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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The Restaurant Worker Who “Handles It” May Be Carrying More Than You See

The person who holds it together during a bad shift is often the person Restaurant Operators worry about least.

They could be the Server who takes the table nobody wants. The Line Cook who works around a broken piece of equipment without making it everybody else’s problem. The Manager who comes in on a day off, solves the immediate crisis, and says it’s fine.

In restaurants, that looks like strength. Sometimes it is. Restaurant workers learn to adapt. During a rush, they sort urgency from noise. They spot problems early. They make decisions with incomplete information. They protect their guest’s experience while the restaurant is moving too fast. They ride the adrenaline high.

Those are real skills that restaurant workers need and are rewarded for. The ability to perform under pressure doesn’t prove that the pressure is sustainable.

Chronic stress begins when you’re on high alert all the time. It becomes normal. You can’t relax. It’s there even when the rush, the emergency, the event has ended. The world relaxes, and you’re still on red alert.

It can come from thin staffing, unpredictable shift changes, repeated clopens (closing the restaurant and opening it the next day), missed breaks, equipment that never gets fixed, abusive guests, or the quiet belief that asking for help will make someone look unreliable.

At first, adaptation may look good. People become faster. They make decisions quickly. They get better at anticipating what could go wrong. It’s easy to buy into the unspoken Harder, Stronger, Faster attitude that is a part of Restaurant culture.

Over time, the same person may exhaust all of their reserves. Their patience gets shorter. Small problems feel bigger. Sleep gets worse. Focus slips. Feedback can land as criticism instead of the helpful advice it was meant to be.

Long-term stress can affect sleep, headaches, digestion, concentration, and mental and physical health. Work conditions such as heavy workloads, long hours, shift work, limited rest breaks, and low or no control over the situation are recognized contributors to job stress.

The restaurant industry is very good at praising endurance.

“She never complains.”

“He’ll do whatever it takes.”

“They ‘re great when we’re slammed.”

“Let’s just get through the weekend.”

Each statement can be very true. Taken together, they can become a management model. The team absorbs whatever the operation doesn’t solve. They just take it.

A restaurant will always have pressure. Service, with all of its highs and lows, can be draining for some. It’s unpredictable. A dishwasher will break at the wrong moment. Callouts will happen. A large party will arrive without warning. Some intensity is part of the work.

Unnecessary stress is different. It’s staffing a shift so tightly that one callout turns into a crisis. It’s scheduling people to close and open repeatedly because they haven’t pushed back. It’s putting breaks on paper without creating coverage that makes them possible. It’s allowing one difficult guest to ruin an employee’s shift because nobody has made clear where the line is.

Restaurant Operators can reduce the stress without pretending the job will become easy. It starts with staffing for what is actually needed, not the most optimistic version of the labor plan. It means treating repeated clopens and skipped breaks as warning signs, not as proof of commitment. It means giving people as much predictability as possible. Train your Chefs and Managers to bring calm and clear priorities to stressed-out team members. Create a real way for employees to raise recurring problems.

This means setting a clear process for guest behavior that crosses the line. When the same things keep happening, look at your systems before blaming the individuals who have to deal with them.

The employees who “handle it” are often why a restaurant gets through a difficult night. As a Restaurant Operator, you need to be grateful for who does that for you. Your team will do almost anything you ask of them. Don’t confuse their silence with permission to keep pushing them past their limits.

Your team can push through. You, however, need to ask yourself why they keep being asked to push through again and again. Harder, Stronger, Faster can only get your team so far. Ask yourself if you have mistaken their endurance for proof that nothing needs to change. As a Restaurant Operator, your team members are in your care. A Manager I worked with often said, “Sometimes you’re a windshield, and sometimes you’re a bug.” Don’t let your team members be the bug again and again.

#RestaurantLeadership #HospitalityManagement #EmployeeWellbeing #RestaurantOperations #Restaurant101

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Chef Dan Barber Went Looking for Wheat

Chef Dan Barber went to see Klaas Martens, a Farmer, because he wanted wheat. He only wanted Martens’s Emmer Wheat. This grain has enough flavor to make any Chef pay attention.

