Opening a Restaurant in Poland: What Actually Stops You

Two dates decide when you open, and neither of them is the fit-out. Sanepid — the Polish sanitary inspectorate — wants your application at least 14 days before you open the doors, and the procedure can run to 30. The alcohol permit is a different authority, a different fee and a different clock. Everything else on your list can be bought forward with money. These two cannot.

This is written for someone who has run a restaurant before — in Türkiye or anywhere else — and is now doing it in a country whose administrative culture they do not yet read. The cooking is not the problem. The sequence is.

How long does it actually take?

From a standing start, with no company and no lease, plan on three to four months to a realistic opening and treat anything faster as luck rather than a plan.

The company is the fast part. A Polish spółka z o.o. registered through the online S24 route is a matter of days, not weeks, and it can be done before you have decided on a location. The slow parts are the ones tied to a physical address: you cannot file with sanepid for premises you have not leased, and you cannot apply for an alcohol permit without the premises either. So the lease is not one task among many. It is the gate every permit sits behind, which is why signing the wrong lease quickly costs more than signing the right one slowly.

What does Sanepid actually want?

Sanepid inspects and approves the premises, not your recipes. Its concern is the building: surfaces, ventilation, hand-washing points, the separation of clean and dirty flows, waste, water, staff facilities, and the paperwork that says who is responsible for what.

Two things are worth knowing before you meet it. First, the notice period is a minimum, not a target — file at 14 days and you have given yourself no room for a follow-up question. Second, sanepid is not hostile, it is procedural: foreign owners consistently read a request for another document as a rejection, and it is almost never that. A fit-out designed against the requirements from the start passes. A fit-out designed for the look and inspected afterwards gets a list.

The practical consequence for your budget: get the kitchen layout looked at before the contractor starts, not after. Moving a sink because an inspector asked you to is the most expensive plumbing in Poland.

What does the alcohol licence cost?

Alcohol is licensed by the gmina — the municipality — in categories, and you pay per category. The fees are fixed and public, which makes them the one part of your opening budget you can know exactly today.

A restaurant that wants to serve beer, wine and spirits therefore applies in all three categories. These are the statutory rates; your gmina sets its own administration around them and the figures are worth confirming with the office that will issue yours. Fees and deadlines checked September 2026.

Do I need a Polish company?

In practice, yes. You can hold Polish property and trade cross-border as a foreign entity, but a restaurant is a licensed, premises-bound, staff-employing business in one municipality, and every counterparty you will deal with — the landlord, the gmina, the sanitary inspectorate, the payroll provider, the POS and delivery platforms — expects a Polish legal person with a Polish NIP. Trying to run it from a foreign entity turns every routine form into a negotiation.

The spółka z o.o. is the default and the right default: limited liability, a low capital minimum, and a structure every Polish accountant and bank already understands. We set these up as part of market entry, alongside the brand and the store, which is a different service from what a law firm sells you — more on that at the end.

The lease is the real blocker

Almost every restaurant opening we have watched go wrong went wrong at the lease, not at a permit. Four things to hold out for:

• A fit-out contribution, or a rent-free period, in writing. A landlord who wants a restaurant in the unit can fund part of making it one. A landlord who will not discuss it is telling you something about the unit.
• Confirmation that the use is permitted — gastronomy, with extraction, at the hours you intend to trade. A residential building above you has neighbours, and neighbours have a say about ventilation and closing time.
• A term that matches your payback. A three-year lease against a fit-out you will not have earned back in five is not a deal, it is a countdown.
• An exit you can afford. Not because you plan to fail, but because the clause you cannot exercise is the one that prices every later negotiation with that landlord.

We were asked this month about a first-floor fit-out quoted at around 100,000 PLN. The right first question was not "can we afford it" but "who owns it when we leave" — and that answer is in the lease, not the quote.

Can you do this without Polish?

You can trade without Polish. You cannot deal with a gmina, a sanitary inspector, a payroll office or a landlord's lawyer without it, and a translation app is not a substitute in a room where a sentence has legal weight. Either you hire someone whose Polish is native and whose job includes those rooms, or you work with a partner who is already in them.

That is most of what we actually do on a restaurant opening: the company, the brand and menu design, the site and the delivery listings, the Polish-language social presence, and being the person who reads the document before you sign it. See brand identity and business development, or how the whole sequence fits together on Enter Poland.

What we are not

We are not your lawyer, your accountant or your architect, and we do not get sanepid approval on your behalf — nobody can, because the approval is of your premises. What we do is make sure the sequence above is being run by someone who has done it, in the language it has to be run in, so that the two dates at the top of this page are the ones you planned for rather than the ones that surprised you.

Thinking about a site in Warsaw or anywhere else in Poland? Tell us where it is and we will tell you what we would check first.