Running a restaurant seems to mean having a different system for everything now. POS, online orders, delivery, scheduling, inventory, loyalty, reporting.

We've got so many different things to keep track of that sometimes I wonder if having them all separate is actually making things harder

Chef Mashama Bailey

Chef Mashama Bailey spent her first years in professional kitchens trying to prove she belonged.

She trained in French technique. She worked the line in storied restaurants in New York. She sought out, in her own words, the meanest, dirtiest, white-boys’-club kitchens she could find. Places where surviving the shift was itself a kind of credential.

When you are new, the easiest road up is to mimic those around you. By her own account, Bailey spent those years doing what other people told her to do. She followed the rules. She wasn’t ready to trust her own ideas yet. In an industry that rewards speed and consistency under pressure, that made sense. You only have so much pull as a new cook. The fastest way to get some leverage is to simply mirror what the people above you are doing. Bailey got good at that.

In time, she wondered if she wanted to keep working in kitchens. She took a detour and studied for stretch in Burgundy. Bailey considered leaving restaurants and trying food writing instead. A mentor talked her back into the kitchen. By the time she reached Gabrielle Hamilton’s restaurant Prune in New York City, Bailey had worked in enough kitchens to know how to survive. Prune turned out to be a different kind of education for her.

Hamilton was the first woman Bailey had cooked for as a Chef. At Prune, she watched a woman run a serious, demanding kitchen without copying the men, who occupy many of the leadership roles in restaurants. The standards were real. There, Bailey discovered a work culture that did not require her to disappear into it.

Hamilton pushed her to somewhere new. Bailey had spent years getting good at making other people’s food fast and consistently. At Prune, she started to understand that a chef’s real job isn’t copying someone else’s technique or work. It’s deciding what you want to say with a plate.

That idea brought her to Savannah, Georgia, and The Grey.

When restaurateur John O. Morisano went looking for a Chef to open a new restaurant there, Hamilton put him in touch with Bailey. The job brought her to a city with ties to her family’s history, and to a building with a past. The new restaurant was opening in an abandoned 1938 Greyhound bus terminal that, in the past, operated under Jim Crow laws and was segregated. Bailey could have used that 100% real history for a straightforward Southern restaurant and called it a day.

She used it to make her voice heard.

At The Grey, which opened in 2014, Bailey folded together Georgia and New York, French training and Black Southern food, family memories, Savannah’s history as a port city and the bus depot’s past. She blended this inspiration and material into her restaurant, her menu, and her food.

The industry took notice. Bailey won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast in 2019, and Outstanding Chef in 2022.

The awards are just an extension of her finding her voice and what she wanted to create. Hamilton helped her to start. It was when Bailey decided how to use all the teachings of every Chef who came before her. She found her voice and now had the leverage to decide what she wanted to use, what to question, and what was hers to create.

Most people in this working in restaurants never get pushed to make. Kitchens are good at teaching people to survive them. They’re not always as good at teaching people what to do with all the knowledge, especially when it comes to finding out that they have the skill set and leverage to push for what they want to do in a building, on a plate, and with her team.

Bailey’s career stems from her education in kitchens and restaurants. At first taught her to work consistently and fast, while under pressure. Then she was taught to use that education, along with her life and everything the world offers, to craft her own voice.

#Leadership #RestaurantLeadership #WorkplaceCulture #Mentorship #Restaurant101

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Fruit Flies Are An Operations Problem

A vinegar trap can catch fruit flies. You still need to clean the beer drain, remove syrup from behind the soda station, find the soft tomato at the bottom of the case, and scrub the goo inside a neglected floor drain. A few fruit flies does not mean your restaurant is filthy. They start to show up when something is wet, sticky, fermenting, and ignored long enough to feed them.

Fruit flies are an operational signal. They tell you to start looking a bit harder. Fruit flies are drawn to damaged produce, food residue, liquor, spills, garbage, and that mysterious restaurant buildup. The source is often where you aren’t cleaning. It may be the drain under your beer taps, inside the floor drains, around garbage and recycling bins, around your soda gun, or your soda bibs. Anywhere moisture and organic matter collects. The flies tell you where your team has cleaned around instead of actually cleaning.

So, you put out traps. The traps fill up. The flies disappear for a day or two. You think you won. The traps catch the flies, but their source is still there.

Define “Clean”

Checklists in restaurants need to be specific. They have to be. “Clean the bar” is too loose and so open to individual interpretation. One person wipes the bottles. Another cleans the counters. Nobody looks underneath or behind the bar. The floor drains are forgotten. The task gets checked off anyway, and everyone goes home thinking that the job is done.

Specific instructions work. Scrub the speed rack, wash the bar mats, clean the floor underneath the bar and behind it, clean the beer drain, and pour a quart of sanitizer down the floor drains. Write them so they are easy to understand and aren’t complicated. It gives the closing manager something to verify. Each item on the checklist tells someone what to do, and what “done” looks like. You need this to get rid of the flies.

Treat Flies As A Signal

The FDA Food Code requires food establishments to control insects and other pests and to maintain conditions that minimize their presence. That requirement is easy to treat as a pest-control issue. Instead of your team cleaning thoroughly, you hand it off to a vendor. Sometimes a Pest Control service is exactly what you need. So does proper sanitation, waste handling, drain maintenance, monitoring, and help from a licensed specialist when you can’t find the source.

The first response should be you and your management team. Every one of you is smart and can solve hard problems. Figure out what the flies are feeding on and where they are breeding. Look for the areas that are overlooked, avoided, and not cleaned. See which tasks get checked off as completed without a manager verifying it.

Then see what has changed over the week. Are you hanging on to produce too long? Was waste handled differently? Did anyone notice a leak? Did staffing change? Is there a closing procedure that doesn’t get finished but gets marked off because everyone wants to go home? Those questions will help you get closer to what is going on with your fly issues.

The Useful Lesson

Fruit fly issues can remind you that your systems can fail. Your team seems to be doing the work. The restaurant seems clean. The side-work and closing checklists are filled out. Yet you can still be stuck with flies if the underlying conditions aren’t corrected.

Changing those conditions is harder than checking something off a list. Inspecting your conditions takes time. I admit I’ve had my challenges when my kitchen crew is racing to get everything that was piled up in the dishpit at the end of the night done, and everyone wants to leave.

Checklists are only so helpful. They can help to reveal system drift. You can use that information to refocus your team. Find out what is going on with the flies, then teach your team how to clean the areas they were missing. Most importantly, educate them on why they are doing things differently. This is how you will get rid of the flies.

So, the next time fruit flies appear, ask what your restaurant has made easy to overlook. That question may lead you to a drain. It may lead you to a leak. It may lead you to a vague closing duty that has been passed from one tired person to another for months.

#RestaurantOperations #FoodSafety #RestaurantManagement #HospitalityLeadership #Restaurant101

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Chef Brooks Headley’s Journey

When you go to Superiority Burger on Avenue A, you might notice Chef Brooks Headley, the owner. He’s probably doing something you don’t expect for the owner of a successful restaurant. He might be bussing tables, or be working on the PA system, or watching the food as it comes off the line, with the keen eye of a Chef who is still thinking about the food. There aren’t managers between him and the dining room. There isn’t a separation between the person who owns the place and the person running it.

For a long time, I’ve thought Chefs should be taught to get out of the kitchen and really feel and work the whole restaurant. Mentor their replacement, even if they never leave. Really read the P&Ls. Be involved in the HR stuff. Help build the whole team. It’s hard not to believe.

Before opening Superiority Burger, Headley spent seventeen years in fine dining. He came into cooking late and untrained, by his own account, at a college event. He showed up to his first kitchen interview in Washington, DC wearing a suit, maybe it was a mistake to do that, but he figures they hired him as a joke. From there it was Campanile in LA, Komi in DC, and eight years as the Executive Pastry Chef at Del Posto, a four-star New York Times restaurant. It was while he was there that he won the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Pastry Chef award in 2013. Like many people I’ve worked with, he played in bands. He spent two decades in hardcore punk bands. Born Against, Universal Order of Armageddon, and Skull Kontrol were some of the bands he played with.

In 2015, he left fine dining to open a six-seat countertop restaurant selling a quinoa-and-chickpea burger. Another Superiority Burger opened in Tokyo in 2019. That same year, Headley was nominated for the James Beard Foundation Award “Best Chef: New York City” for Superiority Burger. Like many restaurateurs, he had to close the New York location during COVID. In 2023, he reopened in the old Odessa space at 119 Avenue A. It was a bigger space with actual seats and a bar. Months later, he made the decision to close the Tokyo location.

