Soo I’ve had the idea of starting a small restaurant on a permaculture farm for a while. Every single ingredient would be grown right on the farm and customers would be able to see and walk around the farm if they want(with supervision, I guess in a short tour?), im thinking it should be a vegan restaurant, it just makes more sense to me. All the food would be organic/pesticide free/herbicide free, This would be the healthiest restaurant in my whole country for sure.
The restaurant wouldn’t be on the middle of the farm but it would be right in the middle of a nice botanical garden. The garden would make the place so much more pretty and attractive, plus this way people can sit down benches placed around the garden and eat while. In my country theres not many 3rd place , I could advertise the place as a free botanical garden with a restaurant on it.
The farm would be right besides the garden but it would be fenced so people dont touch the plants too much or steal them. So yeah these are 3 ideas together, botanical garden/restaurant/farm. I feel like I can advertise the botanical garden and the vegan restaurant separately so its less confusin.
Sounds like a meal at the restaurant would be horrendously expensive as the overhead would be huge.
What do you do when certain vegetables are not in season? What do you do when all the tomatoes are ready for harvesting at the same time? What do you do when pests or weather destroy your entire crop? What do you do in cold weather when there is no crop?
What would be the overhead? im not sure what you mean
If you don’t know what overhead is, then my advice would be to not do this. At least not until you study some basic business management. Before you start this, you need to be able to calculate all the costs of your food, the cost to run the business each month, the cost of labor, know how you are going to market your business, and how many customers you need every day to break even. I love the idea of this restaurant, but restaurants have a high rate of failure in general, and this idea has an even higher likelihood of failure due to its complexity. If you have a lot of capital to start up, can grow the food yourself for really cheap, can find cheap labor, and are on an island with the right kind of wealthy tourists who could support this, it might work, but you need to really do your homework before you jump into it
I live in a tropic island, not in the US. Harvest can be stored in vacumm sealed containers and put on the freezer
If you’re outside of the US, start Googling around how other people do this stuff… You don’t need much to “start a restaurant” on some land you own outside the US
Get creative with some tables and chairs, find a used stove, take some pictures etc
Ahhhh well this changes the calculation. I think this is worth digging deeper into. You really need to pick it apart because restaurants in general have a tough time. Lots to consider but here’s my list of thoughts:
• call it plant based or anything except vegan. I say this as a vegan. People have incredible knee jerk bias against it and it’s been proven in multiple studies. Health food. Plant based food. Living food. Anything but vegan
• if possible see if you can get a grants or other assistance for the gardens. You might even set it up as a separate corporation - maybe even a non profit.
• spend some time looking into relationships with businesses who have customers who might patronize your business. I don’t know where you are but an example might be that if you have a cruise ship that docks there, maybe you create an excursion package that they can offer their guests. These types of relationships make it easier than trying to find individual guests.
i was actually never planing on advertising the vegan part, I should’ve elaborated more on that part, its just that raising animals wpuld make this whole thing more complicated since I dont want to have all the ingredients come from the farm. Its just that i want to be able to say “every single ingredient on the menu is grown on this farm” even if that limits my menu severely, one can still come up with a good variety of recipes if one is growing 15 different types of vegetables and fruits. But if I sell meat i can only say” every vegetable and fruit is grown on this farm, the meat is bought” I feel like that ruins the whole thing for me. But now that i’ve thought more about it, I live on an island, I can buy fish from local fisherman and maybe I can raise chicken as well.
I mean, I agree there’s an attraction about everything coming from your own farm. If you decide to add “locally sourced” animals, just make sure you don’t use it as a crutch or shortcut to creating plant based dishes with depth. IME, if there are animal based dishes on a menu, it seems like the plant based ones become basic. Oh look, a curry lentil basil soup. 🙄 This is because we are so accustomed to centering animal meat in meals we’re not creative with plant based ones. Regardless of which avenue you choose (and it really feel like you made your decision about this business before you posted) I’d highly recommend you spend some time on YouTube looking up some great plant based chefs. You could pop over to r/veganrecipes for channel suggestions. You’ll be blown away by the myriad options that don’t sacrifice taste and complexity even though they’re not using animals in the dishes.
My other two points, which I think are probably more important, stand. I personally wouldn’t do this on an island unless there was a significant tourism industry there AND one in which you could pre-arrange relationships (cruises, hotels, resorts) that would guarantee traffic. Otherwise you’re going to be scrambling to find each individual customer and get them to walk through your doors. You need a relatively guaranteed source of revenue be it cruise excursions or government subsidies or grants from private foundations.
All the best to you