Restaurant Startup Costs: A Full Breakdown

Restaurant startup costs span a much wider range than most first-time owners expect, and the headline total matters far less than how it splits across categories: the lease deposit, the buildout, the kitchen equipment, furniture, the point-of-sale stack, inventory, licenses, insurance, pre-opening payroll, marketing, and the working capital reserve that carries the restaurant to break-even. Illustratively a small cafe or quick-service spot commonly opens in the low-to-mid six figures, a full-service restaurant in the mid-to-high six figures, and fine dining in seven figures, but those totals hide the real story, which is that a handful of categories decide almost everything while the rest are noise around them.

This breakdown prices restaurant startup costs category by category, with an illustrative range and a share of the budget for each line, so you can see where the money actually goes rather than guessing at a single number. It covers the buildout that is usually the largest cost, the kitchen equipment that everyone pictures, the working capital reserve that first-timers underfund more than any other line, how the categories shift between a full-service restaurant, a quick-service counter, and a cafe, the choice between buying an existing restaurant and building one out, ways to trim the total safely, and the funding options that pay for it all. It sits alongside our rundown on how much it costs to open a restaurant for the by-type totals and the step-by-step guide to opening a restaurant for the process, and you can size your own opening budget as you read with the equipment ROI calculator.

What restaurant startup costs actually include

Restaurant startup costs are the one-time and up-front expenses required to open the doors, plus the cash reserve needed to survive the months before revenue catches up. They divide into roughly eleven categories: the lease deposit and first rent, the buildout or renovation, the kitchen equipment, furniture and decor, the point-of-sale and technology stack, initial inventory, licenses and permits, insurance, pre-opening payroll and training, marketing, and the working capital reserve. Some of these are obvious, like the ovens and the tables, and some are invisible until they arrive, like the grease trap the health code requires or the three months of rent you pay on a space that earns nothing while it is under construction.

The reason a category breakdown beats a single headline number is that the categories do not move together. A restaurant can spend little on equipment and an enormous amount on buildout, or the reverse, depending entirely on the space it leased. Two owners opening the same concept in the same city can land a factor of two apart because one inherited a former restaurant’s kitchen and the other converted a bare retail box. Pricing the categories one at a time, against your own lease and menu, turns a vague and frightening total into a plan you can actually manage. The sections below take each category in turn, starting with the full picture and then the biggest lines.

A full restaurant startup cost breakdown by category

The table below lays out each startup cost category with an illustrative range and a rough share of a full-service restaurant budget. Read the ranges as planning shapes, not quotes: a small cafe will land near the low end of most lines, a large fine-dining room near or above the high end, and your own number depends on the local market and how much construction your space needs. The shares are for an illustrative full-service restaurant and will shift for other formats, which the format section below covers in detail.

The chart below turns those categories into illustrative dollar figures for one full-service restaurant, so the proportions are visible at a glance. The point is not the exact numbers, it is the shape: the buildout towers over everything, the working capital reserve and the kitchen equipment form the next tier, and the remaining seven categories together are a modest slice. An owner who spends weeks agonizing over which range to buy while treating the buildout and the reserve as afterthoughts is optimizing the wrong end of this chart.

Lease deposit and rent before you open

The lease is the first category to come due, often before you hold the keys. A commercial lease commonly requires a security deposit, frequently one to several months of rent, plus the first month up front, and sometimes a personal guarantee from the owner. Many restaurant leases are also triple net, meaning the tenant pays a share of the property taxes, insurance, and common area maintenance on top of the base rent, which can lift the true monthly figure well above the base rate a first-timer budgeted from. Illustratively the up-front lease category lands in the low tens of thousands for a modest space, and far more for a large room in a prime district.

What makes the lease category so important is that it sets the scale of nearly every other line. The condition of the space decides the buildout, the length of the construction period decides how many months of dead rent you pay before serving, and the location decides how fast revenue ramps and therefore how long your working capital has to last. A cheap rent in a dead spot can cost more than a higher rent where customers already walk by, because the working capital reserve has to cover a longer, slower ramp. Read the lease with the buildout and the reserve in the same view, and negotiate a free-rent construction period and a landlord contribution toward improvements from the first meeting, because both move real money out of the startup budget.