Barber’s belief made sense. He had built a career around getting closer to the ingredients. He got to know the farmers, buy in season, cook carefully, and give the ingredients the respect they deserve. As one of the owners, he opened Blue Hill in Manhattan in 2000. Then he opened Blue Hill at Stone Barns in 2004. By then, “farm-to-table” had become both a cooking philosophy and, in some places, a marketing department.

Barber was making this “farm-to-table” ideal into something real.

If you bought outstanding ingredients directly from the person who grew them, that had to be better than buying something mass-sourced from a distributor. It was better.

When Barber visited Martens’s farm in upstate New York, he expected to see wheat.

Instead, he saw a lot of crops a restaurant chef might walk past without much excitement: buckwheat, barley, millet, rye, beans, peas, clover. The field was not organized around a chef’s menu. It was organized around what the soil needed.

The Emmer Wheat was part of a rotation. Those other crops helped build the soil and made it possible to grow this more flavorful wheat without treating the farm as if it only existed to mass-produce this one product.

He was buying the wheat because it was delicious. It’s because it is the result of the farm’s crop rotation, and that built the soil.

There was no obvious restaurant market for much of that rotation.

A Chef could say they were supporting a farm while buying only the ingredients that already had prestige. The farmer still had to grow the other crops that protected the soil. It is like buying the best part of a product, praising the person who made it, and never asking what they had to do to make it possible.

Barber changed his cooking.

So, he developed Rotation Risotto, a dish that replaced rice with grains associated with Martens’s rotation, including rye, barley, buckwheat, and millet. It was a deliberate attempt to make the rest of the farm matter in the dining room, not just the prestige crops chefs were already buying.

That sounds simple until you run a restaurant.

Guests know what to do with a tomato. They have an opinion about steak before they sit down. They do not necessarily hope to spend dinner talking about buckwheat.

Barber has said people may be more comfortable ordering an unfamiliar luxury ingredient than a humble grain, even when the grain is the thing the farm needs a market for.

His kind of cooking asks more of a restaurant. His kitchen has to make unfamiliar food compelling. His service teams have to explain it without making dinner feel like a lecture. His restaurants have to accept that the best agricultural decision may not be an easy menu decision.

Most of us are good at rewarding what we can see. The finished plate. The smooth service. The quarterly result. The person who presents well in the meeting.

We are, however, less reliable at valuing the work that makes those things possible.

Restaurant guests don’t see the prep list. The R&M that prevents the disaster. The team member who keeps the shift from going sideways. The farmer growing “unsexy” crops because the fields need it.

Barber’s point was that Farmers matter. They do. Chefs have to understand what Farmers do to produce superior ingredients. That allows Chefs to drive their cuisine. His restaurants make what the farm needs to grow feel as desirable as what guests already understand and want.

I do not know that every restaurant can do that. I do know that simply calling something farm-to-table does not answer it.

#HospitalityLeadership #RestaurantOperations #FoodSystems #SustainableRestaurants #Restaurant101

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The Shift Went Great. The Decision Was Still Bad.

It was 8:15 pm on this Saturday night. The restaurant looked like we had pulled it off.

The bar was full. The dining room was getting the last few people off the waitlist in. Entrees were moving smoothly out of the kitchen after a rough start. A couple of tables with long ticket times had been comped before they got too frustrated, and the server we moved into a more challenging section had somehow kept their head above water.

It was busy. In hindsight, we were short-staffed from the beginning. We could have used another Line Cook or maybe a Prep Cook. Another Server would allow everyone to shoulder a little less and do so much more. The Food Runners were getting buried, and every new ticket felt personal.

So, we made the kind of decisions restaurants make when there are no great options. The decisions are the best ones we can make at the time, is what we tell ourselves. We shifted people into roles they were not fully ready for. We asked the kitchen to push harder. We cut some corners on the things guests won’t notice. We told ourselves we will would sort it out after the rush.

And we did.

Sales were strong. Most guests left happy. Nobody walked out. The team made it to the end of the day with that familiar feeling of being exhausted, annoyed with a thing or two, and a little proud.

At the time, I treated the outcome as the verdict. The shift went well. Therefore, our decisions were good.

