In February 2022 I arrived in Spain as a tourist. A year later I opened my first restaurant. This isn’t a success story — it’s a story of mistakes that led to results.
I’m not writing this as a guide that claims to have all the answers. I’m writing it because when I was in the middle of all of it — confused, overwhelmed, trying to understand what a gestor does and whether I needed one — I would have given a lot to read something honest from someone who had been through it. So here it is.
Why Spain, and why the Costa del Sol
When we left Ukraine in early 2022, Spain wasn’t the obvious first choice. We had considered the United States, but it felt too far and too disconnected from everything we knew. The UK had practical advantages, but the climate and the culture of eating felt wrong. Spain made a different kind of sense.
The Costa del Sol specifically has a hospitality market that runs on international traffic. The area around Marbella, San Pedro de Alcántara, and Estepona draws northern Europeans, British expats, tourists from across the world, and a growing community of long-term residents. There are more restaurants per square kilometer here than almost anywhere else in Spain — which sounds like a warning, and maybe it is — but it also means that the infrastructure for hospitality exists: suppliers, staffing pools, a public that eats out regularly and expects quality.
Compared to opening in a secondary British city or navigating the American visa and licensing system, Spain offered a route that was difficult but navigable. The food culture is serious here. That matters.
First steps: language, paperwork, the Red Cross
I arrived with no Spanish. I had basic Italian from my time at ALMA culinary school in Italy, and in some contexts that helped — the languages share enough structure that I could piece together written documents and get by in conversation if the other person was patient. Most people were not patient, understandably.
The first real bureaucratic task is the NIE — Número de Identificación de Extranjero — the tax identification number that makes you exist, legally speaking, in Spain. Without it you cannot open a bank account, sign a lease, register a business, or do almost anything. Getting it requires an appointment at a police station or a consulate, and in 2022 the queues were long. A gestor — a professional who handles administrative paperwork — can book appointments and process documents on your behalf. We hired one immediately and I recommend doing the same from day one.
For residency, especially coming from Ukraine, the Red Cross was a significant source of practical help. They assisted with paperwork, pointed us toward the right offices, and connected us with people who had navigated the same process weeks earlier. I don’t think we would have moved as quickly without that.
Why Italian cuisine for the first restaurant
I trained at ALMA — La Scuola Internazionale di Cucina Italiana — and spent real time studying Italian culinary logic. So Italian wasn’t an arbitrary choice. But the market also supported it.
On the Costa del Sol, there is consistent demand for Italian food from the tourist and expat population. Ukrainian cuisine, which I love, is not well understood here and would have required extensive education of the market — a task that is possible but expensive and slow for a first project. Spanish cuisine, executed properly, is dominated by operators who have been doing it for generations and know their local suppliers and customers in ways I never would at the start.
Italian I could do well, I understood the product, and the market recognized and wanted it. That combination was the foundation for Luini San Pedro.
Finding the right premises on the Costa del Sol
Location on the Costa del Sol works differently than in a city center. The key variables are: pedestrian footfall from tourists, parking access for local residents, visibility from the road, and the character of the street at different hours.
Calle Andalucía in San Pedro de Alcántara, where Luini San Pedro opened, works because it functions as a through-route for both pedestrians and drivers. There is movement in the evenings from people who live nearby, and we get tourist traffic from the beach areas during summer. Parking is accessible within a short walk. The street has enough other hospitality to bring people in, but it isn’t so saturated that we disappear into the noise.
What I would avoid: basement locations without natural light, ground-floor spaces on streets that die after 8pm, and anywhere that relies entirely on summer tourists with nothing to sustain it in winter. The Costa del Sol has a shoulder season that is longer than many people expect, but a business that cannot survive October needs to be planned for that reality from the start.
Business registration: SL versus autónomo
When you open a restaurant in Spain as a foreigner, you have two main structural options: register as an autónomo (self-employed individual) or form an SL — Sociedad Limitada, the Spanish equivalent of a limited liability company.
As a foreigner with no credit history, no local guarantors, and uncertain residency status, the autónomo route feels simpler because the paperwork is lighter. But it means full personal liability. For a restaurant, where the financial risks are real and the capital requirements are significant, we went with an SL. It required more setup time and more documentation, but it separated my personal finances from the business in a way that I considered necessary.
The gestor handles the SL registration. Expect two to three weeks minimum, and have your NIE and residency documentation in order before you start the process.
Building the team
The kitchen team at Luini is predominantly Ukrainian, and that wasn’t accidental. When you are opening in a country where you don’t speak the language fluently, having a team with whom you share a language, a working culture, and a set of references is an operational advantage that is hard to overstate. Communication in a kitchen needs to be fast and precise. Building that with a team you are simultaneously learning to talk to in a foreign language is genuinely harder.
Finding Oleksii Dolbniev — our brand chef — was the result of a network that reached back through the Ukrainian hospitality community scattered across Europe. Oleksii had worked in Odessa, trained and worked in Norway, and arrived in Spain with exactly the kind of technical foundation and curiosity about ingredients that the Luini concept needed. The conversation about the menu took maybe two hours before it was clear that we were thinking in the same direction.
The lesson: don’t hire out of desperation. We waited longer than I wanted to find the right person, and it was the right call.
The first months: what the theory doesn’t prepare you for
The menu we launched with and the menu we had two months later were different in ways that surprised me. Not worse — different. Certain dishes that I thought would perform didn’t find their audience. Others that seemed like risks became the dishes people came back for. A seasonal chef’s menu, which is part of what we do at Luini, requires the discipline to actually change it, which sounds obvious and is harder in practice when a dish is selling and the seasonal logic says it should come off.
Delivery through Glovo and Uber Eats added revenue but also added operational complexity that we were not fully prepared for in the first weeks. Packaging, timing, sequencing orders — all of it needs to be worked out as a system, not improvised per order.
And the Spanish bureaucracy doesn’t stop at opening. Health inspections, licenses, waste management certification — things continue to require attention for months after you open.
Five things I wish someone had told me
1. Hire a gestor on day one. Not after you have a problem. Before you think you need one. They save time that you cannot afford to lose in the early months.
2. Don’t underestimate the winter. If your business model depends on summer tourist traffic to carry you through the year, model the winter months carefully before you sign a lease.
3. The SL takes longer than you expect. Start the registration process before you think you need it. Delays compound.
4. Your first menu is a draft. Be prepared to change it in the first six months based on what you actually learn from the customers in front of you.
5. Network before you need the network. The Ukrainian and expatriate communities on the Costa del Sol are genuinely helpful to each other. Be part of that before you need a favor — not because the favor will come, but because the relationships are worth having regardless.
What comes next
Opening a restaurant abroad is not a project you finish. It’s a system you build and then continuously adjust. The first year is the hardest not because the work is its worst, but because you are doing real operational work at the same time as learning a country, a language, and a market.
If you are thinking about doing this and want a more structured conversation about the specifics of your situation, I work with restaurateurs at that stage as part of my consulting practice.
And if you want to go deeper on what the launch of Luini San Pedro actually looked like — the numbers, the timeline, the specific decisions — that’s documented in the case study.