Buildout and renovation: the biggest line

For any fixed-location restaurant, the buildout is usually the single largest startup cost category, and the one that varies most between two spaces that look identical from the sidewalk. The buildout is the set of leasehold improvements that turn a bare space into a working kitchen and dining room: plumbing for the sinks and dish area, electrical heavy enough for the equipment, HVAC, a commercial ventilation hood and fire suppression over the cooking line, a grease trap, code-compliant flooring and surfaces, the dining room finishes, and often a bar. None of it is optional, and all of it is priced by contractors rather than by you, which is why it deserves the most planning and the most quotes.

The single biggest lever on this category is the condition of the space you lease. A former restaurant that already has the plumbing, the electrical, the hood, and the grease trap can be opened for a fraction of what a bare retail box or a former office costs to convert, because you inherit the expensive infrastructure instead of building it. This is why the same concept can cost double in one storefront and half in another, and why the lease negotiation and the buildout budget are really the same conversation. A tenant improvement allowance from the landlord can move this line by tens of thousands, so it belongs in the lease talks early. Design the buildout to pass the health inspection the first time, because a failed inspection loops straight back into this budget as more weeks of rent and rework. For a fuller treatment of the whole opening, our guide to opening a restaurant walks the buildout in sequence with the permits it depends on.

Kitchen equipment

Kitchen equipment is the category everyone pictures and usually the second-largest after the buildout, covering the cooking line, refrigeration, the dish area, prep tables, small wares, and the storage a menu demands. Illustratively a compact quick-service kitchen can be equipped for the low-to-mid five figures, while a full-service or fine-dining kitchen with a broad menu can run well into six figures once the ventilation, the walk-in, and the installation are counted. Our commercial kitchen equipment cost rundown prices that package end to end, and it is the piece to read before you set this number, because the appliance stickers are only part of what the kitchen truly costs once the hood, the hookups, and the install are added.

The menu is the strongest lever on this category. Every cooking method your menu adds, whether a fryer, a grill, a wood oven, or a smoker, lengthens the equipment list and enlarges the ventilation hood above it, and a tight, focused menu keeps both short. Refrigeration is the sub-category where a used bargain can turn into an expensive failure, so it deserves care even when the rest of the kitchen is bought secondhand. How you pay for the equipment is its own decision, which the leasing-versus-buying section below takes up, and our used vs new equipment rundown shows how a reputable refurbished kitchen can deliver most of a new one for a fraction of the price on the durable items. Keep this category in proportion: pouring the budget into a showpiece kitchen while the buildout and reserve go thin is a classic first-timer error.

Furniture, decor, and the dining room

For any restaurant with a dining room, furniture and decor turn a bare buildout into a room people want to sit in, and this category scales with the square footage and the ambiance you are selling. Tables, chairs, booths, bar stools, lighting, shelving, and the decor that sets the mood all live here, and a fine-dining room that sells the experience spends far more per seat than a quick-service counter where people order and go. Illustratively the furniture and decor category lands in the low tens of thousands for a modest full-service room, and a fraction of that for a compact counter with few seats.

This is one of the safest categories to control, because quality used and refurbished furniture costs a fraction of new and looks the same once it is in place. Restaurant liquidators and auctions are full of solid tables, chairs, and booths at a steep discount, often from restaurants that closed with nearly new furnishings. Spending here should track what the customer actually values in your concept: a neighborhood cafe rewards comfortable, characterful seating far more than expensive finishes, while a destination dining room may justify the spend because the room itself is part of the product. The rule that keeps this category honest is to furnish for the concept, not for the owner’s taste, and to reach for used before new on anything that is not a signature design piece.

POS and technology

The point-of-sale system is the cash register of a modern restaurant, and this category has shifted from a big one-time hardware purchase toward a smaller upfront cost with an ongoing subscription and a card processing rate on every sale. A typical setup includes terminals, card readers, a kitchen display or printer, and sometimes handheld tablets for table service, plus the monthly software fee. Illustratively the up-front POS and technology category is one of the smaller lines, in the low five figures or less, but the recurring subscriptions and processing fees belong in the monthly burn that the working capital has to cover. Our restaurant POS systems rundown compares what the core system actually needs to do before you commit to a platform.

Around the core POS sits the rest of the technology stack: internet service, a reservation or waitlist tool, online ordering, accounting software, and staff scheduling. None of these is large on its own, but together they form a recurring monthly cost that many first-timers leave out of the burn rate entirely, then find themselves surprised by. The discipline is to buy the stack that fits how you actually serve, keep it lean at the start, and add tools once revenue justifies them rather than loading up on subscriptions before the doors open. A quick-service counter has very different technology needs from a full-service dining room with table turns and reservations, so match the spend to the service model rather than to a vendor’s bundle.

