Hiring Your First Restaurant Team: Roles, Timeline, Pay, and the Compliance Floor

Two problems get called "hiring." One is operational: which roles, in what order, at what wage. The other is legal — the moment someone accepts your offer you are an employer, and a stack of federal, state, and sometimes city obligations attaches to their first shift. Most first-time operators work the first problem carefully and meet the second the week payroll is due.

This guide keeps them apart. First half: roles, sequence, sourcing, pay. Second half: the compliance floor — I-9, W-4, new-hire reporting, classification, tip credit, tip pooling, minor labor, postings, scheduling ordinances.

Most of that second half is state law, some of it city law. Federal rules set a floor; states build higher. Nothing here tells you what your jurisdiction requires — it tells you what the mechanism is and what to ask your state labor department, the only source that will be current when you read this.

Hiring Is a Financial Decision First

An oven is a number you pay once — negotiable, financeable, resellable if the concept changes. A hire is a number you pay every pay period, with payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, and workers' comp stacked on the wage. That makes headcount the most consequential recurring decision in your opening budget, and it's why labor sits next to food cost inside prime cost. That guide has the math — weekly prime cost, what fully loaded labor includes, why sales per labor hour reads a schedule better than labor percentage does. Don't build a wage scale without it.

Every role you add is a commitment against a revenue number you're still guessing at. Opening slightly understaffed and adding people in week three is recoverable. Opening with a full-service org chart against volume that never shows up burns your working capital before the concept finds its footing.

The Roles, and the Order You Hire Them In

The common sequence for a full-service restaurant. Other formats compress — that's under the table.

Read the last column as a tendency, not a ruling. Exempt status is a duties-and-salary test applied to the actual job, and a "manager" who spends most of the week on the line is a wage claim waiting to be filed.

The order's logic: hire the people who hire and train everyone else first. A kitchen manager hired two weeks out inherits a staff they didn't pick and recipes they didn't test.

Food truck. Two to four cross-trained people, no dedicated front-of-house role — whoever isn't on the flat top is taking orders at the window. Hire for versatility, and for comfort in a space smaller and hotter than any kitchen they've worked in. Outfitting a food truck covers that space.

Ghost kitchen. Delete the front-of-house column, add a packer or expeditor. That role owns order accuracy, bag integrity, and courier handoff timing — the three things delivery platform ratings measure — so understaff it and your cooking gets blamed for what happens after the food leaves the pass. A ghost kitchen buildout covers that handoff.

Alcohol. You can't train a bar team before you know the license is landing, and good bartenders won't leave a working shift for a maybe. Expect that hire late and under pressure, and use the license wait to shop used bar equipment.

Why the Kitchen Hires First

Three dependencies, not a hierarchy.

Kitchen skill is site-specific. A cook with ten years in still doesn't know your recipes, plate specs, par levels, or that the left burner runs hot and the convection oven's hot spot is back-right. That gets learned over weeks of cooking on your equipment under something approximating service pressure.

The menu has to lock first. Every revision after training starts means retraining. Menu lock is the real gate on kitchen hiring, not the calendar.

Training can't start until equipment is in and commissioned. Gas connected, hood balanced and signed off, refrigeration holding temperature, suppression acceptance test done. Until then the kitchen is a construction site with cooks standing in it on payroll — and when hiring and buildout timelines collide, the buildout wins. Stage your cooking equipment against your training date, not your opening date, and use the equipment checklist to confirm nothing on the line is still an open purchase order three weeks out.

Front of house compresses because its systems — the POS, table numbering, sequence of service, menu talking points — can be taught in a half-finished dining room in days. The exception is an ambitious bar program: infusions, batching, and a dozen specs is closer to kitchen training, and should be scheduled that way.

A Realistic Hiring Timeline

Recruiters commonly describe this sequence for a full-service opening. Treat it as common practice, not a formula — your buildout schedule sets the real dates.

Food truck and ghost kitchen compress hard — two to four roles and a short training runway fit inside 30 to 45 days. Liquor stretches it, because bar hiring sits downstream of a license timeline you don't control and that routinely runs months; the permits and licenses checklist has the ranges and what drives that clock.

