Veronica, a neighborhood Business Manager in the City of Boston’s Small Business Unit, should be the first point of contact for restaurant owners opening a new venue. Her team’s mandate, after all, is to provide small business owners with the tools and guidance to successfully start, grow, and build a business in Boston. However, t many entrepreneurs do not know about her office and are left to navigate the process of opening a restaurant on their own—which can be especially challenging for new and aspiring restaurant owners. She explains that when trying to open a restaurant, “...you have to touch several departments and agencies, and that’s the problem: everyone’s process and requirements are different.”
Veronica acknowledges that restaurant owners get frustrated because there is no single entity or individual who has all the information they need—which is spread across a number of different departments.
This disconnect between the City and some of the people they serve is something we’ve uncovered as we continue exploration of the problem and interviewing restaurant owners and city officials. As a team of graduate students in Harvard’s class on innovation in government, we are spending a semester working with the Inspectional Services Department (ISD), and the City of Boston at large. Our goal is to improve communications between the City and constituents in order to provide an accessible, efficient, and effective restaurant opening experience for restaurateurs while ensuring compliance with existing regulations. In our first blog we uncovered some early evidence of restaurant owners’ frustrations. Now, we’ve put our boots on the ground and spent time face-to-face with people at various points of the restaurant opening process trying to answer critical questions.
The Journey of Opening a New Restaurant
What are the major pain points that restaurant owners experience during the permitting process? What are the positives of their experiences? What does the process look like from inside the City of Boston and how do city employees operate?
Getting the full picture of the inner workings of the City gives us important context as we seek to understand the restaurateur (that’s a fancy word for someone in charge of opening and running a restaurant). Talking with Veronica intrigued us: Why do restaurant owners feel the need to seek private contractors just to navigate the process?
To answer these questions, we were able to do 13 interviews with restaurant owners and 1 with an expert restaurant investor. We also did 2 visits to restaurants and had owners fill out our email questionnaires. Additionally, we went to ISD’s office and spoke with several staff members. We then took the data gathered from interviews and distilled the high and low points experienced by restaurant owners along the way.
In parallel, we attempted to go through the process of opening a restaurant ourselves. We started by searching online. We were overwhelmed. We couldn’t find the ‘Start a restaurant’ link on the ISD website (Figure 1). The same was the case for the Google link for the permitting process (Figure 2).
Figure 1: The top result from Google search for “How to open a restaurant in Boston” led us to the City of Boston website, but towards a missing page.
Figure 2: The overall results from Google search for “restaurant permitting process Boston” had old links and resources.
After seven weeks of working on this project and talking with various stakeholders, we still do not feel like we have a clear idea of what the process looks like and would not be able to confidently walk a new owner through it.
Our current understanding of the steps involved (user’s journey in design speak) when opening a restaurant is comprised of at least the following:
Identify and secure location of choice;
Identify required licensing and permitting by searching online;
Fill out needed forms (e.g. food service permit, liquor license, common victualler license);
Go to the Inspectional Services Department and City Hall to submit printed and filled out forms in person;
Pay for permits in person at the Inspectional Services Department for health and building inspections;
Call ISD between 8-9 am while inspectors are in office (before they go out into the field to do inspections) in order to request an inspection; and
Wait for inspectors to come by the restaurant while the restaurant remains closed.
This is certainly not a definitive list and both the order and number of steps is something that we are still researching. Moreover, different projects may skip some steps or require additional ones.
What We Found
We distilled our research into 6 insights:
The manual, disjointed, paper-based process is difficult for owners to navigate
“If you go in there blind, you’re gonna be lost.” “You need to get a paper receipt in person for everything.” -frustrated owner
“When we asked ISD how many permits it takes they told us they don’t know” -our student team
There is no single source of truth: there is conflicting information across departments and online resources
“The most frustrating part...is being passed on to different departments for a simple question and not being able to get a straight answer.” “You get bounced from one desk to another.” -frustrated owner
Information asymmetry leads to difficulty communicating between owners and inspectors
“The inspectors don’t have knowledge about modern kitchens so they miss things they should be focused on but they also focus on things that don’t matter anymore with updated tech.” -restaurants expert
Owners use assistance of lawyers and consultants to navigate the process but not everyone can afford it
"I can't imagine being a single person doing all of this because you may find out too late that you can’t open because there is something you had to do that you didn’t realize.” -restaurant general manager
"If I could save the money and do it myself, I absolutely would. [Lawyers] charge about $700 per hour." -first time restaurant owner
Unpredictable delays impose a financial cost on owners
"You need to hire staff, train staff...The guessing game of understanding how much time, how many inspections, how many re-inspections – that process is incredibly difficult to navigate.” -first time restaurant owner
Inspectors are constantly switching between the role of educator, regulator, and success partner
“It’s not their job to be your friend, it’s their job to make sure you did things properly.” -restaurant general manager
“We want the owners to succeed.” - ISD Inspector
Next Steps
Ultimately, the public doesn’t care about distinctions between City departments; they just want to get stuff done. For owners, the lack of a centralized place to get answers can become especially frustrating in situations when contradictory code requirements between different departments exist—for example, between fire department permitting and building permitting.
Our next steps are to work with ISD and the City of Boston to collect more data around existing gaps in our understanding. Additionally, we will go through several ideation phases to brainstorm solutions that will provide Boston restaurateurs with a better opening experience. Our approach will be to get as many ideas as possible on the table before choosing the best one.
Note: Names used throughout our blogs will be changed to protect privacy.
- Ian Cutler, Gavin Jiao, Amy Villasenor, Nicolas Diaz, Emily Chi