I'm a solo founder in San Francisco, and I'm not a developer by any stretch. The only real coding I'd ever done was back in the early 2000s, when I taught myself a little C++ out of a textbook on an old, beat-up computer while I was in prison. I actually got a small program working that found the roots of a quadratic equation, which felt like magic at the time. Then I didn't touch code again for almost twenty years.

This actually started as a hardware idea. I wanted to make NFC and QR enabled bill-presenting clipboards and coasters for restaurants and bars, each one linking to a Linktree style landing page, mostly to make collecting reviews dead simple. I bought a $3,000 UV printer from China and actually made some pretty cool stuff. The problem was that I needed real custom landing pages to connect it all to, and I had no idea how to build them.

So I reached out to a programmer here in SF. He quoted me two to three thousand dollars just for the build, no monetization or anything ongoing. I was already broke from the printer, which is now sitting burnt out in my basement, so that was not happening. Out of options, I asked ChatGPT for help.

That is honestly how it started. I would copy code out of a ChatGPT chat, paste it into a text editor, save the files as .php, and upload them to GoDaddy shared hosting. That was the whole stack. No framework, no clue what I was doing.

Two years, a few different build environments, and thousands of hours later, the coaster idea quietly turned into a full restaurant platform. ChatGPT got me off the ground, but honestly most of the real app got built with Claude, first inside Windsurf and then in Claude Code for the last few months. It runs on a real VPS now instead of shared hosting.

It is called Omnia. It hooks into a restaurant's Square account and runs most of their customer side for them. You push a discount to Square, give the AI a quick brief, and it writes and schedules the social posts. There is an AI that answers the phone and takes orders. Customers order off a branded menu, and the reservations, waitlist, and loyalty pieces collect the data in the background. The review collection that started the whole thing is still in there. It's $99 a month and it doesn't take a cut of sales.

I'll be honest, I have been building this in a cave for two years and I could really use some outside eyes. The thing that keeps me up at night isn't the features, it's how you get a self-taught, "vibe coded" app taken seriously on security and reliability as a non-technical solo founder. I'm also curious whether the all in one approach actually appeals to people, or if most owners would rather have separate best of breed tools. Any constructive criticism, on the product, the site, the positioning, whatever, I'm genuinely here for it.

One last thing, since it's sort of the point of all this. Ten percent of profits go to a small nonprofit I run here in SF providing dog and cat food for the homeless and low-income community, All Good Dogs Outreach.

Happy to answer anything about the build or the workflow.

the kitchen sink started backing up during dinner rush last week with water and food particles overflowing onto the floor and forcing us to stop service for over an hour while we cleared the line with a plunger and hot water. this was the second time in a month and it pointed to grease buildup from daily frying and dishwashing that had narrowed the pipes over time.

we worked with local plumbers for the emergency call and they used hydro jetting to clear the grease completely without digging up the floor. what regular maintenance schedule works best for restaurant kitchen drains to prevent buildup and how often should grease traps be pumped to avoid shutdowns during busy periods.

Throwaway-ish, looking for honest advice from people who've actually run a restaurant.

Background: My boss bought a ~500 m² (5,400 sq ft) fish-hotpot restaurant in Shenzhen, China this past March, taking it over from a previous tenant that had failed. Rent is ~$4,200/month. Open 5pm–3am (dinner + late night), no lunch service. I'm helping him figure out whether/how to turn it around. I have no F&B background, so be blunt.

The real May numbers (from the POS, not the platform dashboard):

• Net revenue: $28,000/month ($910/day avg)
• ~1,150 tickets, ~4,100 guests
• Avg check ~$7/person, ~$24/ticket (cheap, casual)
• Estimated break-even: ~$25,000/month — so May was barely above water, but only because of a 5-day national holiday. Strip that out and the normal run-rate is slightly below break-even.

The problems the data exposed:

1. Insane peak concentration: 52% of all orders hit between 6–8pm. Two hours. The kitchen can't keep up, food comes out slow, and we're getting reviews complaining about wait times.
2. Dead weekdays: Mon–Thu averages ~$590/day (deeply unprofitable). Weekends/holidays ($1,070–1,390/day) carry the whole place.
3. The "late night" concept is a myth: after 9pm it's almost empty (midnight–2am = ~4% of orders), but we're paying staff/utilities to stay open till 3am.
4. Almost zero online/delivery: literally 13 group-buy orders and 13 delivery orders all month. Everything is walk-in dine-in.
5. Now heading into summer, the slow season for hotpot.

