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Opening a restaurant happens in a fairly fixed order, whether you’re aware of it or not: concept, funding, paperwork, then everything physical. Most restaurant opening guides cover that order in detail and then stop right before the part that actually rings the loudest once the doors are open, the phone.
What gets less attention is which part of the operation cracks first when volume hits. It’s rarely the kitchen. It’s usually the phone. The smarter approach starts with preventing service interruptions, particularly from phone calls during peak hours. Bonnie’s AI phone assistant handles guest communication 24/7, allowing your restaurant tech stack to support uninterrupted service rather than create more chaos.
The real order of operations when you’re opening a restaurant
Opening a restaurant happens roughly the same way across Europe, the paperwork just changes by country. Concept comes first. Funding next, because nothing else moves without it. Permits take longer than anyone expects, so they need to start early too. Location, equipment, staff, the actual opening, somewhere in there the order gets less rigid and more about what’s actually ready when.
| Phase | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Concept and menu | Cuisine, service style, what makes you different from the place next door |
| Business plan and funding | Loans, investors, break-even numbers, cash runway |
| Permits and registration | Business registration, tax number, food safety, alcohol licence if needed |
| Location | Foot traffic, lease terms, whether the kitchen can actually handle your menu |
| Equipment, layout and tech | Kitchen gear, POS, online booking, the phone |
| Staffing | Front and back of house, training, who’s running the floor |
| Launch | Soft opening, local visibility, the first month of bookings |
1. Concept and menu come before anything else gets decided
Your concept decides almost everything that comes after it. The equipment list. The staff you’ll need. Which neighbourhoods even make sense. A Thai restaurant opening in Rotterdam needs its own kind of kitchen, its own training, probably a different street entirely than the Neapolitan pizzeria two doors down, even if they’re both fighting for the same lunch crowd at one o’clock.
Keep the concept vague and every later decision gets harder to defend, to investors, to landlords, to yourself at month three when the menu still isn’t selling the way you expected.
2. Funding and the business plan you’ll actually need
Funding is usually the part that determines whether opening a restaurant stays a plan on paper or turns into an actual lease. A business plan matters less for the document itself than for forcing you to write down numbers you’d otherwise guess at: rent, staff costs, food cost percentage, the point where revenue catches up with what you’re spending. Lenders want to see it, but the bigger reason to do it properly is that it stops you opening with six weeks of cash runway and hoping the rest works out.
Funding usually comes from a mix. Personal savings, a bank loan, sometimes a regional small business scheme, occasionally an investor willing to bet on the concept. None of these show up faster because you skipped the plan. They show up because the plan answers the questions a lender asks before you’ve finished explaining the concept.
3. Permits, registration and the legal groundwork
Every country has its own list. Business registration, a tax number, food safety sign-off from whoever handles that locally. Add an alcohol licence if you’re pouring drinks, and depending on where you are, sometimes a permit for outdoor seating or signage too. The categories repeat even when the paperwork doesn’t. None of this moves quickly. Approvals can take weeks, occasionally months, and they don’t speed up because your opening date is already fixed in your head.
Start this the same week you sign a lease, not after the fit-out begins. Restaurants that leave registration until the kitchen is finished are usually the ones delaying their opening by a month they hadn’t planned for.
4. Location: the decision most owners get wrong
Location is where opening a restaurant stops being theoretical, because a lease is a real, binding number on a real building. A good location matches your concept and your budget at the same time, and most owners only optimise for one of the two. High foot traffic costs more in rent, but it also means fewer marketing euros spent convincing people you exist. A quieter side street can work, but only if you’ve already built a reason for people to seek you out specifically, because nobody walks past and discovers you by accident.
Check the obvious things: parking, visibility, who else is on the street, whether the lease terms let you grow. Check the less obvious one too, whether the building’s electrics and ventilation can actually handle a commercial kitchen, because retrofitting that after signing is expensive in a way that rarely shows up in the first budget.
5. Equipment, layout and the tech stack nobody plans early enough
Kitchen equipment gets planned around the menu, and most owners get that part right. What gets missed is everything that happens before a guest even sits down: the booking system, the POS, and the phone.