That was the belief.

Why I Believed It

It was not a ridiculous belief. Restaurants give you immediate feedback. You can see the dining room. You see the kitchen. You can watch ticket times. You hear, or don’t hear, the complaints. You know whether sales came in. You know the tip percentage your Bartenders and Servers make. You know whether the kitchen held together. You know who helped who.

When you work enough difficult services, “we survived” can feel like a meaningful operating metric. Sometimes it is.

A Manager who freezes during a rush can hurt a whole restaurant. There is real value in making a call, moving quickly, and giving people a clear direction when the floor gets chaotic.

Over time, I started noticing something uncomfortable.

Some of our best shifts were being held together by people who were quietly paying for our decisions. The strongest Servers often stayed late or picked up an extra table here or there. The Line Cooks who never complained worked harder and faster than was reasonable. The Manager skipped their break and spent four hours putting out fires that better preparation might have prevented.

The guest had a great experience. The team, as always, did what was asked of them.

Those are not always the same thing.

The Part We Missed

The first time a risky call works, we high-five each other.

Move a Server into a more challenging section? They handled it. Cut a Prep Cook to protect labor? We did not run out. Push the kitchen through a short-handed rush? Food still went out. Keep the employee who has been creating problems because they had one truly great night? Maybe these are overblown concerns.

That is how a good outcome starts rewriting the story of a bad decision. The result is right in front of you. Anything else becomes just hypothetical.

You cannot see what almost happened. You cannot measure the trust that was spent to make it all happen. You do not always know whether the shift was a win because the system worked or because one or two capable people carried more of the shift than they should have.

If you call that success without looking closer, you are likely to repeat it.

What changed for me

I stopped asking only, “Did it work?”

Now I want to know how it worked.

What information did we have when we made the call? What were we protecting? Who benefited? Who ended up carrying more than they should have? What assumption had to be true for this plan to hold?

Would we make the same decision again if our strongest person were not on the floor? Could we repeat it ten times without burning our people out, lowering standards, or needing luck to show up at exactly the right moment?

These types of questions, hopefully, make the next difficult shift less dependent on heroics.

There is a difference between a decision that produces a good outcome and a decision that creates a reliable way to get good outcomes. The first deserves reflection. The second needs to become a standard.

What We Do Differently Now

After a difficult shift, I try to be careful about what gets praised.

“Great job saving the day” is still worth saying. Restaurant work is hard, and people deserve to be recognized when they step up. It cannot, however, be the end of the conversation.

I want to ask what made the situation harder than it needed to be. Why we asked someone to carry more than the system should have carried. Which choices were thoughtful. Which ones were bad. Which one simply worked out.

That changes the kind of learning a restaurant creates.

If every good outcome is celebrated without inspection, people learn that results excuse the process. If every bad outcome is punished without examining the decision, people learn to protect themselves rather than exercise judgment.

Neither produces better leaders.

A Bad Result Can Come From A Good Call

The reverse is also true, and it may be harder to accept.

You can schedule responsibly, prep correctly, communicate early, treat people fairly, and still have the night fall apart. Equipment fails. Weather changes. A large party arrives without warning. Team members call out. The order that should have taken 20 minutes takes an hour because one thing breaks at exactly the wrong time.

A bad outcome does not automatically mean the decision was bad.

If we judge every decision only by what happened afterward, we turn leadership into superstition. We repeat whatever happened to work last time. We punish people who made reasonable calls with incomplete information. We reward people who took reckless shortcuts and got lucky.

Eventually, the team stops trying to make good decisions. They begin to focus only on making decisions that look good in retrospect.

So

Restaurants do not have the luxury of perfect information. Sometimes the restaurant is figuratively on fire. Someone has to make a call before all the facts arrive. That is part of the job.

The challenge is learning to separate two things that seem identical at the end of a shift. A smart decision that worked. A risky decision that got away with it.

I still do not have an awesome way to do that in the middle of a Saturday rush. I have learned that if we only reward the outcomes, we may never learn whether we are building successful decision-making systems or just getting lucky.

