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Contents
Key Takeaways for a Restaurant General Manager Resume
Why This Restaurant General Manager Resume Works
How to Write a Restaurant General Manager Resume That Gets Interviews
What to Include in a Restaurant General Manager Resume
Restaurant General Manager Resume Summary Examples
Restaurant General Manager Work Experience Examples
Top Restaurant General Manager Skills
Key Certifications and Licences for a Restaurant General Manager
Restaurant General Manager Salary
Common Restaurant General Manager Resume Mistakes
Restaurant General Manager Resume FAQs
Summary
Restaurant general manager with thirteen years in hospitality, the last six running high-volume restaurants in Rome. Runs the whole business, not just the floor — owning the P&L, leading front and back of house, controlling food and labour cost, and building a restaurant where guests want to return and staff want to stay. Grew covers and profit while lifting guest scores, and turned around an underperforming site. Owns the P&L, leads the whole team, controls cost and quality, drives guest experience, and handles recruitment and compliance. Commercial, hands-on and people-focused. Looking for a general-manager role with a restaurant or group that wants its sites run like the businesses they are.
Work Experience
Restaurant General Manager
Rome High-Volume Restaurant, Rome, Italy
Jan 2019 – Present
- Run the whole business, not just the floor, owning the P&L and building a place guests and staff both stay loyal to.
- Grew covers and profit while lifting guest scores, and turned around an underperforming site within a year.
- Lead front and back of house together, keeping kitchen and floor working as one team through every service.
- Control food and labour cost tightly, protecting margin without cutting the quality guests come back for.
- Drive guest experience relentlessly, because a great night out is what fills tables and earns repeat custom.
- Handle recruitment, training and compliance, building a capable team and keeping the venue safe and legal.
Restaurant Manager
Italy Restaurant Group, Rome, Italy
Jul 2012 – Dec 2018
- Managed restaurants on the floor and shift by shift, building hospitality leadership experience over years.
- Ran service, teams and cost, developing the commercial breadth a general-manager role demands.
- Learned floor management, cost control and team leadership on the job across more than six years.
- Gained the results and experience that led into a general-manager role of my own.
Education
Degree in Hospitality Management, Hospitality Management
Rome Hospitality Institute
Sep 2008 – Jun 2012
- Degree in hospitality management covering operations, finance, food and beverage and people management, with a placement. The programme built the foundation running a restaurant as a profitable business requires. It led directly into management.
Food Safety & Restaurant Finance Certificate, Hospitality
Italian Restaurant Association
Jan 2014 – Jun 2014
- Certificate covering food safety, licensing and restaurant P&L to a recognised standard. It sharpened the commercial and compliance side of running a venue. It supported managing a restaurant profitably, safely and legally.
Highlights
Grew profit and guest scores
- Grew covers and profit while also lifting guest-satisfaction scores. Doing both at once is hard, because cost-cutting usually hurts the guest, so improving profit and experience together reflects genuinely skilled management.
Turned a site around
- Turned around an underperforming restaurant within a year. Fixing a struggling venue means rebuilding team, cost and guest experience at once, among the toughest and most valuable challenges in hospitality.
Certifications
Food Safety & Restaurant Finance Certificate
Italian Restaurant Association
Jun 2014 – Present
- Certificate covering food safety, licensing and restaurant P&L to a recognised standard, which sharpened the commercial and compliance side of running a venue and supports managing a restaurant profitably, safely and legally.
Recognition
A trusted operator
- Relied on by ownership to run a flagship site profitably and to turn around the ones that struggle, valued for hitting the numbers while keeping guests happy and a strong, loyal team in place.
