Restaurant Manager
Frequently asked questions about hiring for the Restaurant Manager role, plus the mistakes that most often derail it.
Common hiring mistakes for this role
The Restaurant Manager role is one of the hardest in hospitality, because it demands commercial steering, leadership across two worlds (service and kitchen) and the guest experience at the same time. Four traps recur in recruiting processes.
Confusing a Restaurant Manager with a service lead
The service lead steers the service team, the table allocation, the training on the service standard and the guest interaction at the table. The Restaurant Manager steers the whole house: F&B metrics, leadership of service and kitchen, suppliers, HACCP co-responsibility, reporting to the owner family or hotel direction. The areas overlap but are not equivalent. Blending the two in one ad leads to two classic outcomes: either you pay 50-58 k€ for a profile that spends 80 % of the time at the table, or you pay 36 k€ for a profile that cannot run an inventory or renegotiate with suppliers. Frame the scope explicitly in the ad.
Hiring on experience in the wrong concept category
A restaurant manager from chain dining (60-150 seats, a standardized menu, central specifications for food cost and the service standard) operates differently than one from independent dining (autonomous menu decisions, local suppliers, personal cultivation of regulars) or from a hotel restaurant (linked to banqueting, bar, breakfast, the rating pressure of hotel-chain platforms). Look for a profile from a concept category at most one step away from your own. Hiring a chain-dining manager into a fine-dining house produces friction in the first six months and often a separation in the first year.
Skipping the trial-service or case-study phase
The Restaurant Manager is a post where operational structuring, a feel for numbers and rush-hour presence are central and are hard to test in a classic interview. Many candidates speak very well about the guest experience and team leadership without acting in a structured way under pressure or reading F&B numbers. The trial service or the food-cost-reduction case study is the only reliable way to distinguish a methodical candidate from someone who talks about method. Skipping this stage means hiring blind for a role where non-quality gets expensive (food cost derails, rating pressure escalates, the team leaves the house).
Ignoring the collective agreement and the Working Hours Act
Hospitality is bound in most federal states by a DEHOGA state collective agreement, which regulates minimum-wage classification, special payments, shift and weekend supplements and vacation entitlements. An ad or a contract that does not respect these specifications is contestable and can trigger back payments over 12-24 months in a social-insurance audit. The Working Hours Act (ArbZG) also sets hard limits: a maximum of 10 hours per day, at least 11 hours of rest, Sunday rest as the rule with industry exceptions for hospitality. Restaurant managers run on permanent 12-hour shifts are a labor-law risk, not an operational lever.