Initial inventory

Initial inventory is the first full stock of food, beverage, and consumable supplies the restaurant needs to open and keep serving through the first weeks. It covers the pantry, the walk-in, the bar if you have one, and the paper goods, cleaning supplies, and disposables a kitchen burns through daily. Illustratively this category lands in the low tens of thousands for a full-service restaurant with a bar, and less for a limited-menu counter, but it is one of the more predictable lines because it scales directly with the menu and the pars you set.

The trap in this category is over-ordering before you know your real volume. A new restaurant does not yet know how fast each item sells, so buying deep on perishables invites spoilage that eats the budget with nothing to show for it. The safer approach is to open with conservative pars, order more often in smaller quantities at first, and let the actual sales data set your reorder levels once the restaurant has a few weeks of history. Inventory is also a recurring cost, not just a startup one, so the opening stock is really the first cycle of an ongoing food cost that will track as a percentage of sales for the life of the business. Keeping the opening menu tight shrinks both the equipment list and this inventory line at the same time.

Licenses, permits, and fees

Before a restaurant can legally serve a single plate, it needs a stack of licenses and permits, and this category costs time as well as money. The common list includes a business license, a food service or food establishment permit, a health department permit tied to an inspection, a seller’s permit, a sign permit, a certificate of occupancy after the buildout passes, and, if you serve alcohol, a liquor license that can be a large and slow line on its own in some markets. Fees vary widely by city and state, and illustratively they add up to a modest but real category, though the bigger cost is often the delay: a permit or inspection that slips by weeks is weeks of rent paid on a closed restaurant.

The liquor license deserves special attention because it is the one line in this category that can dwarf all the others in certain markets. Where licenses are capped and traded on a secondary market, a full liquor license can cost a large sum on its own, while in other places it is an ordinary permit fee. If alcohol is central to your concept, price the local license reality before you sign the lease, because discovering a six-figure license cost after committing to the space is a budget-breaking surprise. The way to keep this category from derailing the opening is to start the applications early, design the buildout to pass inspection the first time, and treat the timeline as seriously as the fees, because delay is the expensive part.

Insurance

Insurance is the quieter category in a startup budget and just as necessary as any of the visible ones. A restaurant typically carries general liability, property coverage, workers’ compensation once it has employees, and often liquor liability if it serves alcohol, along with coverage for the equipment and business interruption. The premiums are an operating cost that also front-loads into the opening budget, because carriers commonly want the first premium or a deposit before coverage begins, and a certificate of insurance is often a condition of the lease. Illustratively the prepaid insurance category is one of the smaller lines, but skimping on coverage to save a few dollars a month is a false economy against the risk a busy kitchen carries.

The practical move is to bring in an insurance broker who understands restaurants early, because the right coverage depends on the menu, the alcohol, the equipment, and the lease terms, and a broker can bundle the coverages more cheaply than buying them piecemeal. A grease fire, a slip-and-fall, a walk-in failure that spoils a week of inventory, or a forced closure after a storm are the kinds of events this category exists to absorb, and any one of them can be far more expensive than years of premiums. Treat insurance as part of the cost of operating rather than an optional extra, and get the coverage in place before the doors open, not after the first claim.

Pre-opening payroll and training

Pre-opening payroll is the wages paid to staff before the restaurant earns a dollar, and it is a category first-timers routinely forget. A kitchen crew and a front-of-house team have to be hired, trained, and run through practice service before opening, which means real payroll for days or weeks with no revenue coming in. Illustratively this category lands in the low tens of thousands for a full-service restaurant, depending on the crew size and how long the training runs, and less for a small counter with a lean team. Our rundown on how to hire restaurant staff covers building that team, and the wages for the training period are the startup cost side of it.

The training period is not a place to cut, because a smooth opening depends on a crew that already knows the menu, the stations, and the flow before the first real customers arrive. A soft opening, meaning a few days of serving friends, family, or a limited crowd at reduced capacity, is the common way to buy that practice, and it turns unavoidable pre-opening payroll into rehearsal that protects the reputation the restaurant opens on. The category to budget is the gap between when the crew starts getting paid and when paying customers arrive, plus the manager or chef salary that often starts even earlier during the buildout. Underbudgeting this line means either opening with an undertrained crew or blowing through the working capital reserve before the first week ends.