Hire above day-one headcount. Early attrition is normal, and losing two line cooks in week two with no bench is how a kitchen goes down. A cushion costs training payroll and beats an emergency hire in week three. Every training hour in those last two weeks is a wage paid against zero sales.

Where Restaurant Candidates Actually Come From

"Post a job ad" is not a sourcing plan. Roughly in order of how much of your time each is worth:

Your own hires' networks. The most productive channel once you have a GM and a chef. Put a referral bonus in place from your first hire, commonly split half at hire and half at 90 days so it pays for retention rather than introductions.

Culinary and hospitality placement offices. Culinary schools and most community college hospitality programs run a placement function and want local operators to place graduates with. Best channel for prep and junior line cooks, it costs a phone call, and externships let you watch someone work before you hire them.

Industry job boards. Names your candidates already use — Culinary Agents and Poached are two commonly cited examples, not endorsements — pull a more relevant audience than the general boards. Post there in addition, not instead.

Hospitality staffing agencies. A fast fill for a placement percentage or an hourly markup on temp-to-hire. Expensive per head, worth it when the alternative is opening short-staffed.

A job fair at the space. Once the buildout reads as a real kitchen, run open interviews on site. Everyone in this industry knows someone who quit a job for an opening that never opened, and walking a cook through a room with equipment in it converts that skepticism faster than any posting.

What to Pay: Building a Wage Scale

There is no honest national wage table for restaurant roles. State minimums run from the federal floor to more than double it, cities set their own above their state's, tipped minimums are a separate schedule, and many jurisdictions index annually. Any dollar figure printed here would be wrong somewhere and stale everywhere inside a year. Use the process instead.

1. Pull your actual floors. State minimum wage, city or county minimum if one exists, and your state's tipped cash wage if your state permits a tip credit at all. Your state labor department publishes all three, and that page is the only source worth trusting — not an aggregator, not a payroll vendor's blog, not this one.

2. Read competitor postings in your metro. Job listings are public wage data, and most markets now post ranges. Twenty line-cook listings within a few miles of your address beats any survey. Repeat for each role.

3. Sanity-check non-tipped roles against BLS. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program publishes metro-level wage percentiles by occupation, including cooks, dishwashers, and food service managers. It lags the market, but it tells you whether your number is in the right neighborhood.

4. Build the scale, not the individual numbers. Set the spread between prep, line, and lead, then between a second-year cook and a new one. Three cooks hired at three negotiated numbers with no logic behind them will compare notes in week two, and they'll be right to be annoyed.

5. Run it through fully loaded labor. Payroll taxes, experience-rated unemployment insurance, workers' comp, and any benefits sit on top of gross wages. Model the scale with the fully-loaded labor calculation or your labor budget reads several points light before you've hired anyone. Workers' comp is priced off payroll and classification code, and the employee count that triggers the requirement is state-set — some states from the first employee, others higher, each with its own treatment of owners and officers. Restaurant insurance covers how it's priced and bound.

The line item people miss entirely is pre-opening payroll: training wages for the last two weeks plus GM and chef salary for the 60 to 90 days before you take a dollar. It belongs in your startup cost estimate as its own line, not in "miscellaneous."

The Compliance Floor: Before Anyone's First Shift

This assumes you already have an EIN and a formed entity — payroll can't run without an EIN — and know which food handler and manager certification your county accepts. Neither is re-explained here, and which entity to form is its own question. What follows attaches to every hire, in the order it comes up.

Form I-9 and work authorization

Every employer, regardless of size, completes a Form I-9 for every employee hired to work in the United States. No small-business exemption and no exemption for U.S. citizens — "I know him, he grew up here" is not an I-9.

Timing is what people get wrong. The employee completes Section 1 no later than their first day of work for pay. You complete Section 2, examining their documentation, within three business days of the start-of-work date — or by the first day worked if the job is shorter than three days. Miss the window and the paperwork itself is the violation, independent of whether the employee was authorized.

E-Verify is a separate system sitting on top of the I-9: federally voluntary for most private employers, mandatory for certain federal contractors, and required by state law in a number of states — sometimes for all employers, sometimes only for public contractors. Confirm whether your state requires it before your first hire rather than assuming it's optional.

