Restaurant location scouting & scoring sheet (India)

What the 8 factors capture

Footfall & visibility is the free-advertising layer — daily walk-by count at peak, frontage width, signage sightlines from the main road, corner-plot exposure. QSR and casual dining live or die on these; cloud kitchens can cheerfully ignore them. Catchment & demographics is the income, office-density, and residential-density profile within 500m / 1km — the structural ceiling on weekday lunch, dinner, and aggregator order volume. Accessibility & parkingcovers public transport stops, customer car parking, two-wheeler parking, delivery rider staging, and Uber drop-off ease. Indian tier-1 cities still have car-led casual dining customers; tier-2 and tier-3 are two-wheeler-led; cloud kitchens are rider-led. Get the right one wrong and you bleed covers.

Rent & lease terms is the cost gate — rent per sqft, lease tenure (≥9 years with renewal is the floor), lock-in length, escalation cap, security deposit. Most first-time owners over-index on the rent number and under-index on the structural lease terms; a 5-year lease with 12%/3-year escalation will quietly become unviable by year 6. Build-out & layoutis what your contractor and kitchen designer need: carpet area suitable for your format, kitchen-area %, exhaust/chimney duct route, three-phase power, water connection, PNG availability. Any one of these absent can add ₹3-10 lakh of unplanned capex. Competition & saturation, statutory & risk, and operational logistics wrap it up — direct competitors within 500m, anchor brand cluster effect, aggregator menu saturation; Fire NOC feasibility, FSSAI Central vs State, flood history, neighbour noise tolerance, liquor licence feasibility; Swiggy/Zomato rider density, cold-chain supplier reach, garbage handling, and staff commute.

How to weight by format

The tool already does this — but the underlying logic matters. A QSR needs frontage width 5/5, signage visibility 5/5, footfall 5/5, office density 5/5, and aggregator coverage 4/5 — but cares less about parking (3/5) or fine-dining-style customer demographics. A cloud kitchen inverts almost all of that — frontage 1/5, signage 1/5, but rider staging 5/5, PNG availability 5/5, aggregator coverage 5/5, kitchen-area % 5/5. A bar needs liquor licence feasibility 5/5, neighbour noise tolerance 5/5, late-night drop-off ease 4/5. A fine diningoutlet needs catchment income 5/5, customer parking 5/5, lease tenure 5/5, and tolerance for a much higher rent absolute (because ATV is 4-6x QSR).

The rent-adjustment in the ranking is a configurable cost penalty — 1 point per ₹1000/month by default. That converts a higher-rent better-location site into the same scale as a lower-rent worse-location site, so you can compare apples to apples. Tune the penalty in Settings if your format runs at a different rent-to-revenue ratio (QSR typically 6-8%, cloud 4-6%, casual 8-10%, fine dining 10-12%, bar 12-14%).

Where this fits

• Restaurant location scouting checklist (India) — the long-form narrative behind this scoring sheet, with specific Indian city case studies, peak-hour observation playbook, and how to negotiate the lease once you've picked the site
• Cloud kitchen vs dine-in restaurant (India) — the format-choice trade-off this scoring tool reflects: how the location matrix diverges between cloud and dine-in
• Small restaurant business plan (India template) — the broader plan this site-selection step plugs into: format, location, menu, capex, working capital, breakeven, Year-1 P&L
• Pre-opening checklist — once the site is picked, this is the T-90 to Day +7 sequencing of statutory + operational tasks
• Breakeven analysis calculator — once you have the rent number from the chosen site, the breakeven calculator tells you whether the covers/day target is realistic
• Equipment list builder — the BOM you'll need to fit into the build-out area you scored on this site
• P7 — First-time owner pillar — every article we've published for first-time restaurant owners, sequenced from concept through Year-1 survival