Liberty’s Restaurant & Hospitality Practice Group provides commercial insurance for full-service and quick-service restaurants, breweries, and caterers, including general liability, liquor liability, property, business interruption, and workers’ compensation. The practice serves single-location independents, multi-unit and franchise groups, and food and beverage manufacturers such as breweries, wineries, and distilleries. Coverage is structured around the specific exposures of food and beverage operations, including foodborne illness, alcohol service, and high-turnover kitchen and front-of-house staffing.
Restaurant and bar operations combine several exposures most other small businesses don’t carry at once: a working kitchen, alcohol service, high customer foot traffic, and a workforce with some of the highest turnover rates of any industry. A single foodborne illness incident, a slip near a wet service station, or an over-service claim after last call can generate a claim large enough to threaten a location outright, and thin margins leave little room to absorb an uninsured loss.
A strategic insurance partner treats these exposures as connected rather than separate line items — pricing liquor liability alongside general liability instead of layering it on as an afterthought, and structuring business interruption coverage around how a restaurant actually loses income during a closure, not just the property damage that caused it.
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Liberty works with restaurant operators at every scale — from a single independent kitchen to multi-unit franchise groups and beverage manufacturers — and with the owners, managers, and staff who run them day to day. Bar and nightlife operators are served on Liberty’s dedicated Bars insurance.
Liberty structures restaurant coverage around how a food and beverage operation actually runs — kitchen and dining room liability alongside alcohol service, property and equipment loss alongside the income disruption that follows it. That means fewer coverage gaps at the exact points where restaurants tend to get sued or shut down.
Protection against bodily injury, foodborne illness, and alcohol-related claims.
Coverage for kitchen equipment, buildout, and income lost during a closure.
Coverage for staff, delivery, and the technology restaurants run on.
Yes — liquor liability requirements are based on whether a business serves alcohol for profit, not which type of alcohol it pours, so beer- and wine-only restaurants carry the same dram shop exposure as a full bar.
Yes — restaurants process card payment data through point-of-sale systems daily, and a breach affecting customer payment information typically isn’t covered under general liability, which is why cyber liability is now considered standard for the industry.
Typically no — standard business interruption coverage is triggered by direct physical damage to the property, so a closure ordered for a health code violation alone usually isn’t a covered event unless it follows a covered loss.
Often yes, but only if the illness resulted from an incident rather than an ongoing exclusion in the policy — most standard general liability policies cover bodily injury from a single contaminated batch or ingredient, subject to the policy’s terms.
A restaurant’s own commercial auto policy typically doesn’t cover an employee’s personal vehicle, so restaurants using employee-owned cars for delivery generally need hired and non-owned auto liability coverage.
Food trucks and caterers need the same core liability and property coverage as a restaurant, plus commercial auto coverage for the vehicle itself and often broader off-premise liability for events held at third-party venues.
Liberty brings established carrier relationships across the specialty markets that write liquor liability and food and beverage risk, along with the scale to place multi-unit and franchise programs across states. That combination lets restaurant clients get underwritten fairly on exposures generalist brokers often price defensively or decline outright.
Founded in 1987, The Liberty Company Insurance Brokers has grown from a Californiabased agency into one of the nation’s premier insurance brokerages, with $2 billion+ in managed premiums across 80+ offices nationwide.
Liberty's Restaurant & Hospitality practice understands the liquor liability, food safety, and staffing exposures unique to food and beverage operations
Established relationships with the specialty carriers that actively write liquor liability and hospitality risk, rather than avoid it.
Risk management support focused on the incidents that generate the largest restaurant claims: over-service, foodborne illness, and slip-and-fall.
Loss data and benchmarking used to structure coverage and pricing around how a specific restaurant or group actually operates
