General Liability Insurance

Every claim this policy answers begins the same way: a person who does not work for you says your operation injured them, or damaged something of theirs. That one test — a third party, bodily injury or property damage, arising out of your premises or your operations — is what general liability is, and nearly everything else about the line follows from it, including the places it declines to go.

It is the policy named on the certificate your landlord keeps and the one a catering client asks to see. It is not, despite the way operators talk about it, the whole of the programme. It is a broad policy with a defined job and a set of deliberate edges, and the edges are where operators get hurt.

What follows is the shape of that job for a restaurant or a bar: whom the policy answers to, the claims it sees, how its limits are arranged, what the premium is measured against, and where the form tells you to buy something else.

Who counts as a third party, and why that settles most of it

A guest at the corner table is a third party. So is the supplier’s driver wheeling in a delivery, the contractor’s technician on your roof, the neighbour whose ceiling your plumbing reached, and the person on the pavement outside who never came in at all. Each of them can bring a claim against the business, and this is the policy written to meet it.

Your own people are not third parties, and that single fact reroutes an entire category of restaurant injury away from this policy. A line cook with a burn, a server who slips carrying plates, a porter who hurts a back lifting a keg — those are workers compensation claims, answered under a different body of law. Nor is the business a third party to its own claim: damage to your contents, your fit-out and your equipment is a property question. When something goes wrong, ask who is complaining before asking what is covered. The first answer usually names the policy.

The wet floor, and what the argument is really about

Premises liability is the spine of this line for a restaurant, and the wet floor is its archetype. The claim asserts a duty of reasonable care owed to a person lawfully on the premises, a breach in the condition of the floor, and an injury caused by the fall. Almost nothing in that sequence is usually disputed except the middle term.

What is disputed is the routine. Whether anyone knew the floor was wet. How long it had been wet. Whether a cone was out, and whether it was out before or after. Whether there is a cleaning schedule and whether it is a document or a habit. A slip and fall is defended with exactly the kind of ordinary operational evidence a busy service is worst at producing after the fact, which is why an operator who logs a spill and initials the log stands somewhere quite different from one who remembers it.

The exposure runs wider than the dining room: the entryway on a wet night, the step down that regulars know and a first-time guest does not, the patio, the stair to a cellar bar, the walk outside that a lease makes you responsible for clearing. Same claim, different location, same question deciding each.

When the allegation is the food itself

An allegation that something you served made a guest ill is bodily injury like any other, and it belongs to this policy — generally to the part of the form dealing with products and completed work rather than to the premises. That distinction is invisible on the day and consequential later, because the limits for that category are often tracked separately from everything else the policy does.

These claims behave unlike a fall in ways that matter. They arrive in groups: a single service, a single dish, a supplier lot, and a set of claimants who did not know each other in the morning. And causation is hard in both directions — confirming that a particular kitchen caused a particular illness is difficult, and disproving it is no easier. The policy answers the allegation and funds the defence of it regardless. The claim does not wait for a laboratory.

Damage your operation does to somebody else’s property

The injury half of this line gets the attention; the property damage half quietly does a great deal of work in a leased space. Water that leaves your kitchen and arrives in the tenancy next door. A hood fire that does not stop at your demising wall. The loss is somebody else’s, the cause is alleged to be your operation, and that is the combination this policy exists for.

The building you occupy is a special case, and the form treats it as one: a general liability policy generally carves back a limited grant for damage to premises rented to you, so that a fire you cause in the landlord’s building is not stranded between two policies. It is not a way of insuring the fit-out you paid for. Your improvements, your equipment and your stock belong on a property policy, and tenant improvements and betterments is where leased-space operators carry the least cover on the largest sum they ever spent.

Where this form draws its own boundary

This policy is broad by design, and then, in the same document, it withdraws by name from one activity. If the business is in the trade of manufacturing, distributing, selling, serving or furnishing alcohol, injury and damage alleged to arise out of that activity is outside what this form agreed to insure. The withdrawal is explicit, it is standard, and it is not the sort of thing an insurer negotiates away.

Read from this side, it is not a hole in the middle of the coverage. It is a form declining to price an exposure that behaves nothing like the rest of what it insures — one whose severity, legal basis and defence all follow different rules, and which the law in your state may define for you rather than leaving to ordinary negligence.

The test is about the character of the business, not the size of the bar. A dining room with a short wine list sits on the same side of the line as a room that does nothing else, because the question is what the business does and not how much of it it does.

The consequence is procedural. The certificate that satisfies your landlord does not answer the incident that began at the bar. That exposure is a separate purchase, on its own policy, with its own limit and its own conditions, which is the subject of its own page: liquor liability insurance.

How the limits are arranged on the declarations page

The structure is layered, and the layers do different jobs. A per-occurrence limit caps what the policy pays for any one event. An aggregate caps what it pays across the whole term, and it does not refill as the year goes on. A separate aggregate commonly applies to the products and completed work category, so the food claims and the floor claims are not necessarily drawing on the same pool. A narrower limit sits over damage to premises rented to you, and a small medical payments provision sits alongside for minor injuries settled quickly and without a finding of fault.

Defence cost treatment is the structural point operators most often miss. On a standard general liability form the cost of defending you is generally paid in addition to the limit rather than eaten out of it, which matters because defence is where the money goes on claims that do not succeed. Not every liability policy an operator buys works that way. Confirming which way yours is written is a short question with a long tail.

Occurrence, and why the trigger still matters here

Written on an occurrence basis, the policy answers for an event during its term whenever the claim eventually arrives, including after you have moved on. Written on a claims-made basis, it answers a claim first made during its term, which makes the retroactive date and unbroken continuity load-bearing. Illness claims and injuries that turn out worse than they looked can surface a long way from the night in question, so how the policy is triggered decides which of your policies is even in the room.

What the premium is measured against

The useful thing to know about the price is not a figure — it is what the figure is calculated from, because that is the part you can affect and the part you will be asked to evidence.

The exposure base for this line is usually your sales, applied to a classification that describes what kind of operation you are. Because sales are estimated at inception and known only afterwards, the policy is commonly audited at the end of the term and adjusted. An operator who understates on the way in has deferred a cost, not avoided one.

Around that sit the characteristics that move the classification and the terms: what you cook and how, whether there is a bar and how much of the room it occupies, the public area, hours, entertainment, delivery and off-site catering. Then the loss record — and, more than the count of claims, the evidence of what changed after each one.

What sits outside this policy altogether

Injuries to your own staff go to workers compensation. Damage to your building, contents, fit-out and stock goes to property. The mechanical or electrical failure of a compressor or a rooftop unit is an equipment breakdown question, and the inventory that failure ruins is a spoilage question. Anything arising out of the use of a vehicle, including an employee’s own car on a delivery run, goes to auto. The alcohol exposure goes to liquor liability. A programme fails, almost always, at exactly the seam nobody looked at.

Why Wexford Restaurant Insurance

We are an independent agency, so the question we answer is which market fits your operation, not which product we are obliged to sell. We hold appointments across a specialty panel and we built a brand around this trade rather than adding it to a list.

The value is in the reading. Knowing that a defence-outside-the-limit form is not the same purchase as one that erodes, and that an additional insured endorsement can satisfy a lease and still not do what the lease meant — that is most of the work, and it is invisible until the day it is not.

Send us the floor plan, the hours and what leaves the kitchen, and a licensed agent will work through it with you.