64 posts.
Starting a restaurant
Delhi dropped the police eating house licence and turned the MCD health licence into a deemed one. Here is what a new restaurant still needs, and in what order.
Starting a restaurant
Mumbai's approval list changed little while Delhi's shrank, and food safety inspections tightened in 2026. Here is what a new restaurant needs and in what order.
Starting a restaurant
Bengaluru split into five corporations in 2025, enforces a Kannada signboard rule, and has frozen new bar licences since 1992. Here is what a new restaurant needs.
Starting a restaurant
After the Arpora fire, every Goa approval is read more closely. Here is what a new restaurant needs, from panchayat to pollution board, and how to plan for the season.
Starting a restaurant
The right offbeat town is not on a travel list. It has long visitor stays, locals for the quiet months, reliable supply and state rules you can work with.
Property, design & sourcing
Landlords want more food and drink, while operators want less space per site. What the leasing data shows, where it disagrees, and how to use it.
Places & perspectives
Pizza Margherita, the croissant, Caesar salad, tiramisu, butter chicken and chicken tikka masala: what is claimed about each, what the evidence shows, and what it teaches restaurants.
People & careers
A chef-patron owns the restaurant they cook in. Here is how the role differs from a head chef, what it really involves, and how to decide if it suits you.
People & careers
Ten real books for people opening a restaurant, chosen by the question each one answers, with what it is good for and where it falls short.
Menu, food & drink
Curated food is a selection made with knowledge and care on the guest's behalf. The word is overused; the discipline is not. Here is how to curate well.
Menu, food & drink
Food design is the intentional shaping of food and everything around eating it. Here are its branches, its pioneers, the research behind it and how to use it.
Places & perspectives
Restaurants and hotels need time for regulars, teams and reputations to compound. Strategic patience is the plan that lets them survive long enough to get there.
Menu, food & drink
The 2026 food forecasts point to one shift: food sourced closer to home, cooked more slowly, served with more care and judged harder on value. Here is what to change.
New formats
Solo dining, earlier dinners, quieter stays and take-home pantry buys are small shifts with real effects on service. Here is what the data shows and how to respond.
Starting a restaurant
Independent restaurants that did well lately tested small, found a second way to earn, made their best cooking easier to reach and watched a few numbers closely.
Announcements
An introduction to Paxika: one place for everything in hospitality and food, who it is for, and what you can do on it today.
Starting a restaurant
Opening goes faster when you order the work by lead time, not by tidiness. Ten steps, four decision gates and the paperwork to start first.
Starting a restaurant
A single headline figure for the cost to open a restaurant hides more than it shows. Here is the line-by-line structure, the reserve most budgets leave out and a way to price delay.
Starting a restaurant
A restaurant business plan is read by people with a short list of questions. Lead with the answers: what you are asking for, what it buys, who runs it and how it survives a bad year.
Starting a restaurant
A restaurant concept is a set of promises that the room, the menu, the price and the team all have to keep. Seven questions to test them before a lease makes them expensive.
Starting a restaurant
There is no single normal restaurant profit margin. There is a margin your format, rent and labour model make possible, and a few warning signs that show it slipping before the bank balance does.
Starting a restaurant
Eight ways to fund a restaurant, matched to the costs they suit. The usual mistake is using one source for every line of the budget.
Starting a restaurant
A restaurant lease is a long commitment that gets tested three ways: when you succeed, when you struggle and when you sell. Here are twelve clauses to read twice, sorted by the moment they bite.
Starting a restaurant
Your opening date is set by the slowest approval, not by the length of your to-do list. Here is a 90-day, week-by-week checklist built backwards from the tasks that cannot be rushed.
Starting a restaurant
A soft opening is a rehearsal and a grand opening is an announcement. Mixing them up means your first mistakes become your first reviews. Here is how to sequence the two.
Starting a restaurant
The famous 90 percent failure figure is not supported by the data. The real risk is structural: fixed costs, the wrong site and no exit plan. Here is how to design against each one.
Hotels & lodging
Hotel restaurants are usually judged on their own profit, and misjudged. Decide by the job the restaurant does for the rooms, then pick the model that fits.
New formats
Stand-alone ghost kitchens struggled, but virtual brands cooked in a restaurant's quiet hours still make sense. The difference is whose costs the order has to cover.
New formats
Membership works when you sell belonging or access. Subscriptions fail when you sell unlimited product to your best customers. The difference shows up in the maths.
New formats
A restaurant pop-up is cheap to run and easy to misread. Decide what result would stop you before the first service, and you will learn something real.
New formats
Slow hospitality runs on a different sum: more value from each seat-hour, less strain on the team, and time that guests feel they have paid for.
New formats
Twelve unbuilt hospitality ideas, from a restaurant designed for one diner to a kitchen for night-shift workers. Each is an idea to test, not a business that exists.