Past timing, this is attorney territory. Which documents are acceptable, how reverification works, how remote verification is handled — getting any of it wrong in either direction, accepting too little or demanding too much, creates exposure.

Form W-4 and state withholding

Every new hire completes a federal Form W-4, plus a state withholding certificate in states with an income tax. This is a form, not a decision: your payroll provider supplies the right ones and will generally refuse to run payroll until they're on file. The failure mode is cutting a first check before the paperwork exists.

State new-hire reporting

Separate from payroll and separate from the I-9, every new hire gets reported to your state's new-hire directory, which feeds child support enforcement. Federal law sets the floor at 20 calendar days from the date of hire; a number of states require it faster — some as quickly as seven days, some tied to your payroll cycle. Look up your state's number rather than assuming 20. Many payroll providers file it automatically during onboarding; get written confirmation that yours does.

Classification and wage-and-hour basics

Two classification questions, and both of them get restaurants sued.

Exempt versus non-exempt decides whether someone earns overtime. It turns on actual job duties plus a salary basis and a salary threshold — not a job title, and not the fact that you agreed to pay a salary. Calling a shift leader "manager" and paying a flat weekly amount doesn't make them exempt if they spend the week cooking. Most restaurant roles are non-exempt, and genuine management roles still need the duties test applied honestly.

The federal salary threshold shows why you verify rather than remember. A 2024 Department of Labor rule would have raised it in stages; a federal court vacated that rule in November 2024, and the department restored the prior level — $684 per week, $35,568 a year — in 2026. That's the federal figure as of this writing, after moving twice inside two years, and several states set their own thresholds above it. Check the current federal number and your state's before you write an offer letter.

Employee versus independent contractor is the more expensive mistake. Paying a cook, server, dishwasher, or driver on a 1099 to avoid payroll taxes is among the most common labor errors in this industry and one of the costliest to unwind — back taxes, back overtime, penalties, and interest, with federal and state agencies each able to come at it independently. The test is multi-factor, but the factors that carry weight are ones you control: who sets the schedule, who directs the work, who provides the equipment. On those, kitchen and service staff almost always land as employees. If you're considering 1099 for anyone who works a shift, run it past an employment attorney first.

The Tip Credit: How It Works, and What to Confirm for Your State

If your concept has tipped employees, this is the highest-variance rule in the guide, and the one where a wrong assumption compounds silently every pay period until someone files a claim.

The federal mechanism: under the Fair Labor Standards Act, an employer may pay a tipped employee a cash wage as low as $2.13 per hour and count the employee's tips toward the rest of the federal minimum wage of $7.25 — a maximum federal tip credit of $5.12 per hour. The credit is conditional, not automatic. If cash wage plus actual tips doesn't reach the full minimum wage in a given workweek, the employer owes the difference for that week, per employee, and tracking that is your job. There are also notice requirements to satisfy before taking the credit at all.

What matters more than the mechanism: those federal figures are a floor most states build on top of, and in several states they don't apply at all.

• A group of states currently permits no tip credit whatsoever — tipped employees get the full state minimum wage in cash before a dollar of tips. Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington are commonly identified in that group. Treat that as a list to verify, not a fact to rely on: states have added and removed tip credits, and ballot measures and phase-in schedules have moved several jurisdictions recently.
• Most other states set their own tipped cash-wage floor above the federal $2.13, sometimes far above, and many index it annually.
• Some cities set their own tipped wage separately from their state's.

So the only correct answer to "what do I pay a server" is on your state labor department's current tipped-wage page, cross-checked against your city. Look it up before your first offer and again every January — indexed jurisdictions change on a schedule and nobody sends you a notice. Where state and federal rules differ, the one more favorable to the employee applies.

Paying full cash minimum wage and taking no credit is a legitimate alternative if you'd rather not reconcile a conditional wage against actual tips every week. It also changes what you can do with a tip pool.

Tip Pooling and the 80/20 Question

Tip pooling is a separate rule with its own history. Under the Department of Labor's 2021 final rule, the composition of a mandatory tip pool depends on whether you take a tip credit.