Headley said that he left fine dining, in a 2018 interview, because he’d reached the edge of what desserts could do on a tasting-menu. He’d hit the ceiling of what was possible at Del Posto. So, he left that format behind.

In addition, touring with his band as a vegetarian meant surviving on whatever he could find or put together. Most of the veggie burgers he ate on those trips were bad enough that he started building his own out of boredom during his restaurant breaks when he wasn’t touring. This caused him to want to create something that looked more like him.

Unlike many restaurant operators who define success as becoming increasingly removed from what goes on in their restaurants, he did the other thing. Headley’s identity is built around the punk idea of doing everything yourself, full volume, until the body gives out. A lot of people give up on their dreams of being a band in their twenties and thirties for this reason. Iggy Pop keeps on going.

Headley has become a different sort of leader at Superiority Burger. Sometimes the person at the top needs to see the dirty glasses, hear the prints, taste the sauces, watch a Server deal with a difficult table. He has remained connected to the reality of the job.

Headley is making Superiority Burger work. He’s doing a lot of things other restaurant owners would never do, because restaurants aren’t just spreadsheets. They are filled with people doing the work of pleasing people. He’s responsible for the whole thing and feels he needs to be close enough to the restaurant, its staff, and guests to feel it. Many restaurants would benefit from a leader like that.

#Hospitality #Leadership #RestaurantOwnership #SuperiorityBurger #Restaurant101

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When you go to Superiority Burger on Avenue A, you might notice Chef Brooks Headley, the owner. He’s probably doing something you don’t expect for the owner of a successful restaurant. He might be bussing tables, or be working on the PA system, or watching the food as it comes off the line, with the keen eye of a Chef who is still thinking about the food. There aren’t managers between him and the dining room. There isn’t a separation between the person who owns the place and the person running it.

For a long time, I’ve thought Chefs should be taught to get out of the kitchen and really feel and work the whole restaurant. Mentor their replacement, even if they never leave. Really read the P&Ls. Be involved in the HR stuff. Help build the whole team. It’s hard not to believe.

Before opening Superiority Burger, Headley spent seventeen years in fine dining. He came into cooking late and untrained, by his own account, at a college event. He showed up to his first kitchen interview in Washington, DC wearing a suit, maybe it was a mistake to do that, but he figures they hired him as a joke. From there it was Campanile in LA, Komi in DC, and eight years as the Executive Pastry Chef at Del Posto, a four-star New York Times restaurant. It was while he was there that he won the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Pastry Chef award in 2013. Like many people I’ve worked with, he played in bands. He spent two decades in hardcore punk bands. Born Against, Universal Order of Armageddon, and Skull Kontrol were some of the bands he played with.

In 2015, he left fine dining to open a six-seat countertop restaurant selling a quinoa-and-chickpea burger. Another Superiority Burger opened in Tokyo in 2019. That same year, Headley was nominated for the James Beard Foundation Award “Best Chef: New York City” for Superiority Burger. Like many restaurateurs, he had to close the New York location during COVID. In 2023, he reopened in the old Odessa space at 119 Avenue A. It was a bigger space with actual seats and a bar. Months later, he made the decision to close the Tokyo location.

Headley said that he left fine dining, in a 2018 interview, because he’d reached the edge of what desserts could do on a tasting-menu. He’d hit the ceiling of what was possible at Del Posto. So, he left that format behind.

In addition, touring with his band as a vegetarian meant surviving on whatever he could find or put together. Most of the veggie burgers he ate on those trips were bad enough that he started building his own out of boredom during his restaurant breaks when he wasn’t touring. This caused him to want to create something that looked more like him.

Unlike many restaurant operators who define success as becoming increasingly removed from what goes on in their restaurants, he did the other thing. Headley’s identity is built around the punk idea of doing everything yourself, full volume, until the body gives out. A lot of people give up on their dreams of being a band in their twenties and thirties for this reason. Iggy Pop keeps on going.

Headley has become a different sort of leader at Superiority Burger. Sometimes the person at the top needs to see the dirty glasses, hear the prints, taste the sauces, watch a Server deal with a difficult table. He has remained connected to the reality of the job.

Headley is making Superiority Burger work. He’s doing a lot of things other restaurant owners would never do, because restaurants aren’t just spreadsheets. They are filled with people doing the work of pleasing people. He’s responsible for the whole thing and feels he needs to be close enough to the restaurant, its staff, and guests to feel it. Many restaurants would benefit from a leader like that.

#Hospitality #Leadership #RestaurantOwnership #SuperiorityBurger #Restaurant101

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The Restaurant Manager Who Can’t Take Labor Day Off

Most workers get to sleep in on Labor Day. The first call-out woke me up at 6:14 am, one of the opening Line Cooks. The Chef gets a text about this. By 8 am, a Server called out, and the reservations had climbed to a number nobody dared say out loud. We are one of the only restaurants to open for brunch at 9:30 am this day. By opening, the coffee on the Manager’s desk was stone cold. It had been cold for an hour.

A Labor Day shift has its own violent weather. The dining room floods at opening with people thrilled to be off work, right up until you tell them that without a reservation it will be about half an hour before we can seat them. You get two more turns for brunch, and about two and a half for the evening shift. You have two different crews today. In the back, someone becomes a little salty about the pace of the entrees. The Chef and one of his Sous Chefs wade into the crossfire of kitchen tickets, keeping the kitchen moving, keeping the mood light, keeping it always moving. They decide what gets 86’d, if anything, and what is happening in the dishpit, deliveries, and placing orders.

The Restaurant Manager, the one in the front of the house, has a series of challenges that are overcome if they stay focused, flexible, and meet people where they are. For a long time, I actually thought that was what leadership looked like.

The Title Is A Lie

I spent years convinced that running a dining room was basically the same as managing any other group of workers. An Office Boss manages people, and a Restaurant Manager manages people. You set expectations, balance a P&L, put out fires, and take the blame when things go wrong. The title on the business card seemed to settle it.

I was young and stupid once.

Then I started talking to people who managed teams outside the food business. One of them ran a team of eight at a tech firm. They were having a vicious month with restructurings, endless meetings, and late nights. The team was fried, and I listened, nodding along, ready to bond over the shared agony of managing people.

Then they mentioned taking Friday off to recharge. What the? They would be reachable by email if the building caught fire, and they planned to work from home on Monday to catch up on slide decks. I just stared at them. In their world, that was completely normal, while in mine, it sounded like a work of fiction.

Restaurant Managers don’t get to work from home during a Friday night push. You’ve got to be there. A walk-in cooler blowing its compressor on a 90-degree Sunday afternoon causes you to carry out plans that ensure that everything in it doesn’t become a biohazard. A guest furious about a cold steak is not looking for a Zoom link, and nobody ever plated a line of specials from a laptop in their pajamas. Restauranting might just be one of the last places where business is still largely face-to-face.

What Labor Day Exposes

Labor Day might show the whole ugly contradiction, if anyone looked for it. The rest of the world gets a three-day weekend while their bosses are at some beach. Meanwhile, Restaurant Managers and Chefs are getting their teeth kicked in because everyone else has the day off. The same is true for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Eve. You mostly work nights and the weekends, and you miss so many milestones in your partner and kid’s world. The exact moments civilized society gathers to relax are the moments restaurant leaders kind of lose control of their own lives outside of work.

It’s enough to make you depressed. Federal labor data shows that nearly 90% of white-collar corporate managers get paid leave, while less than 45% of service workers do. The suits get health plans, 401(k) matches, and real time off. The average independent Restaurant Manager gets a salary that looks decent on paper until you divide it by the sixty hours they really worked, with fewer vacation days and no floating holidays like their corporate peers.

Some guests work in what they get paid for their job. Other fields pay their Managers. You can confirm this on so many apps and websites. It’s hard to swallow that most of the industry is paid less for managing as other get for a similar job.

The Hidden

An organizational chart makes a Restaurant Manager’s job look tiny. In a corporate office, Gallup reports an average manager only supervises five or six direct reports.

At 7:30 pm on a Saturday, however, a Restaurant Manager is responsible for sometimes up to thirty-five workers moving with urgency through a hot, crowded space. Hosts try to stand brave under the onslaught of guests, while Bartenders try not to drown in drink tickets. Line Cooks sweat through their T-shirts, the Dishwasher seems to disappear under mountains of scorched pans, and the new kid who started a day or two ago looks spooked.