Operations & service
Most operations manuals are written once and ignored. Sort yours by how fast each page goes out of date, give every page an owner, and it becomes a tool people actually open.
Operations & service
Food waste has four sources, and each needs a different fix. Weigh it by source first, then work through ten changes in order of effort, starting with the ones that cost almost nothing.
Operations & service
Faster tables do not need faster guests. Split every visit into guest time and house time, then shorten only the house time: the waits for menus, food, the bill and the reset.
Menu, food & drink
Menu engineering ranks each dish by how often it sells and how much cash it earns. Here is the method, a worked example, and why a low food cost percentage can point you the wrong way.
Menu, food & drink
Food cost percentage tells you how much of each sale goes on ingredients. The useful number is the gap between what it should be and what it is.
Menu, food & drink
Cost times three gives you a number, not a price. Treat it as a floor, then add six methods that set prices guests accept and the business can live on.
Menu, food & drink
Much menu advice is folklore. Here are ten real menu design mistakes, with the evidence for each and what to do instead.
Menu, food & drink
The idea is the easy part. A signature dish is the one a guest can describe to a friend and your kitchen can cook the same way a thousand times. Here is the process.
People & careers
Hiring restaurant staff gets easier when you stop advertising a job title and start describing a shift. A five-step process for a market where good people have options.
People & careers
People rarely leave a restaurant for one reason. An essay on the three things that tend to keep them, a rota people can plan a life around, a visible next step, and being known.
Technology & AI
Buyers tend to compare features. A better test is your worst Friday night and your exit plan. A practical checklist for choosing a restaurant POS system with fewer regrets.
Technology & AI
Restaurant technology works when it takes over a transaction and fails when it replaces being noticed. A simple test for QR menus, kiosks and service robots.
Technology & AI
Seven restaurant KPIs to check each week, from prime cost to RevPASH, with what each one tells you and the trap that comes with it.
Technology & AI
Small venues are exposed through inboxes, shared logins and unpatched till software. Six habits and a one-page plan make the common routes in harder to use.
Marketing & guest experience
A restaurant marketing plan that fits on one page: one job per quarter, built around empty seats and the second visit rather than a calendar of posts.
Marketing & guest experience
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence, and AI answers draw on the same few sources. The practical job is one accurate fact sheet, repeated everywhere, then tested.
Marketing & guest experience
For an independent venue, a restaurant loyalty program starts with an email list and a habit of recognising guests. This guide covers capture, reward choice, a simple cadence and the numbers to watch.
Marketing & guest experience
You do not need a marketing team to run restaurant social media. You need a short weekly routine and a bank of content that comes straight from service.
Marketing & guest experience
Guests do not remember a meal evenly. They remember a handful of moments, usually the handovers. Here are seven to design on purpose, and what to do at each.
Marketing & guest experience
Journalists rarely write about venues. They write about stories that happen to involve one. Here is how to find yours, pitch it and follow up without being a nuisance.
Marketing & guest experience
A restaurant website has one job: answer a hungry stranger's questions quickly, on a phone. Here are ten things it needs and the common ways sites get them wrong.
Marketing & guest experience
An origin story is told once. A service is shown every night. Hospitality storytelling works when the story you tell is one the next table can check.
Property, design & sourcing
A restaurant location is a bet on sales you cannot yet see. Use gates first, a daypart street audit second, and a rent stress test third.
Property, design & sourcing
Commercial kitchen requirements differ by country and council. Here is a checklist of what to ask authorities and engineers, and the order to ask it in.
Property, design & sourcing
Restaurant interior design changes dwell time and comfort more reliably than it changes the dish a guest picks. Here is the evidence and how to design with it.
Property, design & sourcing
Direct sourcing for a restaurant fails on logistics more than on price. Here is how to build a buying routine that suits both the kitchen and the producer.
Property, design & sourcing
Buy new, used or lease by asking what each machine does for the kitchen, not what it costs today. Here is a decision rule by category, with the compliance checks.
Property, design & sourcing
A consultant is worth hiring when you have a specific decision to make and no one inside the business who can make it well. Here is how to tell, and how to choose.
Property, design & sourcing
Restaurants and hotels rarely switch for a slightly better price. They add suppliers to fill a gap. Here is how to find the gap, clear the checks and keep the account.
Property, design & sourcing
Most design disputes come from three people using the same words differently. A shared service scenario, written before drawings begin, closes the gap.
Property, design & sourcing
A franchise sells you a bundle of functions for a share of your sales. The question is which of those you could do better, or cheaper, yourself.
Places & perspectives
Ten cities worth a season or a year in the kitchen, ranked on stated criteria with counts from Michelin and the 2025 World's 50 Best, and one thing each teaches.