What I'm trying to figure out:

• How do you handle a kitchen that's overwhelmed in a 2-hour window but idle the rest of the night? (prep strategy? staffing? menu/station design?)
• Realistic ways to drive weekday traffic for a dinner-only spot?
• Is it worth pushing delivery / group-buy hard, or does that just cannibalize and add chaos?
• Should we cut the dead late-night hours to save cost, or does staying open matter for visibility?
• One industry friend insists food cost must stay ≤30% (70% gross margin) and the chef needs cost KPIs — agree?

It's roughly at break-even and the category (fish hotpot) is actually one of the few growing hotpot segments here, so I don't think it's hopeless — but I'd really appreciate hearing from people who've fixed a place like this. Thanks.

Updating too often can make things feel inconsistent, but leaving everything the same for too long can make the menu feel stale.

Hey guys,

Sorry guys first time posting here. I've been reading on this sub for a while, and I really appreciate you guys on this sub. I'm sorry if I'm seen like I'm whining or talking in circle but I'm seriously at a loss here. I'd appreciate any advice from people from who've sold their business or is experience in this field.

So I've been in the restaurant business for around 10 years now, and honestly I'm burnt out, I want to retire. Business is stable. I'm not growing but not loosing money either. I've made enough.

I've listed my business for sale at BizBuySell, so far a few buyers have contacted me. And I think my price is reasonable enough compared to others in the area. So far they seems interested and a few came by for property visits, but none made any offers yet.

My question is I've contact a broker for help and they're asking for 15% of final sales price. Their contract is making me feel uneasy. By uneasy I meant it felt binding, or maybe I'm just overthinking things.

So is having a broker worth it? Or should I try selling this by myself first since I've gotten a few interested buyers already? And usually, how long is a business up for sale for?

The thing is I have a job offer and will need to leave the country in 7 months, so I'm crank on time. I felt like a broker contract will just binds me, but I might not be able to sell on time by not having a broker.

I'm sorry for being so indecisive and whiny. I wanted to get money out of this after investing in this business for 10 years. I don't just want to liquidate my assets and getting scraps. I hope I'm not being unreasonable here.

I'd very much appreciate anyone who can share with me your process of how you manage to sell your business and how long it took.

Thank you in advance guys, sorry again that this is such a long post.

I want to learn from your "hard ways," as I'm opening a diner in a small college town that

1. doesn't have many local options
2. is sick of fast food.

My background is currently catering and meal prep from a commercial kitchen. I cut my teeth FOH and BOH before college, then recently got back into food service to do this. Got sick of running around, am leasing a space to open a small diner.

Not trying to sell anything here — this is free and there's no account. I build web tools, and making a simple printable menu turned out to be weirdly annoying with the usual design apps (signups, watermarks, exports behind a paywall).

So I made a stripped-down one: type your sections, dishes and prices, add a logo and dietary tags, pick a template, download the PDF. That's it. Nothing gets stored.

Posting it in case it saves someone an afternoon. Happy to add features people actually ask for.

https://staticfast.com/free-restaurant-menu-maker

Do you use the recently released Claude tools for small businesses? I’m thinking of using it in my restaurant and wanted to know if anyone has found any usefulness from it.

Ima gonna start a food truck business with some partners and when i asked to get an LLC, for inspection and other business related tasks, one of my partners straight on suggested he be the owner of the LLC and me and another one, be paid as employees. He said if one person LLC is easier to manage and 3 person LLC is a real pain due to needing an accountant and what not? Has anyone gone through the same process? What is required here and should I be concerned? Also if im paid out as employees, wouldnt it cost me more on taxes than the one who owns the LLC knowing we 3 are partners? Please give me insights?

I started as a pizza delivery driver in university, worked my way through the kitchen, and eventually opened my own location.

I’ve seen food cost from both extremes. At one spot it was once a year on the P&L and a prayer, and honestly not something I had any say in. At another, I was knee-deep in the books myself, trying to actually stay on top of it.
When the numbers were finally mine, I tried to do it right. I built my own costing spreadsheet to do it properly. Every supplier categorized, cost per unit, recipes rolled up into dishes, so when one ingredient price changed, every dish re-costed itself. It worked, but keeping it right was brutal. It kept no history, so I could see what a dish cost today but never how it had been trending. And updating it meant going through every invoice line by line, by hand. Between that and actually running the place, the tool I needed most became the one I never had time to maintain.

So, genuine question for the operators here: how do you actually track your food cost? Monthly? Once a year on the P&L? A spreadsheet? Not at all? Not judging anyone. I’ve been on both ends of this. Just curious how everyone else is handling it.

Need a scheduling app that auto-texts staff their shifts when published. Half my crew will not open an app, they just want a text saying "you work tuesday 4 to 10." We tested breakroom app for two weeks, the SMS notifications worked and the text actually included shift details instead of just an "open the app" prompt, but I want to compare across the category before I commit because my owner wants to see at least three options on paper.