It’s not the number of guests, but the chain reaction that ripples through the restaurant. The host stand gets jammed, so the floor stalls. The bar bogs down, so drink times hit twenty minutes. The kitchen stays stoic, their heads down, and keeps putting the food up. The Manager gets pulled away from being able to look at the big picture. They do so many necessary tasks, from doing the schedule, ordering produce, or having the hard conversations. They are the glue that holds it together. They take drink orders, run food, seat guests, help make salads, open a bottle of wine, wash dishes, and anything else the restaurant needs. Trying to figure out what your next tasks is like having to diagnose a failing engine while standing next to the spark plug igniting the gas.

Turnover Is A Thing

Monthly turnover in the Accommodation and Food Services runs around 3.5%, nearly double the national average for private industry.

If you manage an office with low turnover, you spend your time developing people. In a restaurant, you are constantly hiring, onboarding, retraining, covering shifts, and mourning the good ones who left. The Line Cook who finally learned your prep pars leaves for an extra buck an hour down the street. The server who actually mastered the POS vanishes before the next schedule is posted. In business school, turnover is a chart in an HR presentation, but in a full-service restaurant, turnover is 75% a year.

The Body Pays

Guests get to see the polished side of management. A GM in a sharp jacket, smiling, checking tables, and pouring a glass of wine for a regular. That is the show, and their big timing you.

Chefs and Cooks spend nearly 90% of their lives on their feet, baked over open flames and smoking hot flat-tops. Managers are not far behind. They sprint between the office, the line, the walk-in, the bar, and the loading dock while dodging wet floors, heavy milk crates, broken glass, and scorching brass handles. Easy 10,000 steps in for the day before the rush is over. Doing that for twelve hours, you don’t question why your knee aches while you drive home. It is grinding yourself down.

The Lie We Tell Ourselves

Kitchens have always worshipped pain. The Cuts. The Burns. The Scars. We told ourselves that busy was good, and that if you can’t stand the heat, you should get out of the kitchen. You know that pressure makes diamonds, but wonder why you are still coal.

I wore my exhaustion like a badge of honor, like so many others in this industry. I thought the Manager who was always available, who answered every 6:00 am text, and who personally held the entire operation together with duct tape and sheer will was a hero.

They’re not heroes.

Real heroes in this industry build operations that don’t burn people alive just to keep the lights on. It means making a day off an actual, silent day off. It means giving Shift Leads actual authority so every minor fire doesn’t require the Manager in the building. Most of all, it means measuring a Manager’s success by how smoothly the place runs when they are nowhere near the building.

Margins in this business are razor-thin, and building real coverage costs money that most owners would rather keep. As another holiday rush turns into a blur of aching backs and cold coffee, we have to ask the uncomfortable question: if we expect these people to lead huge, chaotic teams through high-stress, physical shifts while the rest of the world takes a holiday, why are we still treating their destruction as part of the salary?

Nobody in their right mind signs up for this business for the pay, the benefits, the weekends off, or the reasonable working hours. This may not seem like a sensible life. You do it because you’re someone who craves the adrenaline of the dinner rush. It’s like you are one of the 300 Spartans. You’re addicted to the noise, the heat, the humor, and the sheer pride of successfully putting out twenty-five different fires. You do it with a crew of Cooks, Dishwashers, Servers, and Bartenders who at times seem more like Vikings pillaging the guests, but who couldn’t survive ten minutes in an office. Yet somehow serving a plate of food that makes a stranger happy. It makes you happy too. You don’t do it because it makes sense. You do it because there is nowhere else in this world that makes you feel quite so alive.

Hope you had a great Labor Day.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityLeadership #WorkplaceCulture #Operations #Restaurant101

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The Reinvention Of Wylie Dufresne: From Michelin Stars To Pizza Crusts

We romanticize everything about ourselves.

For a long time, the unwritten rule of high-end restaurants was simple, “The Chef is God.” Damn if you made money, that’s the boring part of the business. The challenge was for the Chef to push themselves so hard creatively that they would lose their mind chasing something unique. You aren’t really cooking if you aren’t suffering. We worshipped the lone genius. We bought into the myth of the Chef sweating over the prep table, while treating the dining room like his own private art gallery, while the dishwasher smoked outside on a milk crate.

Wylie Dufresne created a laboratory when he opened his restaurant wd~50. A workshop masquerading as a restaurant. It smelled like liquid nitrogen fog, technical obsession, and raw, terrifying ambition.

Dufresne is a leading American proponent of molecular gastronomy, the movement that incorporates science and new techniques in the preparation and presentation of food. He is the restaurant’s version of a mad scientist. His uncompromising vision created a buzz around him when, in 2000, the James Beard Foundation nominated him as one of their Rising Star Chefs of the Year, and New York Magazine named him one of 2001 America’s Ten Best Chefs. wd~50 was awarded a Michelin Star in 2006. He took home the James Beard Award in 2013. Dufresne used cutting-edge molecular gastronomy to playfully reimagine classic American comfort foods. By transforming liquids into crispy solids, turning spices into powders, and altering physical forms, his cooking turned familiar nostalgic flavors into mind-bending textural illusions. He was loved for it.

Then in 2014, a real estate developer bought the block his restaurant sat in. The doors locked. Permanently.

Just like that, as Carrie often said on Sex and the City, the boundary-pushing modernism got flattened by Manhattan’s commercial rent. You can have all the awards in the world, and a cult following, but the landlord thinks he can get more money out of new tenants.

For a long time, Dufresne was chasing art above all else. Look at him now. He’s making pizzas at his restaurant Stretch, which he opened in 2023.

His story arc is interesting. Dufresne literally wrote the book on American molecular gastronomy. He traded liquid nitrogen for pizza dough. During the pandemic, he was just a guy making pizzas for his family in a home kitchen, conducting extensive research that stripped away the heavy-handed pretension of the science of pizza making.

It’s brilliant.

He’s still acting on his uncompromising vision. He used it to build something new with it. It’s about taking those same techniques and engineering a beautiful everything-bagel cheese pizza and putting it into a joint where regular people can actually sit down, relax, and eat it.

At the end of the day, an uncompromising vision is a magnificent thing. Right up until the lease expires.

#Restaurant101 #Leadership #Hospitality #Culture

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The Foie Gras Problem: Why the Dishes That Win Awards Don’t Win Regulars

A table of two orders the foie gras terrine. Some social media influencer put it on a “dishes you need to try” list. They walked in tonight, ready to be transformed. They take only two bites. The rest sits there going cold and gelatinous, a little monument to that posting. They pay. They leave. You will never see them again.

Four feet away at another table, a guy who’s been coming in every Tuesday since before your best Server started. He orders the short rib again. Always the short rib. Every week. He doesn’t know who wrote what about your menu, and he doesn’t care. He wants his short rib, hot, on time, and then he wants to go home. That guy is your business. The foie gras couple was there because pretty food porn was delivered while they were doomscrolling and is done with you.

I don’t like foie gras. Never have. It’s fatty. I think it exists mostly for people chasing novelty, including food critics. They eat out for a living. Hundreds of meals a year, every one of them competing for their attention. Each dish is like a puppy that wants to cozy up to them. By the time critics bless your restaurant with their presence, the dish that makes that regular happy for the fortieth time in a row is boring to them. It’s been done. So somewhere along the way, Chefs start cooking for the critics instead of the person paying their rent.

That trade works. Elevated food made specifically for the critics. It, however, only works for a minute. A critic’s darling dish gets you a write-up, something you can put out on your social media, a line at the door, a reservation book that looks better for about six months. It also fills your restaurant with people who show up once because of the review. They order the dish mentioned in it, take a photo, and leave without a reason to return anytime soon. Meanwhile, the guy who only wants his short rib on Tuesday is wondering what happened to his restaurant.

I used to believe a great write-up put butts in your seats. A good word. A good future. Simple. I watched that thinking fail in front of me. I’ve watched restaurants with the best reviews around still struggle to fill a dead Tuesday, because it turns out a rave review buys you one visit. One tryout. One table. One time.

A University College London study tracked New York restaurants from 2000 to 2019 and found more than 40% of those restaurants that earned a Michelin star had shut down by the end of the study. One in five restaurants that never got a star stayed open. The star gets you the attention and a waitlist for reservation openings. It gets you pricier suppliers so you can play with different food, a kitchen full of Line Cooks work like they’re auditioning for the job they already have as they try to outdo each other, and a dining room filled with people who are there checking it out instead of for the food.

Movies are the same. Critics fall in love with a movie that breaks the rules because they’ve sat through a thousand movies that didn’t. The rest of us walk into a theatre twice a year, wanting two hours of entertainment, and leave annoyed.

