Guide on How to Staff a New Restaurant

Before a new restaurant can build a schedule, it has to answer a harder question: how many people will it actually take to run the place? A 70-seat full-service restaurant with lunch and dinner needs a very different opening team from a counter-service concept that closes at 4 p.m. Even restaurants with the same number of seats can have completely different staffing needs when you factor in menu complexity, service style, hours, and expected volume.

That is why staffing a new restaurant should start with the operation itself, before any general restaurant staffing and hiring advice applies. Map the positions you need on each shift, turn those shifts into weekly coverage, then work backward from opening day to decide when managers, kitchen staff, and front-of-house employees need to come aboard. This guide walks through that process and the staffing gaps to catch before the doors open. 

1. Start With the Restaurant You Are Actually Opening

Before deciding you need 25 or 40 employees, map out how the restaurant will run on a normal week. Seat count is only one part of that. Your staffing needs also depend on:

• Opening hours: Lunch and dinner require different coverage than dinner-only service.
• Expected covers: Look at projected volume by shift, not just maximum capacity.
• Service style: Full service, counter service, and fast casual require different FOH teams.
• Kitchen stations: Count how many stations need someone on them during service and how much prep happens beforehand.
• Extra business: Brunch, takeout, delivery, private dining, and catering can create work outside the standard dining-room plan.
• Management coverage: Account for opens, closes, shift changes, and days when the GM is not on the floor.

Map the work first, including what happens before and after service, and your headcount will be based on a much stronger foundation than a generic employees-per-seat estimate. It is also the starting point for any of the top methods to optimize staffing in restaurants once the doors are open. 

2. Build Your Opening-Day Staffing Plan

Once the operation is clear, list every position needed to run it. Do this by area rather than jumping straight to a total headcount. It makes missing roles easier to spot and gives you something useful to build the opening schedule from.

• Management: GM, AGM, and shift managers. Staffing needs depend on opening hours, shift coverage, and how many days the restaurant operates.

• Front-of-house: Servers, hosts, bartenders, bussers, and runners. Plan coverage based on expected covers, table sections, service style, and bar volume.

• Back-of-house: Chef, sous chef, line cooks, prep cooks, and dishwashers. Consider the number of kitchen stations, menu complexity, prep workload, and expected service volume.

Your final headcount will be higher than the number of people needed for one busy shift. Nobody works every service, and availability will rarely line up perfectly across the team. Start with the restaurant staff positions required on the floor and in the kitchen, then calculate how many people you need to cover those positions across the full week. The next step is where that coverage math becomes useful.

3. Calculate Your Coverage, Not Just Headcount

Say you need four servers on five dinner shifts. That is 20 server shifts to cover each week. If most of your servers will work three or four shifts, hiring four servers obviously will not cover the schedule. Do the same calculation for hosts, bartenders, cooks, prep, dish, and management before settling on a hiring target.

A simple way to work through it is:

1. Write down every service for the week.
2. List how many people you need in each position for each service.
3. Add those shifts together by role.
4. Estimate how many shifts one employee can realistically work.
5. Leave room for days off, limited availability, and callouts.

This gives you a staffing number tied to an actual schedule. It also exposes thin spots early. You may have enough servers overall, for example, but still be short every Sunday brunch because half the team cannot work that shift, and that is where last-minute restaurant staffing scrambles usually start. 

4. Hire Leadership First

Your GM and key kitchen leadership need to be in place before the bulk of hourly hiring begins. They are not just another set of positions to fill. These are the people who will help decide how many employees each department needs, interview candidates, build schedules, set expectations, and eventually train the team. Knowing what a restaurant general manager is actually responsible for helps you hire the right one first. 

Bring them in with enough time to learn the operation they are about to lead. A chef may need to work through stations, prep responsibilities, recipes, and kitchen procedures before training cooks. A GM needs to understand service standards, floor coverage, opening and closing responsibilities, and where managers will be positioned during service. 

5. Build the Rest of the Team in the Right Order

After leadership, hiring order should follow how much preparation each position needs before opening. Kitchen employees may need time to learn recipes, prep standards, equipment, and stations. Your list of restaurant staff positions can become a hiring sequence once you know what each group needs to learn before the first service.

Do not leave harder-to-fill roles until the end simply because fewer people are needed in them. If you know experienced line cooks are difficult to find in your market, recruiting them should begin earlier than hiring for a role that usually produces plenty of applicants, and a clear food server job description helps the higher-volume roles fill without eating your recruiting time. The order should reflect both training time and how difficult each position is likely to fill. 

6. Work Backward From Opening Day

Once you know who you need, put hiring dates against the opening calendar. Leadership and harder-to-fill positions need the longest runway. Hourly staff can come later, but not so late that orientation, menu training, station practice, and mock service all get squeezed into the final few days.

