The restaurant employee handbook

Search for a restaurant handbook template and you get two things: a PDF somebody scanned, or an actual restaurant's own handbook that happened to get indexed. Neither knows whether you are in California or Texas, and for a restaurant that difference is most of the document.

Why restaurants are the hard case

Four things make food service the industry where a generic handbook does the least good.

Tips. Tip pooling, tip credits and service charges are heavily regulated and vary by state. Getting the wage-and-hour section wrong here is the single most expensive handbook mistake a restaurant can make.
Breaks. There is no federal meal or rest break requirement. Whether your staff get one, how long, and what happens if a shift runs over is entirely a state question — and shift work is exactly where it bites.
Minors. Hour restrictions and prohibited tasks for workers under 18 are state-specific and strictest in food service.
Turnover. A handbook that gets read once at hire and never again has to be short, plain and specific. Long is not the same as thorough.

What your state adds — the two extremes

Take the same 18-person coffee roaster in two states.

California

A 30-minute meal period once a shift passes five hours, taken by the end of the fifth hour, and a second past ten. A net ten minutes of paid rest per four hours worked or major fraction. Paid sick leave accruing at one hour per 30 worked, usable from day 90. Harassment training for everyone because you are past five employees. Expense reimbursement if staff use their own phones for scheduling. Final pay in the till the day you let someone go.

Texas

No state meal or rest break requirement. No state sick leave. Pay at least twice a month for non-exempt staff. Final pay within six calendar days of a discharge, or the next regular payday if they quit. Jury service protected. Almost everything else in your handbook is the federal floor — and a handbook that says so in one honest paragraph is more useful than one that pads.

Same business, same job descriptions, materially different handbook. That is the whole argument for building one from your answers rather than editing a template.

What we do and do not cover

Your answers in the wizard shape what lands in the document. Be clear on the limits, though:

We include your state's meal and rest period rules where the state sets them, its sick leave, its final-pay deadlines, and the federal wage-and-hour baseline.
Ticking some employees receive tips adds the federal tip policy — tips are yours except under a valid tip pool, and the notice a tip credit requires — and puts the rest on your completion checklist.
We do not compute your tip credit, design your tip pool, or set your minor-hour schedules. Those depend on facts we do not collect and get their own line on your completion checklist instead of a confident guess.
Ticking Restaurant, bar or food service adds a section naming what your industry must handle OUTSIDE the handbook — food safety and allergen training, health-department permits, alcohol server licensing — as completion items. It does not write those policies.
In Illinois it also adds the separate written sexual harassment policy that 775 ILCS 5/2-110 requires of every restaurant and bar, with the six elements the statute specifies and the supplemental training that goes with it.

Covered states

California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Michigan, Washington, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Colorado. If you have staff in a state outside that list, wait — tell us which and we will add it.

Build my restaurant's handbook — $149

Informational, not legal advice. Wage-and-hour exposure in food service is real; have counsel review your handbook and your tip practices before you rely on them.