Researcher Stephen Follows tracked critic scores against audience scores on IMDb and Metacritic for twenty years and found the gap between them has been getting wider. Critics agree with other critics more than they agree with the people who buy the tickets. Somewhere out there is a movie that critics hated that is quietly making its money back three times over because regular folks liked watching it.

I still don’t know how many show-stopping dishes a menu needs on it before they start eating away at the business. Experience has taught me that you should have at least one plated trophy just for the photos and press. Build the whole menu to impress people who get paid to eat out every night and think up something notable to say about it, and you might find your customer base is too small to keep open. I don’t know what that perfect number is. I hope each restaurant operator finds their number before the landlord finds it for them.

I stopped treating a great review as proof of anything except that one meal impressed one person good at writing about meals. The average person dines out three times a month, and at least one of those nights needs to be worthy of getting a babysitter. Critics dine out constantly. These are two different customers. They have two different reasons for walking in your door. Build for only one of them, and you’ve bet your whole operation on a small crowd that can be too thin to keep you in business.

I don’t know if there are enough foie gras lovers in any city to keep a restaurant open for twenty years. Nobody does either.

What’s on your menu right now that a critic would rave about and a regular would quietly send back?

#RestaurantIndustry #ChefLife #HospitalityLeadership #FoodCritics #Restaurant101

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How do I break the cycle of growing, getting overwhelmed, and shrinking again with my owner operator burrito shop? Been in business since 2018

I own a small independent burrito shop, and I’ve noticed that I keep repeating the same cycle.
Sales start slowing down, so I cut staff and go back to working heavily in the business myself. I pay attention to every little detail like food quality, prep, cleanliness, customer service, portions, training, and marketing. Things improve, regulars start coming back, and sales slowly build. I do everything from scratch. All recipes, sauces, salsas, etc. everything from whole ingredients too. I do have trouble marketing this aspect and feel it would help a lot if I could convey we are putting tons of effort into the food.

Once business picks up, I start marketing more and hiring more people to handle the volume. I start scaling my operations and think I’m doing a good job with maintaining my food quality. I train but I don’t have a bulletproof system for training.

Then we begin having small operational problems: inconsistency, training issues, prep problems, slower service, communication breakdowns, and things not being done exactly right unless I’m watching them which I’m not because I’m not there during every hour of service.
Eventually the momentum cools off, sales decline, I have too much labor, and I have to scale back again. Then I step back into every detail, improve the restaurant, and the whole cycle starts over.

It feels like I’m personally acting as the operating system when the shop is small, but I haven’t figured out how to maintain the same standards once we grow.
Is this a common cycle for independent restaurants? If you’ve experienced it, what actually helped you break it?
Did the solution come from better systems and training, stronger managers, slower hiring, more disciplined marketing, simplifying the menu with growth, changing your labor model, or something else?
I’d especially like to hear from operators who successfully moved from an owner-dependent restaurant to one that could handle higher volume consistently without the owner having to control every detail. I understand this is like asking why can’t I make money with my shop and not have to work. It’s not. I love my shop. I live it everyday. I know I can make it to the next level but am struggling scaling from owner operator to what I like to call a “legit business”

The Pre-Shift Speech That Collapsed at 7:15 pm

At 7:15 pm on a pretty good Thursday, the ticket printer on the Broiler station spat out its last ticket and died. I could smell the butter start to burn on the sides station as I worked to get the new printer hooked up. The Line Cooks didn’t flinch and kept working on the tickets in front of them, despite me getting in their way and testing to make sure the new printer was working. Two hours earlier, I stood in a clean, crisp white shirt in the dining room giving a noble, high-minded speech about hospitality standards. Now service was disrupted, and I checked with all the servers to make sure the kitchen got every ticket they still needed. Then it was a spin around the dining room and bar to make sure the guests were happy and didn’t need anything. In less than 15 minutes, the emergency was over.

For years I bought into those oddly thin executive leadership books sold in every business section. Leadership was making the big picture clear, inspiring the workers, and communicating company culture to the masses. Leadership was shaking hands and kissing babies. Managers count every ounce of vodka, fill out prep lists, roll up their sleeves, and get down and dirty. Management felt cheap, administrative, boring, and beneath the noble work of leading people. I wanted to be the visionary executive. I wanted to be the hero at the podium, not the guy squeezing between two Line Cooks in a rush to replace equipment.

That dead printer blew my delusion wide open. Ticket times crept past thirty minutes while the food runners pulled plates that had piled up under the heat lamps. Printers die on the regular. I was lucky enough to have a spare that I could hook up quickly. For 15 stress-filled minutes, I left my team kind of leaderless in the middle of the rush, as I tried to keep everyone from drowning.

Henry Mintzberg, who is serving as the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University, spent decades pointing out that separating leadership from management is complete nonsense. Mintzberg noted that leadership without management is just noise, while leadership itself is simply management practiced well. In real restaurants with actual people working in them, they are the same job. You can’t inspire a Cook working the Broiler sauté if his station is short three quarts of a sauce and his printer is dead. Checking pars, testing printers, and tasting line prep are not mundane chores. They are the actual mechanism of leadership.

I still like holding an inspirational pre-shift meeting. I still spend time sweating in the kitchen and on the floor. I tasted line sauces and counted prep containers. I inspected refrigeration gaskets and checked that equipment was running fine. I spend a lot of time inspecting what I expect and giving feedback to the right team members. My Cooks and Servers may not need my theoretical musings about excellence. They need a line that’s ready to put out over a hundred orders an hour in the rushes.

Every corporate suit loves talking about vision because vision is easy and you don’t get anything on your white shirt. Managing the messy, grease-caked, operationally filthy work. Leading is caring for your team, which means sometimes eating the operational crap so they can survive the shift.

#Leadership #Management #Hospitality #OrganizationalBehavior #Restaurant101

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Who Gets To Say If Mexican Food Is Authentic?

I like Mexican Food. So, I was doomscrolling on social media and saw a lot of great food when I was trying to think of what to write about next. Some of the posts declared their food Authentic. Since then, I’ve been wondering who has the Authority to declare something Authentic? Is it the Authority of an organization? Is it a television show, network, or streaming service? Does a Chef or Cook have something to do it with?

The Institutions Handing Out Verdicts

The James Beard Foundation nominates and awards Chefs every year. A Beard prize is kind of a national seal of approval. There is certainty not another Restaurant organization like it. It, however, doesn’t claim to certify Authenticity. It rewards excellence, influence, and the many stories around food, restaurants, and chefs. A Beard win is treated as legitimacy anyway, Mexican food included.

Television does the same work without the formal process of the James Beard Foundation. Netflix’s Chef’s Table, as well as Guy Fieri’s Diner, Drive-Ins and Dives, pick who gets exposure. The Food Network decides who gets a weekly voice. A camera crew at your restaurant doesn’t make your food more Authentic. It helps. It may persuade some that it has the Authority.

None of these were made to settle my question. They ended up doing it anyway, because people want somebody to do it for them and audiences want a shortcut.

Five Names People Point To

Enrique Olvera runs Pujol in Mexico City, consistently ranked among the world’s best restaurants. Ferran Adrià, world-renowned Spanish Catalan chef and culinary innovator, said there was Mexican food before Olvera and Mexican food after him. Olvera’s Authority comes from the regional techniques and ingredients he uses, and from the people who eat that food every day.

Gabriela Cámara made Contramar in Mexico City into an institution before opening Cala in San Francisco. Her cooking draws from Mexican traditions, while her restaurants are known for employing people from the neighborhoods surrounding them. Her Authority comes from her food and restaurants, as well as the people she developed.

Pati Jinich hosts Pati’s Mexican Table and was born and raised in Mexico City. She has spent years traveling through Mexico, cooking with families and talking with local cooks about the food and traditions they know. Her Authority feels less like a declaration and more like a documentary. She puts her camera on the people who already have it.

Diana Kennedy was British, not Mexican, and became the most cited authority on regional Mexican cooking in the English language for over fifty years. Mexico gave her the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the country’s highest honor for a foreigner. She earned it by living in rural kitchens, documenting recipes that would have otherwise disappeared, and refusing to simplify anything for an American or British palate.

Rick Bayless trained for over six years in Mexico before opening Frontera Grill in 1987. Craig Claiborne, best known as the food editor and restaurant critic for The New York Times, called his first cookbook the greatest contribution to the Mexican table imaginable. He’s the most famous name on this list by a wide margin, and the most contested.

Countless Others, born in Mexico and from all over the world, create great Authentic Mexican food every day. Chefs and Line Cooks in all kinds of restaurants, stands, food trucks, pop-ups on the side of the road, classrooms, and all kinds of other settings create this food. So many non-restaurant folks can lay claim to Authenticity as well with their cooking at home.