Languages
- Italian — Native or Bilingual Proficiency
- English (UK) — Full Professional Proficiency
Technical Skills
- P&L Management
- Restaurant Operations
- Food & Labour Cost Control
- Team Leadership
- Guest Experience
- Recruitment & Training
- Food Safety & Compliance
- Service Standards
- Stock & Suppliers
- Site Turnaround
Personal Skills
- Leadership
- Commercial Awareness
- Hands-On Drive
- Calm Under Pressure
- Communication
Activities & Interests
- Ice Skating
- Snow Boarding
- Sculpting
- News
- Taking Bath
Key Takeaways for a Restaurant General Manager Resume
Before the detail, here is what decides whether a restaurant GM CV reaches an interview:
- Put the venue's numbers under every job: annual turnover, average weekly covers, average spend per head, seats and headcount. Without them nobody can tell whether you ran a 60-cover bistro or a 400-cover flagship.
- Show the three percentages a GM lives by. Food cost, labour cost and EBITDA or site profit margin, with a before and after. These are the first things an operations director looks for and the most commonly missing.
- Prove you moved profit and guest scores in the same period. Anyone can protect margin by thinning the rota; doing it while your Google or TripAdvisor score climbed is the harder, more credible story.
- Name your systems. Lightspeed, Toast, Fourth, S4Labour, ResDiary, SevenRooms, Deliveroo and Uber Eats dashboards. Groups recruit for systems fit because it shortens the handover by a month.
- Lead with a turnaround or an opening if you have one. Fixing a failing site or opening a new one is the closest thing hospitality has to a trump card on a CV.
- Keep people metrics on the page. Turnover percentage, retention and how many of your team you promoted, because staffing is the problem every operator is currently trying to hire away.
Why This Restaurant General Manager Resume Works
Read the sample above as a set of positioning decisions. Each one is doing a specific job for the reader:
- The summary claims the whole business rather than the floor, and does it in the first line. That single framing choice is what separates a GM CV from a restaurant manager CV with a bigger title.
- Profit growth and guest satisfaction are stated together, which pre-empts the obvious suspicion that margin was bought by cutting hours, portions or hosts.
- The turnaround is stated with a time bound, within a year. A hospitality operator reads that as a repeatable skill rather than luck, because failing sites do not fix themselves on a schedule.
- Front and back of house are named as one leadership responsibility. Kitchen and floor pulling against each other is the classic reason sites underperform, so owning both signals real GM authority.
- The earlier role is Restaurant Manager at a group, which makes the promotion path obvious and quietly confirms multi-site standards, not just independent instinct.
- The Highlights entries read as standalone claims, each of which still makes sense lifted out and skimmed on a phone by an area manager between site visits.
How to Write a Restaurant General Manager Resume That Gets Interviews
Five moves that turn a duties list into a case for running someone's site:
How do you open a restaurant general manager resume?
Open with the size of business you have run, not your personality. "Restaurant general manager, nine years, running a 220-cover independent turning over 3.1 million euro with 46 staff" tells an operator your weight class in one line. Turnover, covers and headcount up front, then the achievement that proves you controlled them.
Which numbers does an operator actually check?
Food cost percentage, labour cost percentage, site EBITDA or profit conversion, covers and average spend per head, and a guest metric such as Google rating or NPS. Give the movement, not the level alone. "Brought labour from 34 to 29 percent of revenue without dropping service hours" is the sentence that gets a call, because it shows you understand where the money actually leaks.
How do you show you can fix a struggling site?
Tell the turnaround as a short arc with numbers at both ends: what you inherited, what you changed, what it produced and how long it took. Loss-making to profitable in eleven months, or a 2.9 Google rating rebuilt to 4.4 across 600 reviews. Name the levers you pulled, whether that was a menu re-engineer, a rota rebuild, a supplier renegotiation or replacing a head chef.
A general manager CV carries a lot of commercial detail, and getting it onto two pages without losing the numbers is genuinely hard. If you want it handled properly, our professional resume writing service puts a specialist writer on it.
How should you handle staffing and retention?
Every operator in hospitality is short-staffed, so retention is close to the top of the buying criteria. Give turnover as a percentage against the site or group average, say how many team members you promoted into supervisor, assistant manager or head chef roles, and mention any apprenticeship or training scheme you ran. It is the least contested advantage you can put on the page.