So yes, you can share tips with the kitchen — but generally only if you've given up the tip credit and are paying full cash minimum wage. You don't get both. And either way, managers and supervisors may never keep any portion of a tip pool. A manager who receives a tip directly from a customer for service they themselves provided is treated differently from a manager dipping into a pool, but "the owner takes a cut" is not a lawful arrangement, and it gets enforced. Layer state law on top of all of it: state tip-pooling rules can be more restrictive than federal law, and some limit pool composition regardless of your wage structure. Two layers to check, not one.

Then the dual-jobs question, better known by the numbers attached to it. The DOL's 2021 "80/20/30" rule limited how much non-tipped side work a tipped employee could perform before the employer lost tip-credit eligibility for that time — a percentage cap on directly supporting work plus a continuous-time limit. The Fifth Circuit vacated that rule nationwide in Restaurant Law Center v. DOL, decided August 23, 2024.

Read that carefully. The dual-jobs concept still exists in the regulation: an employee who works two distinct jobs for you, one tipped and one not, can't have the tip credit applied to the non-tipped job. What's gone is that rule's specific percentage test — and a vacated federal rule says nothing about state side-work limits, which some states have and that case never touched. This one was issued, litigated, and struck down inside three years, and a future administration could issue something similar. Confirm the current federal position and your state's rule with an employment attorney or your state labor department before building a schedule that leans on tipped employees doing significant prep and cleaning.

Minors, Postings, and the Rest of the List

Minors on the payroll

Federal child labor rules are specific about kitchens. Federally, no one under 18 may operate, feed, set up, adjust, repair, or clean power-driven meat slicers, grinders, choppers or cutters, or bakery mixers. That's a categorical bar, not a training or supervision question, and those machines are standard equipment. Cleaning is included — the detail that catches operators who assumed a 17-year-old breaking down the slicer at close was fine.

Employees aged 14 and 15 face an additional layer: limits on hours per day and per week, and on how early and how late they can work, differing between the school year and summer. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds have no federal hour limits but remain subject to the equipment bar.

State law can be stricter and frequently is — states set their own minimum working age and hour restrictions, and many require a work permit or age certificate through the school district before a minor's first shift. It can never be looser than the federal floor. Get your state's youth employment rules from your state labor department before you hire anyone under 18.

Required postings

Certain notices have to be physically displayed where employees can see them. The federal baseline most restaurants need: OSHA's "Job Safety and Health: It's the Law," the FLSA minimum wage poster (which carries required tip credit notice content), and the EEOC "Know Your Rights" poster once you reach 15 employees.

States add their own and the list gets long — minimum wage, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, paid sick or safe leave, discrimination and harassment notices. Some cities require more, and some states require certain notices in other languages once a share of your workforce speaks them. Federal and state posters are free from the agencies that require them, so skip the laminated compliance package vendors sell. Audit the board against your state's current list, and again each year when minimum wages change.

Scheduling Laws: Predictive Scheduling Ordinances

Predictive scheduling laws — also called fair workweek ordinances — change how you build a schedule, and they exist in a small number of places.

The mechanism is consistent even where the details aren't. Covered employers post the schedule a set number of days in advance, commonly around 14. Changes after that window trigger a premium payment to the affected employee for an added shift, a cancellation, or a time change, scaled to the notice given. Many require a rest period between a closing and an opening shift — the "clopening" — or premium pay when there isn't one, and several require offering additional hours to existing part-timers before hiring someone new.

Where they exist is the important part. Oregon is commonly described as the only state with a statewide law; New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are the commonly cited city examples. Verify both against the current ordinance text, because this area moves and secondary sources disagree. Notice periods, premium amounts, and covered industries differ city to city, and several of these ordinances reach only certain sectors — some cover fast food or retail chains specifically rather than restaurants generally.

Two things keep this from being a rule you can assume applies to you. Coverage almost always keys off employer size — a headcount threshold, a location-count threshold, or both. These were written with chains in mind, so a single independent in a covered city is frequently exempt; read the coverage section before concluding anything either way. And several states have preempted their own cities from adopting these ordinances at all, so a large city with a serious restaurant scene may have no such law and no ability to pass one.

Check your city, then the size threshold — before you build the habit of calling people off on slow Tuesdays.