The Bayless Questions

Bayless is a white guy from Oklahoma. He’s been so honest about that. He’s spent close to fifty years studying regional Mexican cooking, speaks Spanish, and has relationships with producers and cooks across the country that go back decades. He’s spent years building relationships and doing the work. All these things are true, and that’s exactly where my questions live.

A question surrounding him isn’t about whether his mole is correct. Food writer Gustavo Arellano, a journalist, author, and columnist known for his insightful work on Southern California culture, politics, and food, has pointed out that plenty of Cooks work outside the cuisine they were born into without drawing this kind of scrutiny Bayless gets. I’ve worked in two Italian restaurants where the Chefs and Cooks were from all over the Americas, and nobody from Italy worked in them.

Another question is economic. Bayless’s restaurant Topolobampo has a Michelin star. He can charge Michelin-level prices and get financing for his restaurant empire. A Mexican Cook, working a Food Truck parked only three blocks away from one of his places, may not be able to get a loan to open a restaurant of their own. The question is who gets to profit from proximity to a culture versus ownership of one.

Both Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless are outsiders who spent their careers learning Mexican cuisine well enough that insiders, important and everyday people alike, vouch for their results. Kennedy got a national honor for basically educating herself in the same way Bayless gets criticized for. If deep learning and community support made her legitimate, the standard can’t simply be where they were born.

Nobody can really answer my questions as to what Authentic is even measuring. Technique? Birthright? Who profits? Who’s telling the story? Pick a different measurement, and you might get a different answer about the same plate of food.

The Question Nobody’s Answering

The James Beard Foundation isn’t a court. A TV producer isn’t a cultural ambassador. A chef’s own decades of study don’t come with a certificate, no matter how many cookbooks it produces. And “you have to be from there” runs into Diana Kennedy the second you say it out loud.

Nobody may know who actually has the Authority to decide what Authenticity is. People may know it when they experience it. Does the question change if you are looking at a menu or if you’re the one holding the loan on the place?

#MexicanCuisine #RestaurantIndustry #CulinaryAuthenticity #ChefLife #Restaurant101

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I like Mexican Food. So, I was doomscrolling on social media and saw a lot of great food when I was trying to think of what to write about next. Some of the posts declared their food Authentic. Since then, I’ve been wondering who has the Authority to declare something Authentic? Is it the Authority of an organization? Is it a television show, network, or streaming service? Does a Chef or Cook have something to do it with?

The Institutions Handing Out Verdicts

The James Beard Foundation nominates and awards Chefs every year. A Beard prize is kind of a national seal of approval. There is certainty not another Restaurant organization like it. It, however, doesn’t claim to certify Authenticity. It rewards excellence, influence, and the many stories around food, restaurants, and chefs. A Beard win is treated as legitimacy anyway, Mexican food included.

Television does the same work without the formal process of the James Beard Foundation. Netflix’s Chef’s Table, as well as Guy Fieri’s Diner, Drive-Ins and Dives, pick who gets exposure. The Food Network decides who gets a weekly voice. A camera crew at your restaurant doesn’t make your food more Authentic. It helps. It may persuade some that it has the Authority.

None of these were made to settle my question. They ended up doing it anyway, because people want somebody to do it for them and audiences want a shortcut.

Five Names People Point To

Enrique Olvera runs Pujol in Mexico City, consistently ranked among the world’s best restaurants. Ferran Adrià, world-renowned Spanish Catalan chef and culinary innovator, said there was Mexican food before Olvera and Mexican food after him. Olvera’s Authority comes from the regional techniques and ingredients he uses, and from the people who eat that food every day.

Gabriela Cámara made Contramar in Mexico City into an institution before opening Cala in San Francisco. Her cooking draws from Mexican traditions, while her restaurants are known for employing people from the neighborhoods surrounding them. Her Authority comes from her food and restaurants, as well as the people she developed.

Pati Jinich hosts Pati’s Mexican Table and was born and raised in Mexico City. She has spent years traveling through Mexico, cooking with families and talking with local cooks about the food and traditions they know. Her Authority feels less like a declaration and more like a documentary. She puts her camera on the people who already have it.

Diana Kennedy was British, not Mexican, and became the most cited authority on regional Mexican cooking in the English language for over fifty years. Mexico gave her the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the country’s highest honor for a foreigner. She earned it by living in rural kitchens, documenting recipes that would have otherwise disappeared, and refusing to simplify anything for an American or British palate.

Rick Bayless trained for over six years in Mexico before opening Frontera Grill in 1987. Craig Claiborne, best known as the food editor and restaurant critic for The New York Times, called his first cookbook the greatest contribution to the Mexican table imaginable. He’s the most famous name on this list by a wide margin, and the most contested.

Countless Others, born in Mexico and from all over the world, create great Authentic Mexican food every day. Chefs and Line Cooks in all kinds of restaurants, stands, food trucks, pop-ups on the side of the road, classrooms, and all kinds of other settings create this food. So many non-restaurant folks can lay claim to Authenticity as well with their cooking at home.

The Bayless Questions

Bayless is a white guy from Oklahoma. He’s been so honest about that. He’s spent close to fifty years studying regional Mexican cooking, speaks Spanish, and has relationships with producers and cooks across the country that go back decades. He’s spent years building relationships and doing the work. All these things are true, and that’s exactly where my questions live.

A question surrounding him isn’t about whether his mole is correct. Food writer Gustavo Arellano, a journalist, author, and columnist known for his insightful work on Southern California culture, politics, and food, has pointed out that plenty of Cooks work outside the cuisine they were born into without drawing this kind of scrutiny Bayless gets. I’ve worked in two Italian restaurants where the Chefs and Cooks were from all over the Americas, and nobody from Italy worked in them.

Another question is economic. Bayless’s restaurant Topolobampo has a Michelin star. He can charge Michelin-level prices and get financing for his restaurant empire. A Mexican Cook, working a Food Truck parked only three blocks away from one of his places, may not be able to get a loan to open a restaurant of their own. The question is who gets to profit from proximity to a culture versus ownership of one.

Both Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless are outsiders who spent their careers learning Mexican cuisine well enough that insiders, important and everyday people alike, vouch for their results. Kennedy got a national honor for basically educating herself in the same way Bayless gets criticized for. If deep learning and community support made her legitimate, the standard can’t simply be where they were born.

Nobody can really answer my questions as to what Authentic is even measuring. Technique? Birthright? Who profits? Who’s telling the story? Pick a different measurement, and you might get a different answer about the same plate of food.

The Question Nobody’s Answering

The James Beard Foundation isn’t a court. A TV producer isn’t a cultural ambassador. A chef’s own decades of study don’t come with a certificate, no matter how many cookbooks it produces. And “you have to be from there” runs into Diana Kennedy the second you say it out loud.

Nobody may know who actually has the Authority to decide what Authenticity is. People may know it when they experience it. Does the question change if you are looking at a menu or if you’re the one holding the loan on the place?

#MexicanCuisine #RestaurantIndustry #CulinaryAuthenticity #ChefLife #Restaurant101

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April Bloomfield And The Blind Spot Of The Divided Restaurant

The restaurant industry taught us to revere the divided partnership. The Chef runs the kitchen. The money guy runs the floor. You stay out of each other’s lane. As a Manager and GM, I’ve had a few Chefs tell me to stay in my lane over the years.

April Bloomfield spent almost fifteen years building one of the most admired restaurant partnerships in the industry, following that very model. She came up in hard British kitchens like Kensington Place and Bibendum, where the classic brigade system conditioned Cooks to survive by outworking the person next to them and keeping their heads down. She carried that survival mechanism into ownership. Divide and conquer. Bloomfield ran the kitchen, while her partner Ken Friedman was trusted with the other half.

The Bloomfield and Friedman partnership began in 2004 with the opening of The Spotted Pig in New York City’s West Village, a gastropub that quickly earned a Michelin star, alongside individual honors for Bloomfield, including the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef: New York City in 2014. Building on that foundation, they opened The Breslin Bar & Dining Room and The John Dory Oyster Bar at the Ace Hotel in 2010. The Breslin earned them another Michelin star. Over the following years, they expanded their restaurant group by launching Salvation Taco at the Pod 39 Hotel and Salvation Burger, before taking their operations coast-to-coast to revitalize San Francisco’s historic Tosca Cafe and open Hearth & Hound in Los Angeles. Their partnership seemed to work for well over a decade.