What compliance detail belongs on the CV?
Enough to prove the site is safe in your hands, no more. Your last EHO or health inspection score, food safety certification level, personal licence or alcohol certification, allergen and HACCP ownership, and any due diligence system you ran. One tight line per employer beats a compliance essay nobody finishes.
What to Include in a Restaurant General Manager Resume
The details that separate a GM CV from a well-written floor manager CV:
A one-line site profile under each employer: concept, covers, seats, annual turnover, weekly covers, headcount and whether it trades seven days with breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Budget and P&L scope. Say whether you owned the full site P&L, built the annual budget, or worked to numbers handed down from above; operators care about the difference.
Revenue streams beyond the dining room: private events, delivery channels, bar takings, retail. A GM who grew a second revenue line is worth more than one who only grew covers.
Openings, refits and closures you have run, with the timeline. Pre-opening recruitment, training build and soft launch experience is scarce and expensive to buy.
Your last environmental health or food hygiene rating, plus any audit score from a group standards visit.
Systems and stack: EPOS, rota and labour scheduling, stock and purchasing, bookings and CRM, plus the delivery platforms you managed.
Extra tips
Say how the site trades: seven days, breakfast through dinner, or Wednesday to Sunday dinner only.
A 200-cover site doing 14 services a week is roughly double the job of one doing seven, and operators price that difference.
Restaurant General Manager Resume Summary Examples
The sample above is a high-volume independent operator. These three sit at different points on the ladder, so borrow the shape rather than the wording:
Entry-level resume summary example
Assistant general manager with seven years in casual dining, stepping up after eighteen months deputising across a 160-cover site turning over 2.2 million pounds a year with 38 staff. Runs the rota, the weekly stock count and the labour forecast, holding labour at 28.5 percent of revenue against a 30 percent budget through a full trading year. Rebuilt the section plan and pre-service briefing after a kitchen change, which cut average main-course ticket times from 21 to 14 minutes across Friday and Saturday service. Recruited and trained 22 team members through a summer peak with no agency spend, and promoted four of them to supervisor. Level 3 food safety certified and personal licence holder. Looking for a first general manager role with an operator that gives its GMs real control of the P&L.
Mid-level resume summary example
Restaurant general manager with ten years in premium casual dining, currently running a 240-cover city-centre site turning over 4.6 million pounds with 61 staff across front and back of house. Owns the full site P&L, the annual budget and the weekly trading review, and reports site EBITDA to an operations director every period. Improved site profit conversion from 11 to 17 percent over two years by re-engineering the menu with the head chef, renegotiating three supplier lines and rebuilding the rota around actual covers rather than habit. Held food cost at 26 percent through a period of double-digit input inflation. Lifted the Google rating from 4.0 to 4.6 across 1,900 reviews and cut team turnover from 78 to 41 percent. ServSafe and personal licence certified.
Senior-level resume summary example
General manager with sixteen years in hospitality, running a 400-cover flagship with a 90-cover terrace and a private events floor, turning over 8.9 million euro a year with 130 staff and a management team of six. Owns the site P&L end to end, sets the annual budget with the group finance director, and has opened two sites from shell to trading. Took the flagship from loss-making to 19 percent site EBITDA in fourteen months by rebuilding the management layer, re-engineering a 74-line menu down to 48, and putting labour scheduling on forecast covers rather than fixed shifts. Grew private events revenue from 320,000 to 1.1 million euro in three years. Holds a top food hygiene rating across five consecutive inspections and mentors three GMs across the group.
Restaurant General Manager Work Experience Examples
Write each bullet so an operations director can price the impact. These sets cover the three routes people usually arrive from:
Independent and premium casual dining
- Ran a 240-cover independent turning over 4.6 million pounds a year, owning the full P&L and lifting site profit conversion from 11 to 17 percent across two trading years without reducing service hours or headcount.