Hiring Is Also a Turnover Problem

Restaurant turnover runs high industry-wide and is commonly reported to concentrate in the first 90 days — which means much of your turnover cost is decided before the person works a shift, by how you recruited and onboarded them.

Give a realistic job preview. Describe the hardest shift — the volume, the hours, the physical reality of the station. People who quit in week three usually quit because the job wasn't what they were sold, not because it was hard.

Have an onboarding plan, not an orientation. A written sequence for the first two weeks: what they learn on which day, who teaches it, and what "trained" means for their station.

Don't understaff the training week. The week you're most tempted to save payroll is the week that decides whether your first hires stay. A trainer who's also working a station is not training anyone.

Each is a cost you pay on purpose, up front, instead of paying it all year in replacement hiring and the inefficiency of a permanently green team.

What to Ask Your State Labor Department or an Employment Attorney

What applies to you is a short conversation with someone who knows your state — short only if you show up with the questions written down.

• Does my state permit a tip credit, what's the cash wage, and does my city set a different one?
• What's my state's tip pooling rule, and does it differ from the federal one?
• Does my state have its own side-work or dual-jobs limit, independent of the vacated federal rule?
• Is E-Verify mandatory for private employers here, or only for public contractors?
• How many days do I have to report a new hire to the state directory?
• What's the minimum working age for a restaurant here, and does a minor need a work permit first?
• Does my city have a predictive scheduling ordinance, and does my size trigger coverage?
• At what employee count does workers' comp become mandatory, and do I cover myself as an owner-operator?
• Which state postings must I display, which need other languages, and does my state set its own exempt salary threshold?

Write down who told you what, and when. Wage-and-hour questions resurface two years later, and a dated note with a name on it is worth more than a memory.

Frequently Asked Questions

What order should I hire restaurant staff in?

Leadership first, then kitchen, then front of house. A common full-service sequence is GM and/or kitchen manager 60 to 90 days before opening, chef or kitchen lead at 60 to 75, core line and prep cooks at 30 to 60, dishwasher around 21 to 30, and front-of-house staff in the last three to four weeks. Kitchen leads because of training time: cooks need weeks on your actual equipment with a locked menu, while a server learns a new floor in two or three shifts. Bartenders are gated separately by your liquor license.

How much does it cost to hire and train a restaurant's first team?

The wages aren't what surprises people. It's pre-opening payroll — your GM and chef on salary for 60 to 90 days before any revenue, plus the full team's training wages in the final two weeks — along with agency fees and the extra headcount you carry above the day-one schedule to absorb early attrition. Build it as its own line in your startup cost estimate, and model wages fully loaded with payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, and workers' comp rather than at gross.

Do I have to include kitchen staff in a tip pool?

You're generally not required to, and whether you're permitted to depends on your wage structure. Under the DOL's 2021 rule, an employer taking a tip credit is limited to a pool of employees who customarily receive tips; an employer paying full minimum wage in cash with no tip credit may include back-of-house staff like cooks and dishwashers. Managers and supervisors can never keep any share of a pool either way. State law can be more restrictive than federal law, so confirm both layers with your state labor department.

What is the tip credit and does my state allow it?

The tip credit lets an employer count a portion of an employee's tips toward the minimum wage obligation. Federally, the cash wage can go as low as $2.13 an hour with up to $5.12 in tips credited toward the $7.25 federal minimum — but only if tips actually bring the employee to full minimum wage each workweek, and the employer owes the difference when they don't. Whether it's available to you is a state question: Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington are commonly identified as permitting no tip credit at all, and most other states set a cash wage floor above $2.13. Verify on your state labor department's current tipped-wage page, because these change.

What paperwork do I need before someone's first shift at a restaurant?

A completed Form I-9 — the employee's Section 1 by their first day of work for pay, your Section 2 within three business days of the start-of-work date. A federal Form W-4, plus your state's withholding certificate if your state has an income tax. New-hire reporting within your state's deadline; the federal floor is 20 days and several states require it faster. Plus whatever food handler card your county requires, workers' comp coverage if you've crossed your state's employee threshold, and required federal and state notices posted where staff can see them.