Your First Restaurant - An Essential Guide: How to plan, research, analyze, finance, open, and operate your own wildly-succesful eatery.

If you are thinking about, or anywhere in the process of, opening a restaurant, this guide will be invaluable to you.

The author embarked on a career as a restaurateur in middle age, with no prior restaurant experience and not much capital. Within four years he opened three original and quirky restaurants, each of which has become a thriving success.
In this book he draws upon his experiences as a restaurateur, as well as nearly 30 years spent negotiating commercial real estate leases and sales, and a decade teaching real estate investment analysis and decision making to show you how to:
• Accurately estimate the amount of capital required for your first restaurant (it's probably less than you think) and how to raise it.
• Select your restaurant's ideal location and negotiate the optimal real estate lease or purchase for it.
• Develop a creative, winning restaurant concept that is a natural extension of yourself and a perfect match for your customers.
• Market - using low-cost, guerilla-style techniques - staff, source supplies for, grow, and continually refine your first restaurant.
• Identify all the things that could doom your restaurant and avoid them.

However, this book is not for everyone. It completely lacks fluff, hype, and "just believe in yourself" rah-rah encouragement. If that is what you are looking for, you won't find it here.

What this book does offer is a solid framework for beginning with what is often a vague idea and proceeding, step by step, to research, plan, evaluate, open, and operate a very successful first restaurant. If you are serious about opening your dream restaurant, this is the book for you.