- Re-engineered a 71-dish menu down to 52 with the head chef using dish-level margin and sales-mix data, holding food cost at 26 percent through a year of double-digit ingredient inflation.
- Rebuilt the rota around forecast covers rather than fixed shift patterns, taking labour from 34 to 29 percent of revenue while average ticket times on Friday service fell by six minutes.
- Grew average spend per head from 34 to 41 pounds over three quarters by retraining the floor team on wine and dessert conversation and restructuring the drinks list around four well-margined house pours.
- Lifted the Google rating from 4.0 to 4.6 across 1,900 reviews in eighteen months by answering every review personally within a day and fixing the three complaints that recurred most often in them.
Multi-site group and branded restaurants
- Took over the group's weakest site, loss-making on 2.8 million pounds of revenue, and returned it to 14 percent site EBITDA within eleven months by rebuilding the management team and resetting the cost base.
- Cut team turnover from 82 to 39 percent inside a year by introducing a written progression path, publishing the rota a fixed ten days ahead, and replacing unpaid trial shifts with paid ones.
- Delivered top-quartile group standards audit scores across six consecutive visits, having rewritten the opening and closing checks and made section handovers a documented step rather than a conversation.
- Grew delivery revenue from 4,100 to 11,800 pounds a week across two platforms by building a delivery-only menu of 14 travel-safe dishes and holding order accuracy above 97 percent.
- Recruited, trained and opened a 180-cover site from shell to trading in nine weeks, hiring 54 staff and building the training plan from scratch, then hit the sales budget in month two rather than month four.
Hotel food and beverage and events-led venues
- Managed a hotel restaurant, bar and 300-capacity events floor generating 6.2 million euro a year, running a team of 88 and reporting departmental profit to the general manager every period.
- Grew private events revenue from 320,000 to 1.1 million euro in three years by building a dedicated events package structure and putting one manager on enquiry conversion full time.
- Held food cost at 27 percent and beverage at 21 percent across a 24-hour operation covering breakfast, all-day dining, room service and banqueting for up to 300 covers, through two supplier price rounds.
- Rebuilt the breakfast operation for 210 rooms, cutting average wait for a table from 14 minutes to under four and raising the breakfast satisfaction score from 7.1 to 8.9 on the guest survey.
Top Restaurant General Manager Skills
Hospitality recruiters skim the skills block for commercial control first and service second. Mirror the language operators actually use in their job ads:
Hard skills
- P&L ownership and site budgeting
- Food cost control and GP management
- Labour cost and rota scheduling
- Menu engineering and pricing
- Stock control and supplier negotiation
- Covers and revenue forecasting
- EPOS reporting (Lightspeed, Toast, Square)
- Labour systems (Fourth, S4Labour, Harri)
- Bookings and CRM (ResDiary, SevenRooms, OpenTable)
- Delivery channel management
- Recruitment and onboarding
- Training and succession planning
- Food safety and HACCP
- Allergen management and due diligence
- Licensing and alcohol compliance
- Health and safety compliance
- Guest experience and review management
- Private events and banqueting
- Site opening and pre-opening recruitment
- Turnaround and performance recovery
Soft skills:
- Composure through a broken service
- Reading a room and a rota at the same time
- Direct feedback without losing people
- Commercial judgement on the spot
- Building loyalty in a high-churn industry
- Handling a complaint without conceding the margin
Key Certifications and Licences for a Restaurant General Manager
Some of these are legal requirements and some just make you the safer hire. Say which is which on your CV, because operators notice when candidates blur the line:
-
ServSafe Food Protection Manager Certification
— National Restaurant Association Effectively required in most US jurisdictions for the person in charge of a kitchen. Accredited, five-year validity, and the first credential a US operator looks for.
-
ServSafe Alcohol
— National Restaurant Association Responsible alcohol service certification, mandatory in several US states. Pair it with your ServSafe Manager cert rather than listing it alone.
-
Level 3 Award in Food Safety for Supervisors in Catering
— Highfield Qualifications The UK expectation for anyone supervising a kitchen. Level 2 is for team members; a GM should hold Level 3.