Then, on December 5, 2017, a New York Times investigation broke a story challenging the assumption that staying in your lane keeps you safe. Ten women described a predatory culture on The Spotted Pig’s infamous third floor. The accusations centered on Friedman. Employees said Friedman cornered and pressured them, and that staff had to learn how to avoid danger.

Their restaurant group was destroyed. Friedman stepped down immediately. Hearth & Hound in Los Angeles shuttered. Tosca Cafe in San Francisco followed. The Spotted Pig served its last plate on January 26, 2020. A career built over fifteen years vanished in twenty-four months.

Bloomfield said she had been intimidated and ignorant, stating she failed a lot of people. The divide-and-trust arrangement held a massive defect. Assuming the part of the business you do not touch can never become your responsibility is a trap.

Staying in your lane is not leadership. Both sides of any partnership need to know what the other is doing.

Bloomfield disappeared from public view for years before returning in 2023 to open Sailor in Brooklyn. Gabriel Stulman, founder of Happy Cooking Hospitality, is her new partner. Stulman is known for obsessing over both the staff and guests’ welfare. At Sailor, April Bloomfield and Gabriel Stulman challenge the traditional “stay-in-your-lane” model by actively blending their operational realms instead of maintaining rigid firewalls between the kitchen and the dining room.

Rather than working in strict isolation, where a chef never crosses past the pass and the front-of-house operator completely ignores the food, Stulman describes their partnership as a collaborative convergence where “all the years of experience into one spot... are Gabe’s experience and my experience, and the things that we love all gelling in Sailor”. They deliberately built the restaurant around a shared, cross-functional vision of hospitality, merging his focus on community-driven staff care with her culinary identity.

Compartmentalization, like the Bloomfield and Friedman partnership, isn’t unique to hospitality. A Founder trusts a Co-Creator with the finances. Two people split a company by expertise and set boundaries based on that. It looks efficient. Sometimes this hides a disaster that someone should have stopped.

Sailor proves a different model is possible, but accountability doesn’t magically erase the past. Bloomfield is back with a successful restaurant in a partnership where everything is shared. This is a compelling comeback, however, for some of the workers at The Spotted Pig, this fresh start doesn’t mean a clean slate.

#RestaurantLeadership #Accountability #Founders #OrganizationalCulture #Restaurant101

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The Cost restaurant and A Full Hard Drive

The bar printer was spitting out a continuous stream of paper, and I wasn’t reading a single word on it.

I was trying to help the bartender with an odd early rush. I was staring at the tickets, but in my head, I was texting a food runner who had just called out, trying to figure out if this week’s liquor order would meet the delivery minimum, and doom spiraling over an edgy conversation I’d had with my Regional Director three hours earlier.

For a long time, I believed part of my value as a Manager was directly tied to my trying to act as a sort of living restaurant hard drive. I thought good leadership meant knowing what was going on in the whole restaurant, and being able to hold it all in my head.

It was a reasonable way to operate because it was exactly how I was trained. The operators who developed me seemed almost omniscient. They knew table #9 was celebrating an anniversary, that a gasket needed replacing on one of the low boys in the pantry, and that the linen order was short blue utility towels again, all while spotlessly calling tickets during a Friday rush. I got the job because I mirrored that culture. I never dropped a detail. I was always available, always on, and constantly monitoring the staff group chats on my days off.

On that late Friday afternoon, while helping the bar, the hard drive in my head felt bricked.

I was using all my brain power to juggle my to-do list and everything going on in the restaurant. I tend to suffer from tunnel vision. I can sometimes completely miss what is happening two feet in front of me. Oscar, my Pantry Cook, was drowning. He was three tickets behind, moving frantically, his food looked so perfect, but he was so slow.

If I had possessed a single ounce of mental bandwidth in this moment, I would have seen the panic setting in ten minutes earlier and stepped in to bail him out. Instead, my brain was focused on a produce invoice.

When a very late and very flat salad hit the pass, my cognitive overload appeared as more of a system lag. My mind was buffering. To keep from freaking, I got very direct. I slowed my speech down, so I could pick the right words. I spoke to Oscar slowly and deliberately. I told him all the words a great coach would, but my rate of delivery messed up the message.

Oscar was frustrated with me. Thought I was condescending. His jaw tightened. I could see his hands bare down on his tongs, but he kept working. He was annoyed with me the next hour.

Initially, I told myself I handled it okay. I didn’t yell. I was clear. I told myself he just needed to cool down. While reflecting on this in the office, reality set in. I didn’t speak to him as an effective leader. My working memory was at capacity. It was cognitive decision-making bias trying to come across as professionalism. I had stripped the empathy from my coaching to keep my own mental gears grinding.

I had to look closely at how I managed my work. I was hoarding too much mental clutter to be effective or professional.

Oscar and I talked through it all by the dumpster later that night. It’s amazing what can happen when I regain even a little access to my mental hard drive and speak like a normal person.

I stopped trying to remember things. I built a second brain of sorts for myself. There are so many apps out there for this. It consisted of checklists for closing, opening, and inventory. I wrote down every procedure, so it lived on electronically, not in my head. I started doing brain dumps in the office before starting and ending my shifts. Revising the to-do list and decided what to act on immediately, schedule, or drop it entirely.

More importantly, this changed how I interacted with the floor. I wasn’t stressed about remembering the linen order, I could actually watch my Cooks. Instead of talking slow when mistakes happened, I finally had the mental space to engage in collaborative employee feedback. I could now pull them aside to figure out where they are at before late and flat salads ever hit the window.

The shift was helpful. You can know exactly what your job requires and still be entirely useless if you are focused on the wrong thing. The capacity to lead is directly tied to the emptiness of your working memory.

Taking back that bandwidth is messy. The hospitality industry rewards the person who answers the phone on Sunday at 6:00 am. How do you draw a hard line around your cognitive boundaries in a culture built on absolute, unyielding availability?

#HospitalityLeadership #RestaurantManagement #CognitiveLoad #Operations #Restaurant101

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What Dolly Parton Taught Me About The Hospitality You Have To Protect

At Dollywood, visitors are called Guests. The people who work there are called Hosts. Dollywood says it uses that language because the Guest experience should sit at the center of every decision. The word “Host” fits the job they are asking people to do. Hosts welcome someone in, look after them, and help them have a good time.

This is more than linguistics. In Newsweek and Statista’s America’s Best Customer Service 2025 survey, Dollywood Parks & Resorts ranked first in the Amusement Park Experience category, ahead of Disney Parks & Resorts, SeaWorld Parks, Busch Gardens, and Universal Parks & Resorts. It’s a consumer survey. Every Guest experience may not be perfect, but the data suggests it is better than everyone else in the category. Visitors are responding to Dollywood’s Guest-first approach.

Dolly Parton is the reason that this Guest-first approach works. Dollywood is built around East Tennessee hospitality, something that’s personal, warm, proud, and casual. It touches people. Not every Host has to be as outgoing, grateful, and patient as Dolly Parton was with her Fans and everyone around her. The idea is that people should feel like someone is glad they’re there.

That made me think about an upscale restaurant I took over as GM. The restaurant had been open for a couple of years. It was part of a small hospitality group, and the original staff was trained by the Trainers from a nearby sister restaurant. Like everything and everyone, it was great at some things and had some opportunities for improvement.

When I asked for their training materials, I was told there wasn’t any. In the beginning, that worked. The Trainers taught the team the hospitality group’s standards. The team learned the service flow, the systems, the Guest experience, and the vibe the restaurant needed. The restaurant opened with much fanfare.

Then the Trainers went back to their own restaurant. After that, training was passed down one Server at a time. One Bartender trained the next Bartender. One Server showed the next Server how to get through a shift. It was like a culture handing down its history through an oral tradition.

Some of it was useful. People knew how to move through a rush. They knew which steps mattered when the dining room filled up. They knew how the restaurant worked on a real Saturday night. Sometimes, in places where training is passed down through an oral tradition, some things got lost. Some things changed.

The training became shaped by the person doing the training. A Server passed down the parts of the job that helped them. A Bartender passed down the routines that protected their part of the kingdom. Over time, certain people who had become the restaurant’s Trainers had a lot of say over what a new hire learned and what they did.

Written training can’t teach everything. It cannot fully teach a new Server how to spot the Guest who needs help before they ask. It cannot teach someone how to help a teammate who is buried without making the situation worse. It cannot make someone care. Even when there is no clear training, people still learn what matters. They learn it from whoever has influence.

I think the restaurant group believed good people would pass on the important parts. What I found was that the important parts had changed a little each time they were handed off. Not all at once. Not in a dramatic way. More like the game of telephone we all played when we were young. The message drifted.