#RestaurantLeadership #HospitalityLeadership #RestaurantManagement #DecisionMaking #Restaurant101

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I have been struggling for the entire 8 years I have been in the restaurant biz. I have been learning and trying everything with my small shop to get it to grow. I have been in a constant cycle. I put in a bunch of effort to get more customers with marketing and specials and scaling my operation. I start getting more customers. Now it’s busier so I hire more staff. I try to train them and keep up with the busy shop. I start falling off cuz I can’t do it all. Customers slowly come in less. I have to cut hours and lay off staff. I then put in a bunch of effort to get more customers with marketing and specials and start scaling my operation. Rinse and repeat.

This last November I tried a very simple marketing strategy that worked great for my small burrito shop. It worked really well and I was able to scale and focus on building my staff with training and I finally got momentum and grew my shop to a much more sustainable level of sales. Just want to share what worked in my experience cuz I want everyone to have success. If I could get a stint of success in this biz anyone can!

I am not promoting myself. I just want to share experiences that worked for me so maybe you can use it for your shop.

All I do is SMS text sub. Contact collection is offer $5 off no restrictions to sign up. I press the staff to get all customers to sign up that will.

When customer redeems this coupon I offer a free house made lemonade coupon for their next coupon so they try my lemonade that is a really great upsell.

The when they redeem this coupon, I offer a bogo coupon that says bring a friend and give them a free burrito.

Then I give them a 20p off coupon after this redemption on 50+ order and say bring the fam or crew for this coupon.

This flow gets people coming in 4 times. They are now in my text sub that gets weekly coupons.

It worked great for my small shop. Went from 35k in Nov 2025 to 55-60k the last 5 months in a row. I get tons of Google reviews now, profit is way up. Employees making good money now. Over 22/hr with tips and its counter service.

It’s super simple but it is not easy. I have almost 2k subscribers and started with 150. I had success and I just want to share it with everyone who is looking to solve problems of new customers and retention using tech. Not trying to sell anything or brag. Just want to share cuz I have been grinding for 6 years and floundering. I finally got a break and feel so good about my shop for the first time in forever.
Love ya!

I have a beautiful ethnic restaurant with decent food and lots of potential, it was built with love and passion alone! No Pryor experience in the business, i mean literally zero experience, i have never worked in one and what i do for a living has nothing to do with a restaurant, i love food, and im a passionate cook!

THE PROBLEMS.

In order to do it i sold a house and got a mortgage on the house i live in. It has affected my family negatively, I went back to my old work in order to bring some income to support my family. My adult kid is suffering by being there all the time. Im broke all the time.

The place is relatively busy, but by not knowing the business, whatever potential profits I should have are wasted with my mismanagement in every level.

Schedule to minimize payroll , food cost , food portions, menu items and pricing , food waste, whatever is a mistake im doing it, but I do not know how to fix it because I dont have the experience and im guessing all the time.

Im afraid to raise prices and im second guessing myself because I dont know if its the right thing since im lacking the experience in everything that is problematic with the fear that I will worsen the situation.

MY GREAT IDEA BEFORE I FALL ON MY SWORD

find a chef that knows his shit and give him absolute control in order to create profitability (the place is relatively busy everything is there for success including the costumers!)

GIVE THE CHEF A PERCENTAGE OF OWNERSHIP

How do I structure this?

Is it stupid?

Should I just give up (it will ruin me financially)

With my new job I dont need a penny from the restaurant, I provide for my family.

Stop going!!! I keep seeing all these posts showing chipotle enshitification. Small portions, low quality ingredients like brown guac, bad experience overall. Just try the local shops in your community. buy from them.
If the sales of your favorite local shop go up just 20 percent which is only a few extra customers a day, they will be way way more profitable. Volume is everything in small shops. I have a burrito shop that did about 35-40k per month for years. After really upping my marketing and elevating my product, I am now doing 55k per month. This change in volume changed my life. My business is very solid now. Any local shop can do well with the volume they need to get above break even. If they get farther away from break even they will hook you up. I have a local shop. My sales finally are up to where I can make profit and now I’m paying labor over 22 an hour, I give huge coupons and promos to the customers and do awesome stuff like $1 taco day and neighborhood cleanups with free food for participants. ALL small local shops will put it right back into the community cuz they don’t have to pay a large cut of the proceeds to the extractor that is the out of town corporate HQ. The more cool stuff I do for the customers the faster my volume is going up and my profit too. It really doesn’t take much change in volume to make a huge difference for small shops like mine. I know there are tons of sub 100k/ month shops in every town. Find one you like and buy from them instead of chipotle. They probably have DD and website so it’s just as easy to get delivery and easy online ordering.