-
Level 2 Award for Personal Licence Holders
— BIIAB Required in England and Wales to hold a personal licence and act as designated premises supervisor. If you hold it, say so in the first half of the CV, not the last line.
-
WSET Level 2 Award in Wines
— WSET Optional, and disproportionately useful in premium or wine-led venues where spend per head depends on the floor team selling by the bottle.
-
Foodservice Management Professional
— National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation Optional management credential aimed at experienced restaurant managers. Worth having if you are competing for multi-site or area manager roles.
Restaurant General Manager Salary
US federal wage data files restaurant GMs under food service managers, and the spread reflects site size far more than years served:
USD 45,960 – USD 56,870 · entry · US
10th to 25th percentile. Typical for a first GM post at a smaller or quick-service site.
USD 56,870 – USD 86,800 · mid · US
25th to 75th percentile, median 69,390. Most full-service restaurant GMs sit here, usually before bonus.
USD 86,800 – USD 107,640 · senior · US
75th to 90th percentile. Flagship sites, hotel food and beverage, and high-turnover city-centre venues. Site bonus can add meaningfully on top.
Common Restaurant General Manager Resume Mistakes
These are the errors that stall an otherwise strong hospitality CV:
- Writing a floor manager CV under a GM title. If nothing on the page mentions P&L, budget, food cost or labour percentage, the reader concludes you ran service while somebody else ran the business.
- Leaving out the size of the venue. A GM who does not state covers, turnover and headcount forces an operator to assume the smallest plausible site.
- Claiming a turnaround with no numbers at either end. Say what you inherited and what you handed over, otherwise "transformed an underperforming site" reads as decoration.
- Listing every EPOS and rota system ever seen. Name the three you actually ran daily; a long stack list reads as padding to anyone who has used them.
- Ignoring staffing metrics entirely. Turnover, retention and internal promotions are the numbers operators are most desperate about right now, and most CVs still omit them.
- Burying the food hygiene rating or inspection score. Compliance is the one area where a single bad outcome ends a candidacy, so put a good record where it can be seen.
- Describing hospitality as a passion instead of a P&L. Enthusiasm is assumed at this level; commercial control is what is being bought.
Restaurant General Manager Resume FAQs
The questions people most often search before writing this CV:
Put the business first: site turnover, covers, headcount, food and labour cost percentages, and site profit, then the guest and staffing metrics that show how you got there. Systems and food safety credentials go next. Duties like "managed daily operations" can come out entirely, because every GM does them.
Two pages. A GM CV has to carry site profiles, commercial numbers and compliance detail across two or three employers, and one page forces you to cut exactly the evidence that wins the job. Older assistant manager and supervisor roles can shrink to a single line each.
Lead with P&L ownership, food and labour cost control, menu engineering, forecasting and recruitment, then the systems you ran. Guest experience and service standards belong there too, but underneath the commercial skills, because that is the order an operations director reads in.
If you would rather build the whole thing from a hospitality-friendly layout than fight with margins in a word processor, try our free online resume builder.
No. Most restaurant GMs come up through the floor and the kitchen, and operators weigh site results far above qualifications. A hospitality management degree helps for group and hotel roles where there is a structured management pipeline, but food safety certification and a personal licence matter more day to day.
Turn each responsibility into a movement with a number. Rather than "controlled costs", write that you held food cost at 26 percent through a year of ingredient inflation by re-engineering the menu. Context, action, result, in that order, and one number per bullet is plenty.
Yes, and omitting them is the most common reason a GM CV gets passed over. Those two percentages are how operators judge whether you controlled a site or merely supervised it. Give the movement rather than a single figure, and state the revenue base they sit on.
Move the commercial work you already do to the front. Deputising for the GM, building the rota against a labour budget, running stock counts and supplier orders, and handling the weekly trading review are all GM-level tasks, so give them their own bullets with the numbers attached.
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