A POS system handles payment once someone’s at the table. An online booking tool like Formitable or Zenchef handles the guest who books from their phone at 9pm, scrolling Instagram. Neither one answers the guest who just calls, and that’s still how a large share of reservations and questions come in, especially from older guests, group bookings, and anyone with a question that doesn’t fit a booking form.
Ron Blaauw, chef and owner of Ron Gastrobar, runs Bonnie to cover exactly that gap. He says it handles calls professionally and has taken a real workload off his team, freeing them to focus on guests instead of the phone. At The Seafood Bar in Amsterdam, Bonnie has handled 1,813 reservations, cut customer service costs by 40 percent and saved the team 37 hours a month, with 85 percent caller satisfaction across that period. That’s not opening-week enthusiasm. That’s a running total from a restaurant that’s been live for a while.
Bonnie doesn’t replace your POS and it doesn’t replace a host seating walk-ins. It answers what would otherwise be a missed call, books it straight into Formitable, Zenchef, TheFork or Guestplan, and does it in more than 20 languages. Setup takes under 30 minutes, which means it can be running before your first guest walks through the door instead of three weeks after you’ve already missed the calls that mattered most.
| Plan | Monthly price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | €135/month | Small restaurants and cafés opening with a lean team |
| Business | €215/month | Restaurants connecting a reservation platform from day one |
| Pro | €420/month | High call volume locations, multiple staff shifts |
Annual billing brings 10% off any plan. Every plan starts with 7 days free, full access, no card required to try it.
6. Staffing and the week before you open
Staffing is the part of opening a restaurant that’s hardest to rush, because a great concept with an undertrained team reads to guests as a bad restaurant, full stop. Define roles clearly before you post a single job ad: who runs the floor, who’s on the pass, who closes the till. Train on service standards and safety together, not as two separate sessions a month apart, staff retain it better when it’s tied to the actual shift they’ll be running.
The week before opening is also when most owners realise nobody’s decided who answers the phone if the floor is slammed and the kitchen is barely keeping up. That’s usually the same week the Google listing goes live and the calls start.
7. What opening week looks like once the phone is covered
Wes Schreutelkamp, owner of Feast Family, switched to Bonnie and says it brought call response up to 100 percent, busy service and after hours both, with conversion staying high and group enquiries getting captured instead of lost. That’s the version of opening week most checklists assume happens automatically. It doesn’t, not without something covering the gap between a full dining room and a phone that’s still ringing.
8. Promoting your opening without burning out the team you just hired
A soft opening tests your systems on a smaller, more forgiving crowd. It feels like delaying the moment you’ve been working toward. Run it anyway. Local press, a presence on Google and the review platforms guests actually check, a few neighbouring businesses willing to mention you, none of it costs anything beyond the conversations themselves.
What actually drives the first month of bookings is simpler than most marketing plans admit. Someone heard about you. They looked you up. Then they either booked online, or picked up the phone, and if that call hits voicemail, whatever you spent getting their attention just got wasted on a ring nobody answered.
Frequently asked questions
How long does opening a restaurant actually take from lease to launch? Three to six months, usually, counting from the day you sign the lease to the night you open. Permits and the fit-out are what stretch it. Your plan can be flawless and it still won’t move faster than the paperwork allows.
What’s the biggest mistake first-time restaurant owners make when opening a restaurant? Underestimating cash runway, that’s the classic one. Right behind it, treating communication like it’ll sort itself out. People plan the kitchen down to the last pan, and the phone doesn’t cross their mind until it’s already ringing and nobody’s free to grab it.
Do I need a separate phone system when opening a restaurant? A POS handles payments. A booking tool handles the guest who reserves online. Neither one picks up the phone, and plenty of guests still call instead, group bookings especially. Bonnie does pick up, every time, from day one, and books it straight into your reservation system.
How much should I budget for opening a restaurant? It varies a lot by size, location, concept. Most independent restaurants are well into six figures before opening night once you add up the lease, equipment, permits, the marketing push to get people through the door. Underestimate that number and you’re already behind before service even starts.
Opening a restaurant? Cover the phone before night one
Set Bonnie up in under 30 minutes and connect it to Formitable, Zenchef or TheFork before your first guest calls. No more finding out about missed bookings two days later, scrolling through a call log instead of running the floor. Try Bonnie free for 7 days, no card required.