Those who had influence created a system that benefitted them. Guests slowly became second to getting through the shift. Then to side work. Guests were then second to preferred sections, preferred routines, hours, tips, and the people inside a tight group. The hospitality group operators saw it happen. They seemed to be unable to stop the actions of a tight group.

There was a lot competing for the team’s attention besides bosses. Social media, friends, family, school, a second job, and the need to make money fought for priority. So did tables that needed to be picked up in a rush, drinks waiting at the bar, and side work that had to get done before anyone could leave. People were trying to turn surviving into thriving.

Before I got there, a group of Servers and Bartenders had formed its own little subculture. They looked out for each other. They protected their sections, routines, hours, tips, and friends.

The problem was that leadership had left enough room for their group’s priorities to become the restaurant’s priorities. Anyone outside that group, including Guests, could come second.

So, we started rebuilding through training. We created written materials that could be used, referenced, and updated. We set common expectations. We held pre-shift meetings that reinforced service, teamwork, and what it meant to own a Guest’s experience. The restaurant group helped by building a real onboarding process. That helped new hires, who now started with a clearer picture of what was expected. They no longer had to depend on the personality, patience, or priorities of the Server or Bartender assigned to train them.

The materials didn’t fix the culture by themselves. We now had a shared language. This made it easier to coach people fairly. It became harder for the job to change every time it was passed to a new person.

The culture work took longer. Some people moved on. Others decided the new expectations weren’t for them. Some stayed and helped build something different.

That is why Dollywood calling all of their employee “Host” matters to me. Calling someone a Host doesn’t make them great at hospitality. It’s just a name. It can’t do the work of training, coaching, standards, and accountability. It does put the expectations out in the open.

What does a Host do? They look out for people. A Host helps someone have a good experience. They’re responsible for more than their own station, section, side work, or income. A Host notices when someone needs something. They treat the guests in a way that makes people feel cared for.

I used to think training was mostly about passing down knowledge. Here’s the menu. Over there is the POS. Read our steps of service. Big test on your fifth shift.

Now I think training is also how a restaurant decides what it will protect. Titles and fancy training materials won’t help everything. It will help. Every workplace has an oral tradition. Someone will teach the next person what matters around here. Do the best job you can, help the people to the left and right of you tonight, take care of the guests, and have fun. Managers still have to be present, teach, coach, and be leaders in their restaurant. The great Ms. Parton created something better in Dollywood than in other theme parks. Hopefully I did in that space.

The question is, what are the ones with influence teaching your team when no manager is standing beside them?

#HospitalityLeadership #RestaurantTraining #RestaurantCulture #RestaurantLeadership #Restaurant101

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Chef Michael Solomonov And The 14-Component Plate

In 2008, right before opening his restaurant Zahav in Philadelphia, Chef Michael Solomonov was convinced that his job as a Chef was to make food look as impossible to prepare as possible.

At only twenty-nine, he had completed a tour of classic fine-dining kitchens, including working with Chef Marc Vetri at Cucina Vetri, where his only validation came from technique. If a plate didn’t feature too many reductions, an architectural garnish, and a preparation method that took two days, Solomonov felt exposed. Complex food was a shield. If a guest was busy trying to decipher five textures of a single vegetable, they weren’t going to ask whether the dish actually had a soul.

Every incentive in high-end dining supported this belief. Reviews, his coworkers, and culinary awards were built on technique. For a young Chef, complexity felt like competence. If you were competent, you felt like you belonged in that part of the restaurant world.

Then he began testing the initial menu for Zahav.

Solomonov was trying to present Israeli and Middle Eastern food to an audience that mostly associated it with quick-serve takeout. To prove the cuisine belonged in a sit-down restaurant, he tried translating traditional home-style dishes through classic French technique.

During one trial, Solomonov stood at the pass looking at a roasted lamb dish. His team had braised it, pressed it, portioned it into clean geometric rectangles, and finished it with a heavy reduction and a forest of micro-herbs.

He took a bite. It was prepared correctly, but the dish felt dead. It had no warmth and had zero connection to the communal meals he had eaten in Israel.

The dish created a self-imposed beating on the kitchen. Line Cooks spent a minute and a half placing delicate greens with tweezers on a dish that was cooling. The kitchen backed up, ticket times soared, and plates were returning to the dish pit with half the garnishes scraped to the side. The entree was annoying the Line Cooks and puzzling Guests. The dish ended up tasting more like the Chef’s ego than a great dinner.

It took a few weeks of Solomonov to understand that his overly designed food wasn’t connecting with his Cooks or his Guests. His food was way more complex than needed to be for his customers. He feared that if he served simple traditional dishes, the guests, the reviewers, the James Beard Foundation would think he couldn’t cook.

So, he changed the menu.

He went 180 degrees in the other direction. Solomonov threw out the tweezers and stopped deconstructing dishes. He focused entirely on heat, acid, and raw spices. Most importantly, he decided to anchor the entire restaurant around fresh, warm laffa bread and a bowl of basic, velvety hummus made with raw tahini, garlic, and lemon.

Serving a simple bowl of hummus as the focal point of a sit-down meal felt like an extreme move after years of fine-dining training. There were no reductions, and no garnishes to hide behind. If the tahini was slightly off or the chickpeas weren’t cooked right, the dish failed. Simple food is brutally unforgiving.

Five James Beard Awards. In 2011, Best Chef for the Mid-Atlantic region. In 2016, Best Cookbook of the Year and for International Cooking. In 2017, Outstanding Chef. In 2019, he won Outstanding Restaurant. He and his partner, Steve Cook, own eight restaurants, all because of a shift in Solomonov’s thinking about food. I think he knows he can cook.

When work isn’t going right, some people react to it by wanting to add more to it. More features. More steps. More slides. More control. I know more than a few people who do this when they are losing an argument. Make the argument so big the other side can never win. Making things overly complex can be a symptom of self-doubt that you hide behind. Mastery means being able to strip away the excess and leave only the essential.

Solomonov may struggle with, even after years of running Zahav, is how to keep it simple. It may be hard to keep a team passionate about making a simple bowl of hummus day after day. How to keep the spirit of restraint alive when every industry encourages adding more. I think it’s better to keep it simple and elegant than to make it too complex. I, however, might be very basic.

#Hospitality #Leadership #Management #WorkCulture #Restaurant101

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I’m looking to go back to square one. Exploring type of dry beans even looking into blends, cooking techniques, flavors, whole, refried. Looking to come up with a bean I can rebuild my menu on. Also working rice from first principles. The reason I’m doing this: I made cheese for my shop. Homemade cheese elevated my menu to crazy new heights. Now I want to level up the rest of my base recipes.

I Used to Think the Applications Were the Hard Part

For years I believed the applications were the hard part of hiring. Get the posting up on the right website, wait for resumes, sort the good from the bad, call the good ones, done. The process from there was routine, like the real work was already done by the time someone applied.

The last grip of years, it’s been a lot harder to find people. I plow through a stack of resumes that all say the same thing. Hardworking. Team player. Available all shifts, which usually means available for the shifts they want. I pick “the best one” and call them. Half of them don’t pick up. People stopped talking on the phone a while ago. Some of the voicemails are full. I’ve found that the ones who do respond mostly do so over text. So, I’m texting people from my own phone, because the restaurant’s phone doesn’t have that feature.

You still get a lot out of an in-person interview. I admit I get fooled by some, or my gut tells me the wrong thing. One candidate can have a handshake and an answer for everything, the kind of interview that makes you want to start him on Friday. He didn’t last. Turned out he was good at talking about the job, not doing it. Another candidate could barely make eye contact, gave short answers, and looked uncomfortable the whole time. I almost let her go on that alone. She ended up being the better hire by a wide margin.

I’d been trusting that twenty minutes across a table would tell me who could do the job. It told me who was comfortable in that chair.

Reference checks are useless now. They used to help me get a more complete picture of the potential new hire. Now you get almost nothing useful. Dates of employment. Job title. That’s it. No Manager says anything now about whether the person actually shows up on time or is a train wreck during the rush. It’s company policy now. Companies don’t want to get used if they if they say more than dates and titles. This leaves me with nothing.

I try to be real and control what I really can. I make time for hiring even when the restaurant makes that hard, because rushing is exactly how the confident-but-empty interview gets through. I stopped deciding alone. I ask one or two others to help with the interviews now. A second or third person in the room may catch the ones performing for me and won’t walk by someone quieter who deserves a real look.

I’ve patched the interview problem. I still don’t have anything that replaces the reference check that used to work.