Marketing and pre-launch

Marketing is the category that gets a restaurant its first customers, and while it is one of the smaller lines in the startup budget, opening to an empty dining room is one of the more expensive mistakes a new restaurant can make. The pre-launch marketing category commonly covers signage, a website and online ordering setup, professional photography of the food and space, local advertising, social media, and the soft-opening events that build early word of mouth. Illustratively this category lands in the mid-to-high five figures at most for an independent restaurant, and a lean opening can spend far less by leaning on organic social and local relationships.

The most valuable marketing for a new restaurant is often the least expensive: getting the food and the experience right so that early customers tell others, claiming and filling out the free local business listings that customers search, and building relationships with the neighborhood before opening day. Signage is the one piece of this category that is both a marketing cost and a permit item, since a sign permit is usually required, so coordinate it with the licenses category. The discipline here is to spend enough to make sure the neighborhood knows you exist and opens with a full house rather than a trickle, because those first weeks set the ramp that the working capital reserve has to bridge, but not so much that the marketing budget starves the reserve itself.

The working capital reserve

Here is the category that closes more restaurants than any single equipment choice, and the one first-timers most reliably underfund: the working capital reserve, the cash cushion that covers operating losses until the restaurant breaks even. A new restaurant does not open to a full dining room, it opens to a slow trickle that builds over months as word spreads, and every one of those months the rent, the payroll, the food orders, and the utilities come due whether or not revenue covers them. The money that bridges that gap is working capital, and running out of it is the most common way a restaurant that would have succeeded closes before it gets the chance.

The common rule of thumb is to hold enough cash to cover several months, often three to six or more, of full operating expenses beyond everything spent to build and equip the restaurant. The arithmetic is simple and unforgiving: estimate the monthly burn, meaning rent plus labor plus food cost plus utilities and fees, then multiply by the months of runway you want to survive, and that number is the working capital reserve. A restaurant that spends its last dollar opening the doors is one slow month from closing them, so fund the reserve before the finishes, and treat a faster ramp as upside rather than the plan. This is the category most worth protecting when the budget gets tight, because cutting the reserve to afford nicer decor is trading the restaurant’s survival for its appearance. Run your own reserve against the equipment ROI calculator and the companion beside this breakdown to size it honestly.

Where the startup money goes

Zoom out from the individual categories and the shape of a full-service restaurant startup budget comes into focus. The buildout leads, the working capital reserve and the kitchen equipment form the next tier, and the remaining categories together, meaning the lease deposit, furniture, POS, licenses, insurance, inventory, pre-opening payroll, and marketing, form a modest slice around them. The stacked bar below sketches an illustrative split for a full-service restaurant, and the point of it is proportion, not precision: the kitchen everyone pictures is inside the equipment slice, which is real but well behind the buildout and the reserve.

The lesson from the split is where to spend your attention. An owner obsessing over which range or walk-in to buy is optimizing a fifth of the budget while the buildout and the reserve, nearly two-thirds of it combined, decide whether the restaurant opens on time and survives its first year. Get the space, the buildout, and the cash cushion right, and the equipment choice becomes a manageable decision inside a sound plan. This is exactly the split our companion on how much it costs to open a restaurant turns into a by-type total, and the two breakdowns are meant to be read together: this one for the category detail, that one for the format-level number.

Full-service vs quick-service vs cafe cost differences

Format changes the whole category breakdown, not just the total, because each format weights the lines differently. A full-service restaurant carries the heaviest version of nearly every category: a large dining room to build out and furnish, a deep kitchen with a broad equipment list, a bigger opening crew to train, and often a bar with its own liquor license. This is why full-service sits at the high end of the startup ranges and why its buildout and payroll categories run larger than the other formats. The dining room and the service model are what make it expensive, not the food itself.

A quick-service restaurant trims the front of house sharply, since customers order at a counter and there is little or no table service, which cuts the furniture category and shrinks the dining room buildout and the service crew. But the back of house can be equipment-heavy depending on the menu, with fryers, griddles, holding equipment, and the ventilation to support them, and a drive-through adds its own construction and technology. So quick-service shifts weight from the front to the back, landing lower overall than full-service but not always by as much as owners expect. Our cost to start a food truck rundown prices the leanest end of the quick-service spectrum, where the fixed dining room disappears entirely.