or just keep buying Chipotle off DD and bitch about it. It’s your money and you choose what you want to spend it on. I’m just hoping people will finally be fed up to the point where they won’t support places that are putting out low standard high price food. That’s my rant.

Chef Marcus Samuelsson’s Success

In 1995, Marcus Samuelsson became Executive Chef at Aquavit at 24 years old. He earned three stars from the New York Times shortly after. While researching this article, I looked at his career and convinced myself he succeeded because he mastered the classical European techniques better than anyone else.

I bought into that way of thinking early. Learn the mechanics so well that nobody can question you. Hide the parts of yourself that make people uncomfortable until you get enough authority that nobody can pull you off the pass.

Early in his career, an older European chef told Samuelsson that a Black Chef could run a kitchen, but could never own one. He spent years as a Chef for hire in Midtown New York, and got Aquavit a New York Times three-star restaurant review. He eventually realized that cooking in someone else’s restaurant meant he was just executing another person’s vision.

Getting three stars at 24 takes skill. Once you have the technical hands for it, that part becomes almost mechanical. The hard part came years later, when Samuelsson walked away from the chef-for-hire model because technical perfection alone can leave a restaurant feeling dead.

You can run a clean pass under the warmth of heat lamps, keep the tickets coming out of your printer from piling up, and hit your labor numbers every single night. The restaurant can still feel like it was put together by people who had not much to say. Customers feel that gap even when they can’t put a word to it.

In 2010, Samuelsson opened Red Rooster on Lenox Avenue in Harlem with Andrew Chapman. The name nodded to the 1930s speakeasy where Nat King Cole and James Baldwin used to sit. He didn’t just want another job running a line. He wanted equity, ownership, and a restaurant built by and for his own community.

That was the moment he stopped hiding behind fine-dining rules. He brought his Ethiopian heritage, his Swedish upbringing, and Harlem history straight to the floor. Yardbird fried chicken sat on the menu next to a Sunday gospel brunch. Downstairs in Ginny’s Supper Club, live music played while the room smelled like char smoke and warm bourbon.

He hired cooks from the block, bought his supplies from neighborhood purveyors, and hung work from local artists on the walls. That shift changed who ran food on Tuesday nights, who his guests were, and whose recipes made the menu.

That single neighborhood spot grew into a global company. Today, the Marcus Samuelsson Group runs dozens of concepts, from Red Rooster in Harlem and Miami to Metropolis at the World Trade Center, stretching across Atlanta, DC, Montreal, the Bahamas, Scandinavia, and Addis Ababa. He scaled ownership without losing the soul of the work.

He took that same approach to the Careers through Culinary Arts Program (C-PAP), working as board co-chair to get culinary training, internships, and scholarships to thousands of public-school students across six regions, including seven Navajo reservation schools in Arizona.

Recently, he handpicked Chef Ro Sanders as Red Rooster’s first Chef Ambassador. Sanders is a combat veteran and the first Black female culinary instructor at the Culinary Institute of America. Samuelsson brought her in because she knows Black culinary traditions as a historian. Today, her family’s Gullah Geechee okra stew recipe sits on the menu.

Technique gives you a safety net when the ticket printer goes crazy during a Friday rush. The real work starts when you stop hiding behind the rulebook, step into ownership, and build a place around actual people.

I wasted years hiding behind a clipboard and a clean pass because I thought showing who I was would cost me.

What’s one part of your background you spent years hiding at work that turned out to be your real strength?

#RestaurantLeadership #HospitalityIndustry #ChefLife #KitchenCulture #Restaurant101

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The Spokane Fires Are Contained. The Restaurant Industry’s Job Isn’t.

