Restaurant Manager

How to hire a Restaurant Manager for your house

Before you write the job posting, settle three questions. They determine which profile you really need, and help you avoid the most common scope mistakes in German hospitality.

Question 1: Restaurant Manager, service lead or F&B manager? The three roles partly overlap but are not equivalent. The service lead steers the service team, the table allocation and the guest interaction at the table. The F&B manager (typically in hotels from 4 stars or with several outlets) owns the restaurant, bar, banqueting, room service and breakfast at the same time and sits one level above the individual restaurant management. The Restaurant Manager steers a single restaurant in its entirety: F&B metrics, leadership of service and kitchen, suppliers, HACCP co-responsibility, reporting to the owner family or hotel direction. Blending the three in one ad attracts poorly matched applications. Specify the function in the title: Restaurantleiter:in (m/w/d), not a versatile hospitality-and-service profile that says nothing.

Question 2: Which concept category? There are three clearly separate worlds in the German market. Independent dining (autonomous menu decisions, local suppliers, personal cultivation of regulars, often owner-run). Hotel restaurant (linked to banqueting, bar, breakfast, rating pressure via hotel-chain platforms such as Booking, OTAs and Tripadvisor, F&B reporting to hotel direction). Chain dining (60-150 seats, a standardized menu, central specifications for food cost and the service standard, often multi-outlet). Look for a profile from a concept category at most one step away from your own. Career changes work but need 6-12 months of onboarding and a clear support model; in the interview the candidate must be able to explain what changes structurally in the new category.

Question 3: Which house size and which stack? A restaurant manager who has run a house with 60 seats and 800 k€ annual revenue works differently than someone with 150 seats and 3 M€ annual revenue. The rituals, the cadence of F&B steering, the depth of the stack (POS, reservations, shift planning, F&B reporting) and supplier steering differ. Look for a profile whose previous house size is at most 2x smaller or larger than yours; larger gaps require a real re-adaptation. In the German SMB hospitality segment the full-time role is justified from 60-80 seats or 1.2 M€ annual revenue; below that, a service lead with an extended scope or an owner-run management with operational co-responsibility is enough.

If the three answers converge on a full-time Restaurant Manager for a single house of 60-150 seats (and not a service lead or an F&B manager), see the ready-to-use template on the Job description tab.