How much should restaurant owners pay themselves?
Plate costs creep, weekends carry weekdays, and one slow season eats a year of margin. The math below uses Ember & Oak, the demo restaurant inside Counsel.
Ember & Oak, a full-service restaurant, runs a 29% margin and clears a median $4,100 a month after every cost. Its worst honest month is $1,900. With $22,800 in the bank against $6,000 of monthly burn, it holds 3.8 months of runway.
The safe draw sits at or below the $4,100 median, with a written answer for how a $1,900 month gets bridged. A draw set above the median here would quietly spend the runway one month at a time.
Median of the last 6 to 8 months of profit as the ceiling; worst honest month as the floor; cash runway as the referee. The full method, including how to compute it by hand in ten minutes, is in the main pay-yourself guide, and the calculator sorts your months for you.
What is specific to restaurant owners
Seasonality means the median should be computed across a full year when you can; a summer-only median flatters a patio. Watch the margin line as hard as the profit line, because plate-cost creep hides inside good revenue months, and the watchlist should light up the moment margin crosses your floor, not the quarter you notice it.
Connect Square, Stripe, Shopify, Etsy, QuickBooks, or your bank. Every answer carries a receipt: the method, the sample size, and the confidence. When the math is not conclusive, it says so.
Get Counsel on the App Store Try the web demoCounsel's rule, applied to its own content: every figure above is computed, sourced from our demo businesses or your own inputs, never invented. This is cash math, not tax or legal advice. Written and maintained by the founder.