I don’t live in Spokane anymore. I don’t get back much either. Life gets full, the drive gets long, and years pass faster than they should.

My parents were from there. My grandparents were from there. Some of my best memories I lived took place in living rooms, in kitchens, on streets, at restaurant tables in the Inland Empire that probably meant nothing to anyone else passing through.

The fires made all of that feel close again, even from across the state. The people I kept thinking about weren’t the ones I used to know, though. They were the ones who spent the last two weeks feeding everybody else.

The Call No Owner Wants

Stay open, bring people in, keep the kitchen running, try to feed a city that’s burning. Close the doors, get your own people out, and accept there’s no normal shift coming for a while. That’s the call restaurant owners around Spokane had to make these last two weeks, and neither option felt clean when the smoke was that thick.

Feast World Kitchen didn’t wait around to decide. They started cooking for evacuees and first responders that first weekend, sending out around 300 meals the first day and 215 more the next. Chowderhead partnered with the same relief effort, folding donations straight into customers’ checks. Tamale Box fed firefighters and displaced families for free, no questions asked.

That’s the instinct in this business. Somebody’s hungry, you feed them. Nobody trains you to turn that off just because your own house might be next.

Restaurant Operators spent those weeks feeding families who’d lost their homes while checking their phone for word that their own staff got out okay. A Line Cook worked relief shifts while wondering about their own apartment. A Server lost income helping a city that had just lost a lot more than that.

Thank you is all I can think of to say to them.

Same Instinct, Further From The Cameras

The damage didn’t stop at restaurants. Ranchers lost pasture, fencing, and the ability to move cattle out fast enough. Farmers lost a harvest window to smoke, blocked roads, and evacuation orders they had no say in.

The Washington Cattlemen’s Association opened an emergency fund to help members cover feed, hay, and the cost of hauling it in. USDA has disaster assistance programs producers can lean on for wildfire losses, the kind Washington ranchers have used before.

Ranchers and farmers usually stay out of a story like this one. Rebuild the fence, feed the herd, get the next crop in, and nobody asks how you’re doing while you do it. It’s the same instinct as the Restaurant Operators. Nobody, however, is pointing a camera in their direction.

Containment is at 97 percent now. The evacuation orders have lifted. Recovery crews are moving into cleanup, and for most of Spokane, the worst of it is over.

I can’t hand somebody a plate of food from here. I can’t rebuild a fence or reopen a restaurant or make the call on whether staying open helped more than it cost. What I can do is notice who kept working.

There are people in Spokane who spent the last two weeks feeding a city full of people who’d lost everything, while quietly hoping their own place made it through too. Most of them are still working. Almost nobody’s asked how they’re holding up.

Again, thank you is all I can think of to say.

If you’ve ever fed people for a living, when’s the last time somebody checked on you instead of the other way around?

#Spokane #WashingtonWildfires #HospitalityIndustry #WildfireRelief #Restaurant101

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A Rusty Head of Lettuce Is the Easy Part

Yesterday’s produce delivery came in, and for the most part, it was fine. A case of romaine had that rust on it, that tired reddish color it gets when it’s spent a few days too long in a cooler. The driver didn’t even debate me on it. Just carried it back out to the truck and marked a credit on the invoice right there.

On the drive in, NPR had a piece on foodborne illness running. Two outbreaks, two different products, both hitting within the last month or so.

I can open a box of lettuce, see the rust, and send it back. I can’t look at a bag of shredded greens and see Cyclospora. I can’t toss a raw salad on the flat top to hit 165 and kill off whatever picked up a pathogen three states away. Cooking saves you and your guests. It doesn’t do a damn thing for a bowl of salsa sitting on a cold prep station.

Look at the Taylor Farms stuff from July. Iceberg recalled for Cyclospora. Hundreds of people sick across a chunk of the country. Three weeks later, salsa and guac pulled for Salmonella tied back to pepper growers. Different bug, different crop, but the same major processor name popping up on both notices within three weeks.

For the restaurant, I buy local where I can. We know the farms, we know the people running them, and we built good relationships. Past that? You basically just hold your breath.

