How to Start and Run Your Own Restaurant: 7 lessons

Who should read it

This is the book to read before you sign anything: a genuine first-timer, someone moving from working in kitchens or front of house into ownership, or a couple planning a small café or bistro together. If you already run a multi-site group, need detailed financial modelling, or are opening outside the UK and need country-specific licensing rules, look elsewhere; the guide's real strength is walking a nervous beginner through the first eighteen months, not giving an experienced operator anything new.

Choose the concept and the site together

Godsmark's starting point is that a concept invented in isolation and then matched to whatever unit becomes available is how most new restaurants end up mismatched to their own neighbourhood. A fifty-cover brasserie concept dropped into a narrow high-street unit with no rear access for deliveries will fight its own layout every single service. Her advice is to walk the area you are considering at breakfast, lunch, mid-afternoon and closing time, on a weekday and a weekend, and count who is actually on the street rather than trusting footfall figures from an agent.

She is equally insistent on reading a site's history. A unit that has changed hands three times in five years, whatever the story each previous owner tells you, is usually saying something about rent, footfall or the building itself that is worth taking seriously. Cheap rent on a struggling street is rarely a bargain; it is a discount for a problem you have not yet identified.

The practical checklist she returns to covers extraction and drainage (retrofitting either into an existing shell is one of the most common budget-wreckers), parking or public transport for staff on late shifts, and whether the landlord's lease terms allow the use class you actually need. None of this is glamorous, but skipping it is how a concept that looked perfect on paper turns into a lease you regret.

A business plan you actually believe

The book treats the business plan less as a bank-facing document and more as a private stress test. Godsmark's approach is to force every number, covers per service, average spend, food cost percentage, staffing levels, to be written down and then argued with, rather than accepted the first time it looks encouraging. Most first-time plans fail not because the format is wrong but because the owner wrote down the number they wanted rather than the number the site and concept can realistically support.

She pushes readers to build three versions of the same forecast: a confident one, a cautious one, and a genuinely uncomfortable one where the first three months underperform. The uncomfortable version is the one that tells you whether you have enough working capital to survive a slow opening, which is exactly the period when most new restaurants run out of cash before they run out of good will.

The plan is also where she wants competitors named specifically, not gestured at. Walking three direct competitors' menus, prices and busy periods before you finalise your own is treated as basic due diligence, not paranoia, and it is one of the cheapest research exercises available to a new owner.

Where the money comes from, and what it really costs

Godsmark surveys the usual UK financing routes for a small independent, personal savings, a bank loan, family investment and leasing for equipment, and is candid that most first restaurants are underfunded from day one because owners budget for the fit-out and forget the months of trading losses that come before the business finds its rhythm. Her rule of thumb is to budget for the opening costs and then add a working-capital cushion on top that many owners are tempted to skip.

She is particularly direct about family money: it can be the cheapest capital available, but only if the terms are written down as carefully as they would be with a bank, because an unpaid family loan does more lasting damage to relationships than a business failure does on its own. The same discipline applies to any investor, a clear, written agreement about what they get and when, agreed before the money moves rather than negotiated afterwards under pressure.

Leasing kitchen equipment rather than buying it outright is presented as a genuine option for a cash-poor opening, trading a higher total cost over time for a lower barrier to opening at all, a trade-off she thinks is honestly explained less often than it should be.

Licensing, hygiene and the paperwork that takes longer than you think

This is the most UK-specific section of the book, and rightly so: a premises licence application, food hygiene registration with the local authority, and the various health and safety obligations that come with running a professional kitchen all have their own timelines, forms and inspection visits, and Godsmark's repeated warning is that every one of them takes longer than a first-time owner assumes. Applying for a premises licence after you have already booked an opening date is a classic and avoidable mistake.

She treats the food hygiene rating and a genuine, working food-safety routine not as bureaucratic hoops but as the operational backbone of a kitchen; the same discipline that keeps a fridge at the right temperature every day is what keeps an inspector, and more importantly a guest, safe. Getting this right from the first week is far cheaper than fixing it after a poor inspection.

Insurance, staff contracts and basic employment law round out the section, again framed practically: get proper advice once rather than guess and hope, because the cost of a mistake here compounds for as long as you employ people.

Fitting out a kitchen and dining room without overspending

The fit-out chapter is built around one repeated idea: spend where the guest can feel it and where the kitchen cannot function without it, and economise everywhere else. Good extraction, a reliable cold chain, and enough hot-holding and prep space for the menu you actually plan to run are treated as non-negotiable; the finish on the dining room floor or the design of the menu covers is where a tight budget can flex.

Godsmark is a strong advocate of buying reconditioned or ex-catering equipment for anything that is not guest-facing, and of getting a proper mechanical and electrical survey done before signing a lease, since the cost of upgrading a building's power supply or drainage after the fact regularly dwarfs the headline fit-out budget people plan around.

She also warns against designing a kitchen around an ambitious menu you have not yet tested at volume. A layout that works for a chef cooking alone falls apart the first Saturday night it has to feed a full room, and redesigning a kitchen after opening is far more disruptive and expensive than getting the workflow right on paper first.

A menu that can be cooked and sold, and a floor that runs itself

On the menu, the book's advice is unglamorous but sound: keep it shorter than your instincts suggest, cost every dish properly including waste and portion drift, and design it around ingredients and techniques your kitchen can actually execute consistently on a busy Saturday, not just on a quiet test night. A menu that looks impressive on paper and collapses under real volume is one of the most common reasons a promising opening loses its early momentum.

Front of house gets equal attention, treated as the guest's whole experience of the business rather than an afterthought to the food. Godsmark's practical standards, a genuine greeting, knowing the menu well enough to answer questions without hesitation, checking back at the right moment rather than too soon or too late, are the kind of detail that separates a restaurant guests return to from one they simply visited once.

She also links pricing directly to costing discipline: a menu priced on gut feeling rather than a properly worked food cost percentage is one of the quiet ways a restaurant can be busy every night and still lose money, which she treats as more common, and more dangerous, than an empty dining room.

Staff, shoestring marketing and the realities nobody mentions

The closing chapters cover recruiting and training a small team, and marketing on a budget that most first-time owners actually have, which is to say very little: building a local reputation through word of mouth, a simple and consistently updated online presence, and relationships with the immediate neighbourhood, rather than expensive campaigns a new restaurant cannot afford and does not yet need.

Godsmark is unusually candid about the emotional and physical toll of the first year, the exhaustion of working every service yourself, the temptation to skip your own days off, and the strain that a struggling cash position puts on both the business and the owner's home life. This is presented not as a warning to put you off, but as a normal, survivable stage that catches almost everyone unprepared because nobody tells them in advance.

Supplier relationships get their own honest treatment too: negotiating terms early, paying on time to protect your credit with the people you depend on, and knowing which suppliers to trust with a slow first month, are framed as part of the same discipline as the business plan itself, not a separate skill you pick up later.