Find out if the seats can carry the kitchen, before you sign a lease.
Seats, turns and average check against the real cost of a kitchen and a dining room.
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The assumptions, benchmarks, and drivers behind your restaurant projections.
A full service restaurant is a capacity business: seats times turns per day times open days sets the theoretical ceiling, utilization sets how much of it you actually sell, and average check converts covers into revenue. That structure matters because it makes the ceiling explicit. Sixty seats at two and a half turns over twenty six days is a hard limit of 3,900 covers a month, and no amount of marketing sells the 4,000th. Food and beverage cost sits in the high twenties to low thirties as a percent of net revenue, and staff is treated as a fixed cost because a dining room cannot flex its roster with same-day demand.
Prime cost, food plus labour, is the number operators actually manage, and healthy independents keep it near 60 to 65 percent of sales. Build-outs vary enormously with how much of the previous tenant's kitchen survives, so the capex here is a mid-range assumption rather than a sourced average, and it is financed over ten years. Utilization in the first year rarely clears 50 percent, and a plan that assumes 70 percent from month one is not a plan. Debt service coverage above 1.25 and fixed cost coverage above 1.15 are the two lines this template holds the model to.
Utilization is the whole game. Fixed costs, rent, salaried kitchen staff, insurance, do not move when the room is half empty, so every point of utilization above break-even drops almost straight to the bottom line and every point below it burns cash at the same rate. That is why the model separates the ramp from steady state: the question is not whether a full room is profitable, it is whether the business can survive the months before the room is full. Average check is the second lever, and it is the cheaper one to pull.
Everything you need to know about restaurant financial modeling.
The numbers that matter most for a restaurant business, calculate any of them free.
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