Restaurant Management interview prep.

Behavioural questions to expect

1. Walk me through your CV.
2. Walk me through your most impressive unit, shift, or operational turnaround.
3. Tell me about a weakness, a failure, or feedback you've received and worked on.
4. Why restaurant management — and why a chain operator specifically?
5. Why the sector — what's your point of view on this restaurant segment?
6. Why the firm?
7. When a guest is choosing between the firm and a top competitor on a Saturday lunch, what's the unit-level reason she ends up at the firm?
8. Which units, dayparts, or markets at the firm look healthy right now, and where would you focus the next round of operating investment?

Technical concepts to master

• Prime cost — the chain General Manager's primary operating lever

  Prime cost definition and the 60% line · Food cost decomposition · Labour cost and productivity · Controllables and the four-wall profit bridge

• Food safety — the non-negotiable four-wall baseline

  TCS foods and the temperature danger zone · Cross-contamination and allergen control · HACCP — Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points · Health inspector visit discipline

• Throughput, line speed, and off-premise — where the four wall meets the digital order

  Line speed and the peak-rush ceiling · Drive-thru speed-of-service · Mobile order and pickup workflow · Third-party delivery economics

• Guest experience — what drives OSAT and what the General Manager owns

  The five OSAT drivers · Guest-recovery discipline · Voice-of-guest cadence

• People, bench, and turnover — the long-cycle craft of restaurant leadership

  Voluntary turnover and its decomposition · Shift Leader and AGM bench · Pre-shift huddle and field-leadership cadence · Safety and team incident discipline

Practical drills

• Your unit does $2.4M in annual sales. Food cost runs at 30%; labour at 28%; prime cost = 58%. You're tracking +1% comp YTD but four weeks into the quarter the trend has flipped to -4% comp. Your Area Coach wants you to hold prime cost at 58% or better. What's the prime-cost dollar movement if you do nothing, and what's your operating response?
• You inherit a unit with a recent health-inspection score of 78 (cut-off for re-inspection is 85 in your jurisdiction). The Area Coach has handed you a corrective-action plan and a 60-day timeline before re-inspection. Walk me through your RCA and your 90-day response plan.
• It is 11:50am on a Friday. Lunch rush hits in 10 minutes. Your grill cook just walked out after an argument with a Shift Leader. Your fryer is throwing an error code and the oil temperature is dropping. A guest at the counter is loudly complaining about a 25-minute wait time from earlier that morning. Walk me through the next 60 minutes.

Smart-question anchors

• Operating priorities and the Area Coach scorecard — what good looks like for a General Manager in {firm_name}'s next 12-18 months and the gating prime-cost / OSAT / turnover metric
• Scheduling and labour-model technology — {firm_name}'s investment in forecast-to-schedule, demand prediction, and labour optimisation
• Food-safety programme and brand standards — {firm_name}'s recent food-safety trajectory, ServSafe-plus or brand-specific protocols, and the partnership cadence between units and the brand standards team
• Off-premise integration and channel mix — drive-thru, mobile order, third-party delivery, and catering posture and how the four-wall economics integrate with the digital flow
• Bench development and the internal-promotion ladder — how Shift Leader and AGM seats progress to General Manager and Area Coach

Sourced from

National Restaurant Association (NRA) — operations and ServSafe resources · FDA Food Code + ServSafe manager training curriculum · Restaurant Finance Monitor, Restaurant Business, Nation's Restaurant News · Black Box Intelligence and Technomic — chain restaurant benchmarks · Glassdoor, Indeed, and Reddit r/KitchenConfidential + r/restaurateur General Manager interview threads