
	Culinary Careers • Restaurant Manager Jobs • Catering • Restaurant Manager • Executive Chef

How to become a Restaurant Manager

Restaurant Management Salary

Restaurant and hospitality management can take you on a vast number of different career paths to a variety of fantastic work environment, from five-star restaurants and hotels to day spas, resorts and even special event planning. Create a dining experience that will keep customers coming back to pay top dollar. Restaurant and hospitality managers are the operators or the dining experience, managing everything from the ambiance to the cuisine and all personnel involved. The position requires a variety of skills from leadership to interpersonal to creative. If you have what it takes to run a fast paced dining establishment, a career in restaurant and hospitality management is a rewarding and exciting choice.

The job description for a restaurant manager runs the gauntlet between business savvy, culinary arts and personnel management. A restaurant manager is a leadership position keeping every cog in the wheels of the fast pace kitchen and dining machine moving smoothly. A management position includes the sourcing and hiring of all personnel, from chefs to bus boys, waiters, bartenders, dishwashers, prep cooks and even marketing and advertising. The manager works closely with the head chef to create the menu and restaurant theme, along with a variety of other tasks, including:

Staff Scheduling, Training & Human Resources
Menu & Equipment Budgets & Purchasing
Customer Relations
Marketing & Advertising
Compliance With All Health Codes & Tax Regulations

Restaurant Management Skills

A great restaurant manager will excel only with the right skills. Although many of these skills cannot be taught in any school or degree program, they can be cultivated. At the selected programs listed here in Nutritionist-World’s culinary arts section, we have sourced the top culinary arts programs throughout North America that promote and cultivate the skills and experience needed to run the best dining and hospitality establishments across the globe.

There are a number of skills that improve a restaurant manager’s ability to run an establishment at the highest level, but a select few are by far the most important. These skills include:

Great Social Skills: This job involves constant work with other people, from chefs to employees to product and food vendors, customers and management. Those able to provide excellent service to customers as well as the cultivation of necessary relationships will find it much easier to succeed in this industry.
Organization: A restaurant, club, spa or hotel is a continuously moving organization with many integrative parts. A manager must have the organization skills to run the entire machine without losing sight of the important details along the way.
Leadership and Decision-Making Skills: Management is leadership position. Many times, managers must make difficult decisions that are not always the most popular. These decisions must be made for the good of the establishment, and leadership and a firm knowledge of the business can provide the strength to make the tough decisions.
Business Savvy: Hospitality is, after all, a business. From budgets to marketing to operations, a restaurant manager must be able to see the big picture and steer the establishment in the right direction toward financial success.

Restaurant Management Salary & Career Outlook

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), restaurant, hotel and food service manager positions will continue to grow over the coming decade. As hospitality and food service is many times correlated with the economy, the position has seen a decline in job openings and compensation during 2008 and 2009. However, as the economy begins to pick up worldwide, this career is expected to pick up as well. As more people begin to eat out and travel again, demand for restaurant and hospitality managers will again increase as well.

Job openings are expected to grow by over five percent by 2018, on par with the average growth of the economy over the same duration. However, as many managers in the hospitality field tend to move positions quite often within the industry, opportunities for new entrants into the field will be better than the data show. Salaries for restaurant and hospitality managers are quite good for those just out of a two or four-year training program. Average starting salaries for restaurant managers are above $50,000 annually, while those with experience generally earn more. Individuals who start their own restaurants, spas or other types of hospitality establishments traditionally earn much higher.

A list of beginning restaurant and hospitality management salaries are listed below:

Restaurant Management Position	Annual Salary (2010)
Hotel/Resort Manager	$54,700
Events/Banquet Manager	$52,700
Fine Dining Restaurant Manager	$49,500