A cafe or coffee shop is usually the lightest format on most categories, with a smaller kitchen, a shorter equipment list, and a modest dining room, though a specialty coffee program can be surprisingly costly per square foot once a high-end espresso machine, grinders, and a water treatment setup are counted. Our cost to open a coffee shop rundown breaks down that format in full, and it is the sibling to read if a cafe is the concept you are pricing. Across all three formats the discipline is the same: the buildout and the working capital reserve are the categories that decide affordability, and format mainly changes how large those two lines are relative to the rest.

Buying an existing restaurant vs leasing and building out

There is a decision above all the category line items, which is how you enter the business at all: build an independent restaurant from a lease, or buy an existing restaurant that is already operating or recently closed. Building out from a lease gives you full control over the concept, the layout, and the equipment, but you carry all of the buildout risk and pay for the most expensive category from scratch. Buying an existing restaurant can be cheaper and faster on the buildout and equipment categories at once, because you inherit a working kitchen, existing infrastructure, and sometimes the furniture, the POS, and a trained crew, which collapses several of the largest startup categories into a single purchase price.

The catch is that buying an existing restaurant means inheriting whatever came with it, so the diligence matters as much as the price. Deferred maintenance on the equipment, a kitchen built for a different menu, a bad reputation attached to the location, or a lease with unfavorable terms can all turn an apparent bargain into a costly problem. The honest way to compare the two paths is to price the specific deal rather than the category: a turnkey former restaurant in good condition can be the cheapest way into the business, while a distressed one can cost more to fix than building fresh. Whichever path you choose, the buildout and equipment categories are where the buy-versus-build decision plays out, so weigh the inherited infrastructure against the freedom of a clean start.

Leasing vs buying your equipment

Once the equipment category is sized, the next question is how to pay for it, and for a startup the answer often turns on cash preservation rather than the total cost of the gear. Buying equipment outright is usually cheaper over the life of a machine you run hard, because you avoid the financing premium and keep the asset, which is exactly the conclusion our buy-vs-lease equipment rundown reaches for high-utilization gear. But buying consumes cash at the precise moment a new restaurant is most fragile, draining the very working capital reserve that keeps the doors open through the ramp.

That tension is why leasing or financing equipment is so common for restaurant startups specifically. Spreading the equipment cost into monthly payments keeps a large chunk of cash in reserve, lengthening the runway that survival depends on, and the premium you pay for that flexibility can be worth far more than its dollar cost when the alternative is opening with an empty cushion. The framing is not that financing is cheaper, it is that a startup values cash on hand more highly than an established business does, because the startup is closer to the edge. Our equipment financing rundown lays out that math, and for many first-time owners the answer is to finance or buy used, protect the reserve, and upgrade to owned, new equipment once the restaurant stands on its own. To watch that decision played out with full arithmetic, our equipment financing case study finances an illustrative restaurant kitchen build-out end to end, loan against lease against cash.

Ways to reduce restaurant startup costs

Every startup budget is a series of choices about what to trim, and the safe cuts and the dangerous ones are easy to tell apart once you know which categories tolerate cutting. The safest place to save is the buildout, and the lever there is the space itself: choosing a former restaurant that already has the kitchen infrastructure inherits the most expensive category and can slash the buildout dramatically. After the space, the next safe cuts are buying quality used or refurbished equipment for the durable items, furnishing the dining room with used tables and chairs, keeping the opening menu tight to shrink both the equipment and the inventory categories, and negotiating a landlord contribution toward the buildout. Each of these trims a real category without touching quality or reliability.

Starting smaller is the most powerful lever of all, because format sets the scale of nearly every category at once. A food truck, a takeout-only kitchen, or a compact quick-service counter opens for a fraction of a full-service room and lets you prove the concept before committing to a large lease, which is why our cost to start a food truck and cost to open a coffee shop rundowns are worth reading as lower rungs on the same ladder, and our walkthrough on how to start a catering business prices the leanest rung of all, a food business run from rented kitchen time. The dangerous cuts are the ones that show up on the plate or in the bank account: cutting corners on code compliance risks a failed inspection, skimping on refrigeration invites spoilage and failure, and thinning the working capital reserve to afford nicer finishes is the deadliest cut of all, because it ends the business before it matures. The rule is short enough for a sticky note: cut the room, not the reserve.

