How to own a restaurant in Italy while living in the US

Every American who writes to us eventually asks the same question, usually in the second email: "Do I have to move to Italy?"

The honest answer: no. But someone has to be there. In the dining room when a supplier shorts a delivery, at the town hall when a permit needs a signature, in the kitchen when the food cost drifts two points. A restaurant is a daily business; oceans don't change that.

The good news is that "someone" doesn't have to be you. This is exactly the model we run — for ourselves and for our clients.

The operating partner model

Think of it as the difference between owning a building and being its property manager. You own the company, the lease, the brand and the profits. We are the operating partner on the ground:

• Before opening: we scout and verify the location, negotiate the lease, run the build-out, hire the team with regular Italian contracts, negotiate with suppliers, and build the menu with margins calculated before the card is printed.
• After opening: we run service, manage the team, watch the numbers every single night, and handle everything Italian bureaucracy throws at a food business — which is a lot.

You stay the owner. We are accountable to you, with numbers, not anecdotes.

What "weekly reporting across the ocean" actually means

Our venues run on a back-office system we build in-house. Every week our owners see, from any device, in plain English:

• Sales by day and by service, against the same week last month
• Food cost, computed from actual purchases, not estimates
• Labor hours and their cost per cover
• Cash position and distance from break-even
• What happened and what we're doing about it, in five lines a human wrote

The point isn't the dashboard. The point is that you never have to ask "how's it going over there?" — you already know, before your morning coffee in New York.

The legal scaffolding (it's simpler than you fear)

Three pieces make remote ownership work in Italy, all standard and fully legal:

1. 100% foreign ownership. A US citizen can own an Italian S.r.l. outright. No Italian partner is legally required, ever. If someone tells you otherwise, they want to be that partner.
2. The qualified manager (preposto). Italian law requires someone with a professional food-service qualification in the business. It doesn't have to be the owner: the company appoints a qualified manager who formally takes that role. That's us. We wrote a full guide on licenses and the preposto route.
3. Power of attorney for the paperwork. For filings, utilities and banking operations that need a physical presence, a notarized power of attorney lets your operating partner act without flying you in for every signature.

Add the investor visa if you eventually want residency — but plenty of our conversations are with owners who visit their restaurant three times a year and love it that way.

We're doing this right now

This isn't a theoretical service page. As we write, we are the operating partners for a US family opening their restaurant in Piedmont: investor-grade business plan first, then €184,000 of construction managed on their behalf, weekly reports crossing the ocean every Monday.

And we test everything on ourselves before offering it: in 2026 we reopened and personally ran Ristorante ART in Punta Ala, Tuscany — a venue its own town had written off — closing the first 80-day season above €100,000 with the books reconciled to the cent. The full story is here.

What goes wrong without someone on the ground

We've been called in to fix these, so we'll just list them: the lease signed on premises where a kitchen flue can't legally be installed. The "trusted local contact" who was trusted by three other owners too. The chef who ran the purchasing with no food cost control, at 42%. The permit filed in the wrong order that froze the opening by four months, with rent running.

None of these are exotic. All of them are what happens when ownership is remote and operations are unsupervised. Fix the second part and the first is a lifestyle choice, not a risk.

What this costs, honestly

Our engagements start with a Feasibility Check (from €2,000): a written report with real numbers for your specific area — costs, licenses, timeline, break-even. Then, if the numbers convince both of us, the full project is priced on scope: setup as a one-off, ongoing operations as a management fee tied to results. We will tell you if your budget doesn't fit the dream before you spend it. That's cheaper for you and better for our track record.

If this sounds like your situation, start from the complete guide to opening a restaurant in Italy — or tell us about your project. We answer within 24 hours, with real numbers, not a brochure.