Restaurant business in Nigeria: what to plan before you open

A restaurant business in Nigeria is easier to start than it is to keep. Registering, renting and cooking are the visible parts, and plenty of people get through all three. The parts that decide whether the shop is still open in two years are quieter: what your running costs do each month, where your orders come from, and whether you own any record of the people who bought from you. This article walks through those three, in the order a new owner meets them.

Choose the shape before the shop

There are three shapes worth considering, and the choice changes almost everything after it.

A place with tables needs frontage, seating, service staff and a location people pass. It earns the most per customer and costs the most to hold open on a slow Tuesday.

A takeaway counter needs a small unit and fewer staff. Most of the money arrives in a rush at lunch and again at night.

A kitchen with no shopfront needs only a licensed kitchen space, packaging and a way for people to find you. Rent falls sharply. Being found becomes your whole problem instead.

Decide this first, because it sets your rent, your staff count and the number of people who will ever walk past your door.

Two running costs that will not sit still

Food is the obvious one. Nigeria's food prices are still climbing faster than most menus are rewritten: the National Bureau of Statistics recorded food inflation of 20.31 percent in July 2026 against the same month a year earlier. A menu priced in January and left alone is a menu quietly losing money by June. Price your dishes off current costs, and give yourself a way to change a price in seconds rather than reprinting.

Power is the one people underestimate. A survey of women-led small businesses by the Renewable Energy Association of Nigeria found close to half of them spending between two and five thousand naira a day on generator fuel, and reported that 86 percent of businesses rely on fossil fuel generators. For a kitchen with freezers, that is a fixed cost before you sell a single plate. Count it into your dish prices from day one rather than discovering it in month three.

Where the orders will come from

Every restaurant business in Nigeria ends up with some mix of five channels, and each has a different price.

Walk-in customers cost you rent. Phone calls cost you a staff member holding a handset during the rush, and orders get taken down wrong. Instagram and WhatsApp messages cost you the same person, plus the back and forth of confirming an address. Delivery apps cost you a share of every order, and we go through that trade in the guide to online food delivery platforms.

The fifth channel is your own ordering page. A link and a printed square that lead to your menu, take the whole order without a conversation, and put the address in your hand.

None of these is wrong on its own. What is wrong is having only the ones somebody else controls. If every order this month arrived through an app or through a direct message on somebody else's platform, then your business is a supplier to their business.

The record almost nobody keeps

Ask an owner who their best customer is. Most can describe the person and cannot produce the phone number.

That record is the most valuable thing a kitchen builds, and it is what survives a bad month, a rent increase or an app leaving the country. Holding it also comes with a duty now. The Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 is enforced by the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, whose stated job is to safeguard data privacy and promote responsible data handling. In plain terms: keep the list, keep it safe, and be able to remove somebody from it when they ask.

"The first thing I ask a kitchen is not what they sell. It is how many phone numbers they can hand me today. When the answer is none, every naira they spend on getting noticed has to be spent again next month."

— Anzul Aqeel, founder of Get Menu

What Get Menu puts behind your own link

We built one system for exactly this problem, and it is worth being specific about what a Nigerian kitchen gets.

Your menu sits at your own address on getmenu.ae from the first day, and it is included in every plan. There are 12 page layouts, 57 colour themes and a font picker, so the page looks like your shop rather than a template. Nothing is installed by the customer.

Dishes carry options and add-ons with their own prices, so a size, a protein or an extra portion adds the right amount. You can mark a choice as required, and the item cannot be added until it is answered. Menus load from a spreadsheet if you already have one, which saves an evening of typing.

At the moment of checkout every line is priced again from the live menu, so a price you raised at four o'clock is honoured at eight. A double tap cannot create two orders. There is a minimum order value if you want one.

Stock counts fall as orders come in, options keep their own counts, and a dish greys out by itself at zero. Cancel an order and the stock returns.

About 2 seconds after a customer confirms, 3 messages leave the system: a confirmation to the customer, a ticket to your managers' group, and a dispatch note to your riders' group carrying the map pin the customer dropped at checkout. Every message is logged with whether it arrived. If a number cannot be reached on WhatsApp, an SMS can be sent from your own SIM instead.

For delivery, the customer picks their estate or building from a list you control, and the fee can differ per building. Free delivery can start above a total you choose. Riders open a link and need no account.

For the repeat customers you want back, stamps can count per order or per amount spent, regulars grow into tiers, and rewards expire so people use them. The card lives in Google Wallet and updates itself. The Apple version is built and awaiting a certificate. Coupons take caps, exclusions and expiry dates, and two discounts never combine by accident, because only the better one applies. There is more on printing the square in the piece on the qr code menu, and a wider tour in our guide to restaurant management software.

Invoices carry your registration number as a PDF the customer downloads with no login, sales export to a spreadsheet, and your customer list exports on any day, including the day you leave us. The trial runs 15 days with no card details, then one flat monthly price with 0% of your sales taken.

What it does not do

It does not bring you strangers. There is no marketplace and no listing of hungry browsers, so your first customers still come from your street, your Instagram and the apps.

It does not employ riders. Yours, or a logistics company you hire, do the driving.

And there are no online payments. Customers pay cash or through your own card machine at the door, which also means no card details sit anywhere in the system.

If you are opening this year

Get the kitchen and the licence sorted, then price the menu against this month's market prices rather than last year's. Put the generator into the price of every dish. Open the ordering page in the same week you open the shop, not a year later, so the numbers start collecting from your very first customer. Print the square on the packaging, the receipt and the shop door. Then look at one figure every month: how many orders came straight to you.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to start a small restaurant in Nigeria?

It depends far more on shape than on cooking. A kitchen with no shopfront can start on rent for a licensed space, equipment and packaging. A place with tables adds frontage, fit-out and service staff. Build your plan from rent, power and food cost first, because those three repeat every month.

Is a restaurant business in Nigeria still profitable?

It can be, and margin is decided by control rather than by turnover. Food prices and generator fuel push costs up, so the money is protected by pricing accurately, wasting less, and keeping a share of orders on a channel that charges you nothing per sale.

Do I need to join a delivery app?

At the start it is usually the fastest way to be found by people who do not know you. The change worth making is having your own page ready at the same time, so the second order from that customer can come directly to you.

Do my customers have to install an app to order?

No. Your menu opens like any web page from a link or a printed square, and the loyalty card goes into the wallet already on their phone.

Can my customers pay online?

No. Payment is cash or your own card machine at the door. Nothing sensitive is stored, because none of it is ever collected.