Restaurant Manager CV Examples & Writing Guide

This person is invented, the restaurants are not real, but the figures are the ones an owner or area manager will look for. Every job answers three questions: how big was it, what did it cost to run, and what got better while you were there.

Restaurant hiring is a numbers conversation held quickly. The person reading is usually an owner, an operations director or an area manager, and they have seen a hundred CVs that say "managed daily operations". They are scanning for evidence that you have carried a budget.

• Volume. Annual sales, covers per day, seat count and staff count. This is the first filter, because managing £700k is a different job from managing £3.2m.
• Cost control with movement. Food cost and labour cost as percentages (or GP), with a before and an after. A static "maintained food cost" line is worth much less than "32.4% to 28.9%".
• People. Staff turnover, how many you hired, how long your training takes, whether anyone you trained got promoted. Staffing is the industry's real problem and it is the number most CVs skip.
• Food safety and licensing. Your food hygiene rating, any improvement notices, Level 3 Food Hygiene, and whether you hold a personal licence or have been the DPS. One bad inspection story can end a career, so a clean record is worth stating.
• Guest metrics. Google or Tripadvisor rating, mystery diner scores, complaint rate, and what you did about them.

“I skip straight to the percentages. If a candidate cannot tell me where their food cost was when they arrived and where it was when they left, they were a shift supervisor with a manager title. The ones who move those two numbers are the ones I call.”

Four lines maximum, with volume in the first line and a cost or people number in the second. Write a personal statement if you have managed anything, including shifts. Keep a career objective for a genuine step up.

The fastest way to improve a restaurant CV is to delete every bullet that starts with "responsible for" and rewrite it with a percentage, a headcount or a pound figure.

Split them into the business side and the floor side. The business side is what separates a manager from a supervisor, so put it first.

• P&L ownership, weekly flash reports and period close
• Food cost, cost of sales and theoretical versus actual variance
• Labour cost forecasting, rotas and overtime control
• Stocktakes, par levels, ordering and supplier negotiation
• Menu engineering, portion specs and pricing
• Cash handling, banking, comp and void control
• Food safety compliance, HACCP-based checks and temperature records (Safer Food, Better Business or equivalent)
• Licensing compliance, Challenge 25 and ID-check audits

Systems, named by brand. Job adverts list them and filters match them literally.

• EPOS: Toast, Square for Restaurants, Lightspeed, Zonal
• Rotas and labour: Planday, Fourth, Deputy
• Stock and ordering: Procure Wizard, Kitchen CUT, supplier portals
• Reservations and waitlist: OpenTable, ResDiary, SevenRooms
• Delivery platforms (Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats) and tablet consolidation
• Excel or Sheets for P&L, par sheets and forecasts

The people side, written as things you did rather than adjectives.

• Running a pre-shift briefing that changes what happens on the floor
• Holding a performance conversation without losing the person
• Recovering a table that has already waited 40 minutes
• Working with a head chef whose food cost target conflicts with the menu
• Covering a shift yourself when two waiters call in sick on a Saturday

Two qualifications do most of the work here. UK food law requires food handlers to be supervised and trained in food hygiene to a level that suits their job, and employers translate that into Level 3 Food Hygiene for managers. If the restaurant sells alcohol, owners also want to know whether you hold a personal licence and can act as designated premises supervisor (DPS). Put both near the top with their dates.

• Usually expected: Level 2 Food Hygiene for every food handler and Level 3 for supervisors and managers. The law asks for training that fits the job rather than one named certificate, so employers set the level in the job advert.
• Often required: a personal licence. In England and Wales, a premises licensed to sell alcohol needs a DPS who holds a personal licence (Licensing Act 2003), and the restaurant manager is often that person. Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own licensing systems, so check with the local licensing authority rather than guessing.
• Nice to have: allergen training (Natasha's Law), Emergency First Aid at Work, IOSH Working Safely, and any franchisor or brand certification you completed.
• Education matters less than numbers in this trade. A hospitality degree or a hospitality management apprenticeship helps for hotel and group roles; for independents, a strong P&L record beats it.

Most restaurant managers are promoted from the floor, so nobody expects a management degree. What they need is proof you have already carried responsibility on a shift when the manager was not there.

1. 1List every duty manager shift you covered, with what you were allowed to do: comps, voids, cashing up, closing paperwork, sending staff home.
2. 2Put a pound figure on the cash you handled and state your till record. Owners care about till accuracy more than they will admit.
3. 3Name what you trained. "Trained 9 new waiters on the EPOS and floor plan" is management experience.
4. 4Add anything you fixed: a rota that stopped double-booking, a prep list, a side-work chart, a wine-by-the-glass push that raised sales per head.
5. 5Get Level 3 Food Hygiene and the one-day personal licence course (APLH) before you apply. Both are short courses and they move you into a different pile.
6. 6Apply for assistant manager and supervisor roles as well, which are the normal route in.

• Two pages is the UK norm once you are a manager. One page is fine for an assistant manager with a short history; go past two only for long multi-site careers, and even then summarise the early jobs.
• Reverse chronological. Restaurant careers move fast and short stays are normal, but list months as well as years so nothing looks hidden.
• No photo, date of birth, marital status or nationality on a UK CV, even though front of house feels like a face-first job. State your right to work in the UK only if the advert asks.
• Every employer line gets a size tag: seats, annual sales, staff count, concept type (full-service, fast casual, hotel F&B, franchise).
• A short "Key numbers" band under the personal statement works well here: food cost, labour cost, covers, staff turnover, food hygiene rating.
• Save as PDF, one column, no tables. Restaurant groups and franchisors often run standard applicant tracking systems.
• If a restaurant closed or you left after a sale, add four words saying so. Unexplained short stays get read as dismissals.

Mirror the advert's vocabulary. UK adverts use "restaurant manager", "general manager", "assistant general manager", "food and beverage manager", "front of house manager", plus "P&L", "GP", "food cost", "labour cost", "covers", "Level 3 Food Hygiene", "personal licence", "rota", "guest satisfaction" and "food hygiene rating". If the job is titled general manager and you have been a restaurant manager with full P&L, say so plainly in the personal statement rather than inflating your job title. In the US the same document is a one-page resume with a summary; for UK applications, use the two-page CV format described above.