anything other than an "all in" mindset, you're very likely to fail. There is nothing easy or half-assed about running a successful restaurant. It's nothing personal to you and your work ethic, it can just be an absolute nightmare of an industry to succeed in so people really need to get their mind right before diving in.
A few pitfalls:
Don't overload your menu. Menus with a ton of items are an immediate red flag to me. Don't do 40 things average when you can crush 20, and if you can't crush 20, do 15. Make sure whatever menu you put out there, every item receives attention to detail. If you can't give a menu item that level of detail, don't do it until you can. Odds are you won't have the resources for a large menu out of the gate, so lock down what you can do and build up from there. Pre-fab items from the purveyors will either wreck your food cost or be marginal at best, so find someone who can build a menu mostly from scratch items. This is going to take people who can prep efficiently, but if you have the proficiency to get in... say whole chickens at cost, break them down, then distribute that whole chicken across 4-5 menu items, your food cost will drop to a point where it covers the extra back of the house prep labor. This includes making stock from the carcasses and any celery/onion/carrot "scraps" that would otherwise go to waste can be used in stock. Use that stock in your sauces/soups, and you can immediately see the cost benefit.
Narrow down a genre or style and focus on that. So many places try to be everything to everybody so you'll see a disjointed menu of Asian items, Italian, American, Mexican, etc. etc. I don't know a lot of folks who are simultaneously experts on Sausage gravy and the perfect Mexican Mole. Decide what you want to be and be the best at it, seems obvious but isn't always in practice.
Your restaurant is not your personal hangout nor your employees. The quickest way to lose control is to allow your employees to drink/party at your restaurant/bar (unless it's a scheduled company gathering). Over time they will take advantage of this. It's also not a hangout place for the owner to sit there and get hammered with his buddies. You are inviting a terrible situation by mixing Management/Employees/Customers/Booze. When staff are done for the day, they shouldn't want to hang around and if they are, free drinks are going to be handed out and this leads to my next point........
INVENTORY. Make sure you have inventory systems in place so you don't realize down the line that a certain manager has been stealing a bottle of vodka here and there and it turns out over the course of their tenure they've taken the equivalent of 10 cases of .750 mL bottles of Vodka. Saw that one first hand. People will steal from you, it's damn near guaranteed, have systems in place from the start so it gets caught sooner than later. You don't have to be draconian about it, but you need it.
Those are a few common mistakes I see off the top of my head. I'd be willing to chat and share my experiences if you want to talk to someone whose been through the best and worst of it, at least from the kitchen side.
I don't say these things to make it too daunting for someone to get into it, because it can be a very rewarding industry. I've just had too many friends/colleagues in the past fall into some deep addiction problems (myself included) due to the stress of it all (one died to it) that I always want to make sure that people understand the difficulty before making a potentially life altering decision.
