Firstly, if you have no experience in the restaurant business, I’d advise that you find work in restaurants for the next six months or so doing everything from busing tables and washing dishes to waiting tables and cooking if they’ll allow you back there and if you have the skills. This will give you some of the work experience that you’ll need to understand and run a cafe/restaurant profitably.
If this is your first business venture, I would strongly recommend that you talk to a business counselor before you do anything especially spend money. If you are in the USA, I’d call the local office of SCORE (go to http://www.score.org and input your zip code to find the chapter nearest you), the advice is FREE. Ask for someone who has a background in restaurants and they’ll try their best to match you with the right counselor.
The business counselor at SCORE will most likely advise you to write a business plan which is very good advice because it will make you dig out all of the start up details and the costs of opening a restaurant and force you to also understand all of the other aspects of this business including the customers you’ll concentrate on (your market ) and how you’ll get them to discover and want to come to your fabulous cafe/restaurant.
The location of the restaurant is important but doesn’t make it successful. To prove that all you have to do is walk down a street in your town where there are several nice restaurants all in a row and you’ll find one or two that are empty while the others are very busy. It has to do with the menu, the ambiance, and your reputation at the beginning and over time.
You also have to have food handling licenses, the right zoning, the right city and county licenses and permits and you have to be skilled at negotiating with your landlord about who’ll stand the cost of the build-out or the changes to the premises to make it ready for your look and feel. You also have to worry about the normal business planning and management issues related to starting up any business.