All guides

What it costs to open a restaurant depends most on the space you take: in the best survey available, a ground-up build cost more than twice as much as taking over an existing restaurant. A line-by-line startup checklist, a budget sheet for your own quotes, licenses to plan for, and how restaurants fund an opening.

A free food cost calculator for restaurants: list what goes on the plate, allow for trim and waste, and see your food cost percentage and the menu price that hits your target. With the formulas, a worked example and how to set your own target.

Prime cost is your cost of goods sold plus your total labor cost. It is the biggest cost a restaurant controls week to week. How to calculate it, what counts, what is typical, and how to bring it down, with a free calculator.

How to design a restaurant menu that is easy to read and makes your best dishes easy to find: layout, writing descriptions, printed versus QR menus, and what to check before you buy digital menu boards.

The typical restaurant keeps only a few cents of every sales dollar: in 2024 the median full-service restaurant made 2.8% before tax and the median limited-service restaurant 4.0%. How to work out your own margin, how it compares, and where profit usually leaks.

Restaurant technology is easier to choose when you start from the job, not the brand. What to set up first, what each tool does, what to ask before you sign, how card fees and delivery commissions really work, and the stack by type of restaurant.

The 30/30/30 rule is an informal restaurant budgeting benchmark: about 30% food and beverage, 30% labor, 30% overhead, and roughly 10% profit. Here's what it means, how much it varies, and where marketing fits.

You can shoot appetizing photos of your own food with the phone in your pocket. A practical guide to light, angles, styling, and editing — plus when it's worth hiring a pro.

Display banner ads are cheap, highly targetable, and almost no local restaurant uses them well. Here's what they're actually good for, what they're not, and how to run them without wasting money.

Your Google Business Profile is the free listing that drives the map pack — the biggest local-search lever a restaurant has. Here's how to claim it, complete it, and keep it working.

A vendor-neutral guide to restaurant loyalty programs: how punch-card, points, tiered, spend-based, and app-based programs compare, which fits your restaurant, and how to launch one without overpaying.

54 practical restaurant marketing ideas: free foundations, retention, menu, promotions through the year, local, ideas by type of restaurant, and paid channels, each with a rough cost and effort.

A neutral, operator-first guide to marketing a restaurant: the foundations, the channels that actually move covers, how to budget, and how to measure it — with no tool to sell you.

Menu engineering means sorting your dishes by how popular and how profitable each one is, then redesigning the menu to steer guests toward the items that make you the most money.

Restaurant social media marketing for busy operators: which platforms matter, how to set up Instagram, what to post, a weekly posting plan you can keep, and how to tell if it is working.

How to build a performance-driven Google Ads campaign for your restaurant on just a few dollars a day — set-up, day-parting, match types, negative keywords, and what results to expect.

The complete overview of how to advertise a restaurant — the free tactics, the paid channels, offline ideas, real examples, and a sane way to set your budget.

Email is the one marketing channel you own outright — no algorithm deciding who sees you. Here's how restaurants build a list, what to send, and how to bring diners back.

Facebook ads for restaurants, step by step: what they cost, how to target locally, which ad formats work, how to set one up in Ads Manager, and a $5-a-day starter plan.

Local SEO is most of restaurant SEO. The biggest lever is your Google Business Profile, not blog posts. Here's how to rank in the map pack, on Google Maps, and in local search.