Restaurants are a funny business. Notoriously slim margins, long hours, fickle guests — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We talk about all those things at Full Book because we have to. It’s a hospitality publication, after all. You need to know how to cost a drink, what reservation platform suits your concept, and how to train a host who doesn’t ghost after three shifts. But there’s something we haven’t talked enough about: partnerships.
Not every restaurant is a partnership. There are plenty of single-owner spots doing just fine, publicly traded chains reporting to boards, and multigenerational family businesses keeping it all in the bloodline. But partnerships still make up a sizable part of the independent restaurant world. And the way those partnerships are formed, structured, and managed is often what determines whether a place thrives or ends up in a near fistfight in year two.
A lot of partnerships start out as friendships. Two bartenders or cooks with a shared vision decide, “Let’s just open our own place.” They’ve got chemistry, experience, and just enough naivete to believe they can pull it off. Sometimes they can. Other times, that alignment falls apart the moment one of them decides they want to do brunch and the other doesn’t believe in serving Mimosas.
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