Restaurant Staffing Guide: How Many Servers and Cooks Do You Need? | Qwick (2024)

FAQs

Restaurant Staffing Guide: How Many Servers and Cooks Do You Need? | Qwick? ›

Staffing Guidelines and Staff to Customer Ratios

Sample server to table ratio. If your restaurant has 25 tables, you'll probably want to have around five to six servers. This would mean if your restaurant was operating steadily at full capacity, each server would have about four or five 5 tables at a time, sticking with the optimal ratio.

In the kitchen, you'll usually have an executive chef along with a sous chef or lead line cook supervising the rest of the kitchen team. Depending on the size of the restaurant, you could have three to five line cooks (or more), as well as a dishwasher.

Guest-to-staff ratio: Aim for 1 staff member per 10-15 guests. This includes kitchen staff and FoH personnel like cashiers and food runners. Peak hours staffing: Consider an additional 1-2 staff members during peak hours. You might need specialized roles, such as a dedicated dishwasher.

A good rule of thumb is to have one server for every 25 guests, but here are some more detailed guidelines to help you figure out exactly how many servers you'll need for your event: Bartenders: Plan for one bartender for every 50 guests.

Staffing Guidelines and Staff to Customer Ratios

Casual dining: One server for every five to six tables per shift and four back-of-house staff per 50 tables. Fine dining: One server for every three to four tables per shift and six to seven back-of-house staff per 50 customers.

How many servers do I need? For a buffet, we recommend one server for every 25 to 35 guests. For a seated, plated event, we suggest one server for every 10 to 15 guests.

Additionally, a cook has an average salary of $31,803, which is higher than the $27,271 average annual salary of a cook and waitress/waiter.

How do you calculate staffing needs? ›

To calculate this, you need to determine the ratio between sales revenue and staff. To do this, divide current sales revenue by the current number of sales employees. If the ratio is 50:1 (with 50 representing $50,000 in sales), that means a sales revenue of $500,000 would require 10 employees.

The Staffing Calculator helps you forecast your optimal headcount and staffing schedule during every one-hour period in a given week. It's a tool made for teams of all sizes, allowing you to confidentially propose changes to staffing, KPIs, and ticket volumes.

You should aim to keep your labor costs somewhere between 28-33% of your total revenue. While this isn't a steadfast rule – fine-dining establishes, for example, allocate much more to labor costs — spending too much on labor makes it much harder for your restaurant to turn a profit.

The ideal staff-to-patient ratio will vary depending on the type of healthcare facility and the needs of the patients. However, in general, a ratio of 1:4 or better is considered to be a good benchmark.

Fill rate is the ratio of job orders received to job orders filled. When the fill rate begins to decline, it should be taken as a warning sign, says an expert at Talent Plus Staffing, a company that takes pride in their 85% fill ratio, as compared to the industry average of 46%.

It depends on the types and sizes of the restaurant, operational hours, menu complexity, etc. A restaurant's average staff-to-guest ratio is 1 server per 4 to 5 tables, 3 to 4 kitchen workers, 2 support workers and 1 manager. Here, we have given general guidelines for different types of restaurants.

A small business may be able to get by with a single server if it has a small number of employees and a limited number of applications and data to manage. However, as the business grows and becomes more complex, it may need to add additional servers to handle the increased workload.

Licensing Requirements:

A minimum of 8 cores must be licensed for each processor. A minimum of 16 cores must be licensed for each Server.

This answer will depend on the size and location of the restaurant, seasonality, employees' availability, etc. Taking all this into consideration, it's safe to say that to be fully staffed with backups in place it would require a team of at least 12-15 hosts for a medium-sized establishment in a busy location.