Ask five people what a restaurant is worth and you'll get five different numbers, most of them a feeling dressed up as a figure. The honest answer isn't a feeling — it's a multiple of provable earnings, and provable is doing most of the work in that sentence.
The EBITDA multiple is the anchor
The number most buyers and brokers actually use is a multiple of EBITDA — typically somewhere around 2–4×, hedged, as indicative ranges that move a lot with location, lease quality, and how dependent the business is on the current owner. A restaurant clearing CHF 150,000 in EBITDA isn't automatically worth CHF 450,000; the multiple is a starting point for a negotiation, not a formula that ends it.
What pushes you up or down the range
A long, transferable lease at a fair rent pushes you toward the top of the range; a lease expiring soon, or one that has to be renegotiated at sale, pushes you toward the bottom. A growing sales trend, a recognizable brand or location, and a team that isn't built around one irreplaceable person all move the number up. A business that would visibly wobble without its current owner in the kitchen moves it down, sometimes sharply — buyers price in the cost of finding, hiring, and training a replacement for whatever the owner was quietly doing themselves.
Why provable margin sells higher
Buyers — and the banks financing them — discount numbers they can't verify. A food cost backed by twelve months of invoices and real fiches techniques is provable; a food cost that's a line on a P&L with nothing behind it is a claim. The gap between those two closes the distance between what a seller asks and what a buyer actually offers, often by more than a point on the multiple.
The multiple is a start, not a price
None of this produces a single number you hand over unchanged. The multiple sets a range; the diligence that follows — real invoices, real fiches, the lease terms, equipment condition — is what moves you inside that range or, occasionally, resets it entirely. A seller who can't produce fiches techniques for their top sellers isn't just missing paperwork; they're handing you a legitimate reason to negotiate the multiple down.
None of this is precise enough to skip the diagnosis first — the due diligence checklist is what turns a seller's numbers into numbers you can actually trust before applying a multiple to them, and a multiple applied to unverified numbers is just a guess with extra decimal places. The estimator and the full valuation method are in the buying a restaurant guide, alongside the honest comparison of buying versus building from scratch.
