How to write a restaurant business plan in Nepal

Most Nepali hotels and restaurants are started on their owners' own money: 71.6% of them, in the national survey published in January 2025, against 28.4% on loans from banks or financial institutions. Either way, a plan is how you check that rent, wages and gas leave something over at the number of guests you can really expect, before you have signed a lease or bought a kitchen.

If you borrow, the bank will judge you by it. An article on bank lending in New Business Age (2025) says banks often see revenue hopes that are too optimistic and repayment plans that are unclear, and want projections that are realistic and backed by data. Have your registration papers and PAN ready too, and, for a larger loan, collateral.

Keep it short. A plan you can explain in ten minutes, with numbers you can defend, does more than a thick file.

Ten parts cover a restaurant or café. The last four are numbers, worked through for an example café below. Write the summary last.

Describe the place in a sentence a guest would use: a quiet café for students near the campus, a momo house for office lunches. The menu, the prices and the rent you can afford all follow from it.

Then test the location. Stand outside at breakfast, at lunch, in the evening and on a Saturday, and count who passes and who goes in where. List every café and restaurant within a few minutes' walk and what they charge: the Kathmandu Valley alone has about 15,000 restaurants and cafés, most of them opened after Covid (Kathmandu Post, 2024).

Write the lease into the plan: the rent, the advance, and how fast the rent will rise. Kathmandu shop rents had been rising about 10% a year by 2023 (Kathmandu Post), and one Kathmandu restaurateur's landlord asked for 25% more after ten years (Business 360, 2025). Check, too, that the space may be used as a restaurant: some outlets had to close when restaurants were banned from basements.

Cost every dish: what the ingredients for one plate cost you, waste included, as a share of its price. For most restaurants, ingredients come to 25% to 35% of sales, by one international benchmark (ChowNow, 2025). What sells matters as much as any one price, so plan on the mix you expect, not on your best dish.

Don't plan on a service charge. In January 2023, the Supreme Court's constitutional bench struck down the Labour Act clause behind the 10% charge, and ruled that no one can add a service charge to a customer's bill. What you pay your staff has to come out of the menu prices.

Plan, too, for costs to rise faster than you can raise prices. In 2026, Kathmandu restaurant owners reported costs up 25% to 30% as imported food and transport got dearer (Kathmandu Post).

Here is how the numbers fit together for an imaginary 30-seat café serving coffee, breakfast and simple meals, open every day. Where Nepali sources publish a figure, the example uses it; the rest, and all the sales figures, are the example owner's estimates. Replace every one with your own quotes and counts.

First, everything paid before the first guest:

Then the costs that come due whether the café is busy or not, in a 30-day month:

Each guest leaves something towards those costs: what they pay, less what their food and drink cost you. In the example, guests spend Rs 450 on average and ingredients take 35% of that, so each guest leaves Rs 292.50.

Break-even is the monthly costs divided by that: Rs 2.98 lakh ÷ Rs 292.50 is about 1,020 guests a month, or 34 a day. Below it the café loses money; above it, every guest adds Rs 292.50 of profit.

Then forecast three ways, because the first months are rarely the expected ones. 45 guests a day in 30 seats means each seat is used one and a half times a day: plausible with a breakfast and a lunch trade, but count your own street before you assume it.

Say where every rupee comes from: your savings, partners or family, and loans. In the example, the owner puts in Rs 14.6 lakh and borrows Rs 15 lakh over five years.

Borrowing is cheaper than it has been. The average lending rate of Nepal's banks and financial institutions was 6.90% in March 2026, the lowest on record, down from a peak of 13.03% in July 2023 (Kathmandu Post). What you are offered depends on your bank and your collateral, and rates can climb again, so the example plans at 10%: Rs 31,900 a month, which still leaves about Rs 96,500 of profit in the expected case.

Some borrowers get part of the interest paid by the government. Under the concessional loan rules revised in August 2025, it pays up to 3 percentage points of the interest on eight kinds of loan, including loans of up to Rs 25 lakh for women entrepreneurs and startups, and up to Rs 20 lakh for returnee migrant workers, educated young people and Dalit entrepreneurs. You apply through a bank, so ask yours whether your café qualifies.

Before you show anyone the plan, rerun the numbers for each of these, and write down what you would do:

The plan doesn't end when the bank says yes. Each month, put the real number of guests, the average bill, the ingredient costs and the fixed costs next to the forecast. When one drifts, you will see it in weeks rather than at the end of the year, while there is still time to change the menu, the prices or the hours.