A rough hiring timeline might look like this:

• 8–12 weeks before opening: GM, chef, and other key leadership
• 6–8 weeks before opening: Begin recruiting harder-to-fill kitchen and specialty roles
• 4–6 weeks before opening: Build the core front-of-house and back-of-house teams
• 2–4 weeks before opening: Fill remaining schedule gaps and reconfirm availability
• 1–2 weeks before opening: Run orientation, training, station practice, and mock services

Treat those ranges as planning points, not fixed rules. A large full-service opening may need more runway, while a smaller counter-service restaurant may need less. Deciding where to hire restaurant staff for each tier early matters just as much as the dates. The important part is giving each group enough time to become useful before opening day instead of hiring everyone first and figuring out training afterward. 

7. Plan for Some Candidate Drop-Off

Do not build your opening schedule on the assumption that every accepted offer will turn into a first shift. Pre-opening hiring can stretch across several weeks, and some people will take another job, change their availability, stop responding, or decide the opening date no longer works for them. It is the same pattern behind why restaurants lose candidates before the interview, only stretched across a longer runway. 

Build a little breathing room into the staffing plan, especially for positions where one or two withdrawals would leave a shift exposed. That does not mean hiring a huge bench and paying people you cannot schedule. Keep recruiting until critical shifts have dependable coverage, confirm availability again as training approaches, and stay in touch with strong candidates who could fill a late opening.

8. Keep Pre-Opening Hiring Organized

Hiring one server is easy enough to track in your head. Hiring servers, hosts, bartenders, cooks, dishwashers, and managers at the same time is where things start slipping. During pre-opening hiring, you need to know more than who applied. You need to know which role they want, whether they interviewed, what availability they gave you, whether an offer went out, and when they are supposed to start training.

An applicant tracking software gives that information one place to live instead of spreading it across job boards, inboxes, texts, and manager notes. This becomes even more important if the opening date moves or staffing needs change. You should be able to see which positions are covered and which ones still need people without counting names across five different places.

9. Make Every Job Post Match the Opening

Pre-opening job posts need details candidates can actually make decisions around. Include the expected opening date, pay, likely schedule, required availability, experience requirements, and when training begins. If weekend availability is essential or training starts two weeks before opening, say it before the interview. Finding out later wastes time on both sides.

Writing six or eight positions at once can also lead to copied descriptions that barely explain how the jobs differ. An AI Job Description Generator can help create a starting draft for each role, but check every post against the actual opening plan before publishing it. A bartender, prep cook, and host should not read like the same job with a different title at the top.

10. Plan Training Before Offers Go Out

Decide when training will happen before you start promising candidates a start date. New hires need to know when they are expected to be available, and managers need enough time to teach the operation without cramming everything into the final weekend.

Build the training schedule around what each group actually needs:

• FOH: menu knowledge, POS, table numbers, service standards, opening and closing work
• BOH: recipes, prep standards, equipment, stations, food safety, opening and closing procedures
• Bartenders: drink specs, bar setup, POS, service flow
• Hosts: reservations, floor plan, seating rotation, guest flow
• Managers: shift procedures, cash handling, staffing responsibilities, opening and closing routines

Leave room for the team to practice together too. Knowing a menu or station individually is different from running a service with tickets coming into the kitchen, tables turning, drinks hitting the bar, and managers trying to see where the operation is getting stuck. A hostess job description is a useful reference for what that role has to be ready for on day one. 

11. Know When the Team Is Ready to Open

Having every position filled does not automatically mean the restaurant is staffed for opening day. Look at the actual first-week schedule. Every service should have enough coverage in the kitchen and on the floor; employees should know when they are working, and managers should already know where the thin spots are.

Before calling the staffing plan finished, check that:

• Critical positions have reliable coverage
• Employee availability matches the first-week schedule
• New hires have completed the training required for their roles
• Managers know who can cover more than one station or position
• Everyone has received their schedule and reporting time
• There is a plan for first-week callouts or a last-minute withdrawal

Opening week will expose weak coverage quickly, and a restaurant staffing shortage on day one is a hard hole to dig out of. Finding a missing closing cook or thin Saturday server section while you still have time to hire, train, or adjust the schedule is much easier than discovering it during the first full service. 

12. Keep Opening Hiring in One Place

A new restaurant can have dozens of candidates moving through hiring at the same time, often for six or more positions. OneTeam can help keep that work together by bringing job posting, applicants, screening, candidate follow-up, and interview scheduling into one process. That gives the opening team a clearer view of which roles are filling up and which still need attention.

The useful part during a new opening is not adding more hiring steps. It is reducing the amount of chasing required to keep all those positions moving at once. When the GM and other leaders are also dealing with training plans, vendors, schedules, menus, and everything else that comes before opening day, hiring software means hiring does not depend on somebody remembering which candidate still needs a text. 

Let the First Few Services Tell You What to Fix

Watch your first few services closely because they will show you where the staffing plan is wrong. Maybe the kitchen needs another prep shift because cooks are spending too much time getting ready for service. Those are better signals than the headcount you estimated months before opening.

Give yourself permission to change the plan quickly. Add hours where the work is showing up, stop scheduling extra coverage where it is not needed, and keep recruiting if one position is consistently thin. The end goal was never to predict the perfect team before opening. It was to get close enough that your first weeks of service can show you what the restaurant actually needs.