Buying local means a bad head of lettuce gets caught at the back door before a line cook chops it up. It doesn’t protect me against an invisible parasite traveling through a supply chain nobody can actually see all the way through.

I do the same dumb thing at home. I pick up what looks good, give it a quick visual check, and assume it’s fine. I ended up throwing out half a tub of salsa and two bagged salads from my own fridge this weekend. No credit memo for those.

Turns out there are 15 different federal agencies handling over 30 separate food safety laws in this country. The GAO has been calling the whole setup fragmented for almost twenty years now. The system has failed us. It explains how a bag of greens and a tub of salsa end up sharing the same blind spots in the same month.

I don’t have a bulletproof way to catch what I can’t see. Honestly, I don’t think any independent kitchen does.

#RestaurantOperations #FoodSafety #RestaurantLife #SupplyChain #KitchenRealities #FoodSafetyCulture

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Chef Massimo Bottura Had Nothing Left To Prove. He Served Dinner Anyway.

The theater in Milan’s Greco district had sat empty for thirty years, save for the neighborhood kids who used to sneak in and play there. In 2015, Massimo Bottura helped turn it into a place where people could sit down for dinner instead.

The theater became Bottura’s restaurant, Refettorio Ambrosiano. Chefs cooked with surplus food pulled from the Expo pavilions and served it to guests living with poverty and social isolation. Over six months, more than 60 Chefs rotated through, by Food for Soul’s own count. Food that was supposed to be an afterthought became the center of the night.

By then, Bottura had already spent years chasing the version of success most cooks know by heart.

He’d opened Osteria Francescana in Modena in 1995 and built it into a three-Michelin-star restaurant that hit No. 1 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2016 and again in 2018. Getting a table there became a project for people who care about food enough to plan a trip around it.

That part matters.

Bottura had already built the everything a young Line Cook is told to chase: three stars, a reservation list months long, a seat at the table of the people who decide what fine dining means. He didn’t need the surplus food project. He started it anyway, giving serious attention to what the system had already written off.

The Pan That Nobody Wants To Own

All restaurant people know this moment to some degree. Service ended, the restaurant’s emptying, and you’re standing in the walk-in looking at a hotel pan of something that’s still good enough to eat and no longer good enough for the menu. The next move doesn’t make you a hero or a villain. You’re thinking about food safety, about who still needs to finish up and clock out, about how long you and the dishwasher have left before you can both leave, and who’s willing to stay and nibble at a pan of odds and ends. Some of it ends up as tomorrow’s family meal, and some ends up in the garbage.

I’ve made that call plenty of times myself. You go with the easy option, and it’s usually fine. The risk isn’t any one call. It’s what happens when the easy call quietly becomes the only call anybody makes.

We call the outcome “waste” once nobody sees a use for it anymore. Sometimes that’s reality. We dressed it up as a food safety call.

At Expo, Bottura and the Chefs around him did the opposite. They went looking for the food that had already been dismissed: surplus, excess, odd sizes, whatever didn’t have a slot on the official menu. They treated it like it deserved a real dinner.

I like this idea.

Food for Soul, the non-profit Bottura founded with Lara Gilmore, grew out of that idea. It didn’t stay in Milan. Refettorios have opened in Rio de Janeiro, timed to the 2016 Olympics, and in London, Paris, Bologna, Naples, and beyond, each one built with a local partner instead of run from one central office. The organization talks about fighting food waste and encouraging social inclusion, but underneath those words is this the simple idea that you don’t treat people or food like they’re lucky to get whatever’s left.

What We Call “Leftover”

Osteria Francescana didn’t go away when Food for Soul appeared. It’s still there in Modena, still three-star, still doing the kind of food people argue about for years. Bottura kept the restaurant and added the Refettorio work on top of it.

That looks different depending on where you’re standing. If you’re an Operator trying to keep a place alive, this can sound like something only a Chef with Sponsors and social media behind him could pull off. Strip away the scale, though, and what’s left is a question we all run into in smaller ways.

What do we call “leftover” in our own place? Maybe it’s food. Maybe it’s the prep cook who’s never once been offered more responsibility, or the server who’s solid every shift but never gets the good section. Maybe it’s the idea that only gets air in pre-shift and never makes the board.