Funding and financing options

Restaurants are rarely opened on cash alone, so how the whole set of categories gets funded is its own decision. The common sources are personal savings, a bank or SBA small business loan, an equipment loan secured by the machines themselves, a line of credit for working capital, contributions from friends and family, and sometimes an outside investor or partner who trades capital for a share of the business. Each carries a different cost and a different set of strings, and the right mix depends on how much cash you bring, how much risk you can carry, and what a lender will extend to a business with no operating history. Our rundown on how to get a small business loan walks that process for the loan side of the mix.

The discipline that keeps financing from becoming a trap is to decide on the total cost of the money over its term, not on the monthly payment in isolation, and to match the term of any loan to the life of what it funds. Financing equipment over its useful life is sound, while financing perishable inventory or a few months of rent on a long-term loan means paying interest on things long gone. A sensible pattern is to fund the durable, long-lived categories like equipment with financing matched to their life, cover the buildout with a mix of savings and a term loan, and hold the working capital reserve in cash rather than borrowing against it if possible. Above all, do not borrow so aggressively that the debt service becomes part of a monthly burn the young restaurant cannot carry, because a heavy loan payment can turn a survivable slow patch into a fatal one.

A worked example: one restaurant startup budget by category

Put the whole breakdown on one illustrative budget for a small full-service restaurant in a modest space. The owner leases a 2,000 square foot former retail unit that needs a moderate conversion into a restaurant. The buildout, meaning the kitchen infrastructure, the ventilation hood, the plumbing and electrical, the dining room finishes, and a small bar, runs an illustrative $300,000, the single largest category because the space was never a food business. The kitchen equipment package, from the cooking line to the walk-in and the dish area, comes to $150,000, some of it bought refurbished to protect cash.

The smaller categories fill in around those two. The lease deposit and first months of rent add about $30,000, furniture and decor for the dining room add about $36,000, initial inventory adds about $14,000, the POS and technology stack adds about $12,000, licenses and permits add about $8,000, prepaid insurance adds about $5,000, pre-opening payroll and training add about $22,000, and marketing and pre-launch add about $8,000. Those one-time categories total roughly $585,000. On top of them the owner holds a working capital reserve of about $208,000, roughly four months of a $52,000 monthly burn, to survive the ramp to break-even. The all-in startup cost is around $790,000, and the two largest pieces, the buildout and the reserve, are nearly two-thirds of it, while the kitchen everyone pictures is under a fifth. Run your own category budget through the companion beside this breakdown and the plan stops being a guess. If a formal plan is the next step, our rundown on how to write a restaurant business plan folds these categories into the financial section lenders read.

The bottom line

Restaurant startup costs are best understood as a set of categories rather than a single number, because the categories do not move together and a handful of them decide almost everything. The buildout is nearly always the largest line, the working capital reserve and the kitchen equipment form the next tier, and the remaining eight categories together are a modest slice around them. Illustratively a small cafe or quick-service spot opens in the low-to-mid six figures, a full-service restaurant in the mid-to-high six figures, and fine dining in seven figures, but your own number comes from pricing the categories against your actual lease, space, menu, and market, not from any average.

The owners who open successfully do three things in order. They price the categories honestly, category by category, rather than quoting a headline total. They spend their attention on the buildout and the reserve, nearly two-thirds of the budget combined, instead of obsessing over which range to buy. And they fund the working capital reserve to reach break-even with a cushion, because a restaurant that runs out of cash two months early closes anyway. Size the format-level total with our rundown on how much it costs to open a restaurant, price the kitchen carefully with the commercial kitchen equipment cost rundown, weigh how to pay for it with the buy-vs-lease and equipment financing rundowns, and run your own category budget through the equipment ROI calculator so the total to open is a plan, not a surprise.

Written for the person costing a restaurant honestly, not for anyone selling the dream of one: this breakdown is educational material, not financial, tax, legal, or business advice, and it recommends no specific format, vendor, lender, or location. Every dollar figure, category range, and percentage share here is an illustrative sketch built to show how the lines add up, and a real project is priced by its own lease, its own space, its own market, and how much construction the restaurant needs. Buildout costs, liquor licenses, permit fees, insurance premiums, rents, and the time to reach break-even vary enormously by city and by site, so gather local quotes on the actual space, equipment, and permits in front of you, and put an accountant, a contractor, and an insurance broker between you and any lease, purchase, or financing agreement you sign.