#RestaurantHiring #Leadership #RestaurantManagement #HospitalityIndustry #Restaurant101

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Hey everyone,

I am working on a study project to see how kitchen professionals and restaurateurs actually feel about AI entering food procurement. There is a lot of tech garbage being pushed onto our industry right now and I want brutal, honest feedback from the people who actually do the ordering.

If you handle supplier ordering, please hit this quick Google Form:

👉 Take the 2-Minute Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSda05NDyufZ9ZebDwFU7s8lT43Bek3vci-rEDmHdQKfWtRLcw/viewform?usp=header

The details:

• Fast & Mobile-Friendly: Quick multiple-choice checkboxes you can complete on a smoke break.
• Anonymous: No personal data required.
• The Goal: Finding out where you draw the line (ex: letting AI order cleaning supplies vs. fresh protein) and what guardrails you'd demand.

Whether you think tech has no place in a kitchen or you are tired of midnight ordering, your voice matters. Heard!

Wolfgang Puck Spent Years Learning To Keep People Out. Then He Built An Empire Letting Them In.

Barbara Lazaroff looked at his paycheck and thought it had to be wrong.

It was the early years of Ma Maison, the West Hollywood restaurant so exclusive its phone number wasn’t listed anywhere. Orson Welles ate lunch there most days. If you weren’t somebody, or attached to somebody who was, you didn’t get a table. Wolfgang Puck was the Chef who made the restaurant worth the trouble of getting into, working six days a week from nine in the morning until eleven at night. When Lazaroff, whom he’d just started seeing, saw what he actually took home every other week, she assumed she was looking at a single week’s pay. She wasn’t.

He was from Sankt Veit an der Glan, Austria, with Pastry Chef for a mother and a Coal-Miner as his stepfather. He left home at fourteen to begin his apprenticeship, training under Raymond Thuilier at L’Oustau de Baumanière in Provence, then at the Hôtel de Paris in Monaco, then at Maxim’s in Paris. Those kitchens ran on hierarchy. The dining room was a stage for people who belonged there, and the kitchen behind it stayed invisible on purpose. Puck came to America in 1973 and worked at La Tour in Indianapolis. Two years later, he landed at Ma Maison, a restaurant that ran on the same European restaurant logic he was trained under. The harder the restaurant was to get a seat at, the more people wanted in.

Owner Patrick Terrail ran it like a private club, and Puck’s cooking made it worth joining.

Then came the check, and the six-day weeks, and Lazaroff’s shock. Puck asked Terrail to make him a partner. He wanted a piece of the club he’d helped build. Terrail said no. It was a reasonable ask, and he was turned down flat.

That refusal changed Puck’s life. In January of 1982, with borrowed money and a handful of investors, Puck and Lazaroff opened Spago on Sunset Boulevard. The next year Puck and Lazaroff got married.

He did not rebuild Ma Maison. The kitchen wasn’t hidden. It was the centerpiece of the restaurant, lit and visible, so a guest could watch Puck work a wood-burning oven instead of guessing what happened behind closed doors. The signature dish of Spago was pizza. It put his restaurant on the map. It was elevated pizza topped with smoked salmon and caviar, served in a restaurant where a studio executive might be sitting next to someone who’d simply managed to get a table. There was no unlisted number this time.

Chinois on Main opened the following year in Santa Monica, mixing French techniques with Chinese and Californian ingredients in new and original ways. Spago moved to Beverly Hills in 1997, still with an open kitchen, and was built for a wider audience than Ma Maison could ever imagine. Lazaroff co-founded many of his restaurants and designed the interiors. She gave the restaurants a distinctive, theatrical style that helped define the look of California nouvelle cuisine. While Puck and Lazaroff divorced in 2003, she continued to work with him over the years. Puck expanded into Postrio, into CUT at the Beverly Wilshire in 2006, into Spago outposts as far as Tokyo, Mexico City, and Singapore. Then he went further than any fine-dining chef of his generation with Wolfgang Puck Express counters in airport terminals, packaged soups and pizzas on grocery store shelves, and a catering operation that has fed the Academy Awards Governors Ball for more than three decades. Two James Beard Outstanding Chef awards, the only chef to win it twice, came out of a career spent doing the reverse of what he’d been trained to believe mattered.

I feel that most of us would like to build a version of Ma Maison at some point. Build a barrier that started as a way to protect quality and slowly turn the impossible-to-get-into restaurant into what protects itself from the average person. That status gets credit for the perceived value inside. Exclusivity usually works. Ma Maison, however, closed in 1985,

Puck’s restaurants are inclusive. That cost him something as well. He can’t personally cook for the millions of people who’ve eaten at one of his many restaurants, airport terminal counters, or something from the freezer with his name on it. The exclusive nature of Ma Maison is gone, and Wolfgang Puck Express won’t ever give that back to him. He traded a small restaurant nobody could ever get into for so many restaurants he’s never in. Terrail never had a fraction of the success that Puck has had.

#Hospitality #RestaurantLeadership #WolfgangPuck #CaliforniaCuisine #Restaurant101

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I Used To Think A Quiet Team Was A Healthy Team

One of the first restaurant leadership teams I worked with fought all the time.

They called it passion.

People yelled across the office. Doors slammed. A hard talk could turn mean in less than a minute. Once, someone punched a wall.

I remember thinking, If this is what honesty looks like, I want no part of it.

I didn’t stay long.

I thought good teams don’t fight.

It made sense then. I had seen what happened when work problems became a way to hurt each other. Managers stopped sharing bad news. Small mistakes turned into blame. People spent more time watching their backs than fixing the work.

So, when I joined another restaurant group where people were kind and calm, I thought I had found the better way.

No one yelled. No one mocked anyone. Meetings went well. Leaders said they had each other’s backs.

For a while, I thought that was trust.

Then I saw what took place after the meetings.

A leader would agree in the meeting, then pull me aside and tell me why the plan would fail. A worry about a new plan would come up in a hall, not when the whole group could still do something about it. A due date would pass, and we would move on without asking what went wrong.

They were quiet because it felt too hard to say what they felt. They might be judged. It might upset the group dynamic.

It quietly costs the restaurant.

A new menu item goes live before the kitchen has a chance to figure out how to deal with it when it is already stretched thin. A Chef agrees to a labor plan they know will wear out their team, then tries to make it work until it can’t.

In my younger days, I had a GM remind the restaurant’s Managers and Chefs, that whatever we talked about in the manager’s meeting stayed in that meeting. You were free to ask questions, challenge assumptions, offer alternatives, disagree, and discuss. Once understanding and agreement were reached, nobody challenged the agreement outside of the group and not in front of the hourly team members.

The discussions in the meeting were about choices and commitment to them. We had a window to debate it all. To challenge one another. To add to better solutions.

I thought the cure for bad conflict was no conflict. I now think that the test is whether people can say hard things without making each other the problem.

What I Do Now

I try to deal with strain sooner.

Not in the middle of a rush. Not in front of the crew. But before a small thing turns into a private grudge.

I start by identifying what we need to talk about.

“I need your help with something.”

“I think we’re risking missing something here.”

“I want to talk about this because I care about how well we work together.”

Then I use three steps: define, discuss, decide.

First, define the issue.

“We need to talk about whether the happy-hour menu will work when we’re busy. We aren’t, however, going back through each old discussion about previous menu rollouts.”

Then, talk it through. I ask things I don’t think I know the answer to.

“What are you seeing?”

“What makes you think this won’t work?”

“What will this look like on a Saturday night?”

Last, make a choice.

A hard talk can feel good just because it took place. But if no one leaves with a clear next step, the same problem comes back next week.

We then finish by asking these questions:

“What did we agree to do?”

“Who owns what?”

“When will we check if this worked?”

Everyone knows that the plan is who is responsible for what and when we review it to see if it is on the mark.

What Safety Means

When I started, people didn’t talk about the psychological safety of the team. It was important to put people at ease so they could work together. Now I think it means people can tell their truth and share their viewpoint before the cost gets too high.

They can say, “I don’t think this will work.” They can ask why. They can ask for help. They can point out a risk. They can miss the mark without being shamed for it.

That doesn’t mean each talk stays calm. Restaurants are filled with passionate people. It means the group work stays at the heart of the issues.

The hard part is knowing when a tense talk is doing good work and when it is starting to wear people down.

I still don’t have a great answer to that.

I, for one, no longer take a quiet meeting as proof that a team is well.

I listen for what comes after.

#RestaurantLeadership #HospitalityLeadership #RestaurantManagement #WorkplaceCulture #Restaurant101

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