90-Day Restaurant Pre-Opening Checklist for First-Time Owners

Opening day is not the finish line; it is the first day the restaurant has to perform in front of people who will decide in one visit whether to come back. The last ninety days before that decide how it goes. Here is the sequence we run for our own openings.

Days 90–61: lock the fundamentals

Confirm the critical path with your contractor in writing, including the dates equipment must land and utilities must be live.
File everything that has a queue: health permit, business license, seller's permit, alcohol license status check, signage and any conditional use approvals.
Finalize the menu in draft and cost every recipe. This is the moment kitchen equipment decisions are still reversible.
Sign vendors and open accounts — broadline, produce, protein, beverage, linen, waste, pest, propane, POS, music licensing.
Set up the back office: entity and EIN, bank accounts, payroll provider, workers' comp, liquor liability and general liability coverage, chart of accounts built for restaurants.
Write the job descriptions, wage ranges and org chart. Decide how many hourly bodies each shift actually needs.
Reserve the brand: domain, Google Business Profile, social handles, reservation and online-ordering platforms.

Days 60–31: build the team and the systems

Hire the leadership first — chef or kitchen manager, front-of-house manager — and let them help hire the rest.
Post hourly roles and run group interviews; expect to hire roughly 20% more than the schedule requires to absorb early attrition.
Build the POS: menu tree, modifiers, tax rates, tip and gratuity policy, void and comp permissions, printer routing.
Load recipes and par levels into inventory; set up ordering guides so the first order is not written from memory.
Write the employee handbook, onboarding packet and compliance files — I-9s, tax forms, meal-break policy, harassment training in states that require it.
Schedule the health department pre-opening inspection and the fire and building sign-offs. Assume one item fails and leave room to re-inspect.
Photograph food, room and team for the launch. Build the website and menu pages now, not opening week.
Start local awareness: neighbors, nearby businesses, hotel concierges, and a simple email capture list.

Days 30–8: train, taste, and rehearse

Run the full menu as a costed tasting with the owner. Every plate, plated the way it will go out.
Set stations: build sheets, line diagrams, prep lists, par levels and mise placement taped where the cooks work.
Train front of house on the menu with tastings, not handouts. Servers sell what they have eaten.
Rehearse the shift: mock service with staff family, then with invited guests, with tickets running through the POS.
Test everything a guest touches — reservations, waitlist, online ordering, payments, gift cards, restrooms, music volume, lighting levels at dusk.
Publish hours everywhere they will be checked: Google, maps, social, door, voicemail.

Days 7–1: the soft opening

Open small, on purpose. A limited menu at reduced covers for three to five nights teaches the kitchen its own timing and lets the front of house find the room's rhythm without a full dining room watching. Debrief every night for twenty minutes: what took too long, what came back, what nobody could find.

The first thirty days after opening

Watch ticket times by hour and by station, and fix the station that drags rather than adding bodies everywhere.
Recost the top ten sellers against real invoices — opening specs and reality drift fast.
Read and answer every review, publicly and quickly. Early reviews carry disproportionate weight in local search.
Close the books on the first month with a real P&L, not a bank balance. Prime cost in month one tells you what to correct in month two.
Keep a chef or senior operator over the kitchen for the first several weeks of service — our culinary package builds in five weeks of post-opening oversight for exactly this reason.

Openings fail on sequence far more often than on talent. If you want the critical path built and owned for you, that is the core of our concept development and culinary engagements.