Can you run a restaurant as a home business?

[chintznibbles]

Hi, I decided to attempt to get a home business up and running, but I've been somewhat stymied by the fact that most of the cool businessy things are community-lot only.  Who says that my sims can't have a restaurant and live upstairs?  Hmmph.  I've downloaded a "use community items on residential lots" thing, and I'm hoping that this will solve my problem.

My thought was that the family who owned it would be the main employees, like many small restaurants you see.  Dad cooks, mom is a hostess and the kids help out after school.  The question is, though, will placing the various restaurant doohickeys attract random NPCs to run them automatically?  Can I have the business owner fire them and such?

If not, maybe I'll just have to run it as a takeout place and put plates of food on sale trays. Time to bust out the heat-lamps, I guess...

[Ness]

I believe the short answer is no.

Clothing stores and restaurants both need to be on community lots unless you get a collection of things hacked to allow use on a home lot, and then it may work.

[jrd]

I use jaxad's mod:  http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=138575

With it, you can easily make any kind of home business. Including restaurants.

[kutto]

I thought about buying a community lot, buying the needed items there, and putting them into inventory to take them home. Never tried it out, though. You can if you want.

[simposiast]

You can get any community items on a lot when you build it, using the changelotzoning to change it from residential to community and back.  It's better to start residential because then you don't have to find a mailbox and trashcan later on.

This residential lot has a restaurant and shops in it http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/lot_detail.php?asset_id=373777. It's a little village, so I made it to work as a residential/community/home business/dorm, depending on how you change the lot zoning and where you put it.

The objects attract npcs, so you get a host a chef and waiters, and sims can eat there.  When the waiters aren't busy, they walk across to the house and clean up too. In dorm mode, you get a cafeteria worker as well as the pay food. A disadvantage is that normal visitors may go to eat as soon as you greet them, and I don't know of a way to distract them.  I don't know whether it'll give my computer a nervous breakdown, but I have eight sims in it, and it hasn't yet.

I've only just installed OFB. As I don't know how to run a restaurant as a business, I don't know if this one is working or not yet.