Specifically interested in tools where SMS is included rather than charged per message, and where the text actually contains the shift details rather than just a notification.

We are a busy restaurant in NYC (400 brunches on weekends + 180ish dinners) and about 20-30% less monday - thursday. We are family owned and operated so the only thing we know is what we've done for the last few decades. But, as they say - you don't know what you dont know.

We have always had 1 GM, 1 AGM, 1 Floor manager and at least one of us (owners) on site to pick up any slack on the floor when needed.

Same goes for the kitchen 1 sous chef 1 exec chef.

We are beginning to expand and interested to see how other operators set up their management and kitchens - particularly if you have multiple units of the same concept how do you run a kitchen to maintain consistency at both locations

I co-own a pizzeria in BC (Canada). We’re a franchisee in a small chain. About a month ago, corporate aligned our DoorDash menu pricing with our in-store pricing. So 0% markup now. Before that we had a 10% markup, which I always thought was already on the low side.

I dug into our last four months of DoorDash statements and the numbers are rough. DoorDash is about 30% of our total sales. Commission alone is 18-19%, and after commission, marketing fees, and merchant-funded discounts, DoorDash’s total take is hitting 40-41% of subtotal. After 30% food cost, there’s basically nothing left to cover labour, rent, or anything else.

When I pushed back to corporate, the reasoning was that lower prices help with customer acquisition and there’s “benefit to the locations.” I don’t really see it in the numbers. Feels like we’re absorbing the platform’s costs to grow their order volume.

What markup are you guys running on DoorDash? Ive always thought 20% seemed like a good spot to be as it would at least cover the commission. Anyone actually not markup their DoorDash prices, does it actually work or are you just eating the margin hit? Any wisdom is appreciated.

UPDATE:

Quick update about my franchisor removing our DoorDash markup.

Sent an email laying out the numbers. Total take hitting 40-41% of subtotal, already operating at a loss, 10% markup wasn’t aggressive to begin with, etc. Mentioned that most operators run 15-25% markups and it’s not really industry norm to do matching prices.

Got a response back the same day. They pushed back a bit with growth metrics (sales up 47% YoY, orders up 56%, lots of new customers), but they also implemented a 20% markup across all DoorDash menu pricing immediately. That’s actually higher than the 10% we had before.

So yeah, win. Pretty surprised it moved that fast honestly.

Thanks for everyone’s advice, the perspectives helped me sharpen the case.

We recently got a new GM. He’s salary. Typically when he actually works he’ll bartend. At the end of the night he’s been taking tip outs from the servers since he was the only bartenders. These servers are getting paid $3hr. Does this sound right? I think it’s BS. I’m a cook so it doesn’t directly but it still seems messed up.

So, I'll keep it brief, a few weeks ago, a customer left after drinking at our restaurant and was involved in a serious crash later that night. We ended up getting dragged into the situation and spent weeks dealing with lawyers and gathering security footage, reecipts, and staff statements.

It also made me realize how little I actually knew about our liquor liability coverage and whether it was structured correctly in the first place. Honestly my advice to other owners is to spend a lot of time understanding your coverage better before the time comes when you'll actually need it.

Thankfully, we finally settled it, but i'm pretty sure this incident scared me straight.

I work at a small restaurant. Our front door was heavy, and customers struggled with it, especially kids. It has been that way for a long time, but recently, the management finally approved an automatic door operator last season. The installation took a morning. The tech mounted the arm, wired the sensor, and showed us the push button. It looked simple and easy.

The first week was chaos. Customers keep pumping into the door or keep pressing the wrong button. Most staff haven’t fully mastered how to use the automatic door as well. and the door opened every time someone walked past on the sidewalk. What I noticed is that when kids try it the first time and can't get it, they try again and again until it opens. When it eventually opens, the excitement in their faces is so wholesome that I watch half the time. Kids love it. They stand and make it open and close. So parents will allow their kids to figure it out while they wait patiently and monitor.

Last week it broke down, and we couldn’t get a hold of the technician who fixed it the last time it broke down. Sometimes if the power flickers, it stays half open until you reset it. We keep a sign that says 'Push to open' just in case.

While we were waiting for the service call, my manager asked me to search for prices for a sensor, see what they cost and compare it with a new door. When I browsed for an automatic door sensor on Alibaba, the cost was nowhere close to what these automatic door operators charge us. They add more than 20% on the price. When I showed my manager she was instantly furious at the margin. Now she has added an automatic door technician to the maintenance guy’s duties to cut costs.