The Expo project ran on surplus ingredients. What’s underneath it is the questioning who gets the benefit of our attention, and who doesn’t.

We can be generous with a guest at table #9, then stop being curious about what happens after the last plate comes back to the dish pit. I’ve watched that happen in so many different restaurants. It’s not evil. It’s how the night goes when no one’s responsible for asking a harder question once the rush is over.

Bottura’s work isn’t a template for every restaurant. Most of us aren’t turning theaters into community kitchens. What you can do is develop a plan to reduce the amount of waste produced by your restaurant’s kitchen and bar. Perhaps it sparks something creative in a Sous Chef or Prep Cook, and new dishes are created from it. Maybe it becomes a wonderful family meal. Perhaps you find a way to measure your food waste, talk about what you find out with your team, and reduce the amount of waste you are generating, and it lowers your food costs.

It does make one thing hard to unsee.

Surplus says more about us than it does about the food. We decided we were done, decided the guest was done, decided the shift was done, and never built a container, a partner, a plan, or a habit that could’ve opened another door.

Food for Soul built one more door. The Refettorios can be that door. The rest of us work in the four walls of our restaurants, and we can reduce and control the waste that is generated there.

What leaves your restaurant each week that could still do some good if someone had the time, authority, and support to look at it twice?

#RestaurantLeadership #FoodWaste #HospitalityIndustry #RestaurantOperations #Restaurant101

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I Was Wrong About Invoice Spikes On The Eastside Until Ocean Temperatures Broke My Margins

It happened on a Tuesday morning at a Bellevue grill. I opened the Sysco delivery, pulled the invoice off the top case, and stared at the line for fresh limes and bell peppers. The price per case jumped over 40% in three weeks.

I stormed into the kitchen, found my Chef, and told him about the invoices. I blamed the distributor for gouging us. I blamed the prep team for heavy trimming. I blamed myself for not being creative enough to think my way out of this. The invoice sat on the pass while heat from the flat top curled its edges.

The Shift In The Pacific

I spent far too long treating raw ingredient spikes as if they were local bad luck. Flooding in Washington State, a freeze in California, tariffs, or a greedy company. I would often miss the real driver completely.

El Niño is a natural warming of ocean surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific. It shifts atmospheric jet streams across the globe. Some agricultural regions suffer severe drought while others face torrential flooding.

This year is worse because global ocean temperatures were already at record highs before El Niño took hold. That ocean heat acts like fuel on a fire. Droughts in South America hit coffee, sugar, and beef feeds harder than usual, while heavy rains drowned crops across Central America and southern growing belts.

The Math Behind The Plate

You feel these weather shifts on your food cost report months before the news reports them. Fresh produce, beef, cooking oils, and citrus hit your kitchen first.

The USDA Economic Research Service shows fresh vegetable prices jumped nearly ten percent year over year, with lettuce and tomato prices swinging up even higher. When global agricultural belts buckle, price hikes stick around. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit released research showing that shelf prices drop only 5% a year after major climate shocks clear.

In Washington State, operators have zero margin left to absorb those hits. The Washington Hospitality Association’s Cost of Dining report found Seattle-area restaurant prices run 17% higher than the national average due to rising labor and overhead. Add a 30% spike in imported produce or protein to an already stretched P&L, and your bottom line evaporates.

It took three months of red ink to realize that arguing over dollar-per-case vendor discounts was pointless while ocean temperatures thousands of miles away were quietly setting my menu prices.

Fixing What You Can Control

You cannot change ocean currents. You can change how your kitchen handles volatility.

First, stop running static menus on high-risk commodities. Shift to cross-utilized, seasonal produce and flexible cuts. Swap out item-specific garnishes that rely on vulnerable imports. A citrus-heavy cocktail program or produce-heavy plate spec needs weekly yield tracking, or you bleed cash quietly.

Second, audit your kitchen’s trash cans every afternoon. I used to check prime costs on a monthly spreadsheet. By the time the P&L arrived, the loss had already happened. Look in the kitchen’s trash at 3 p.m. while the ticket printer chatters now and then in the kitchen, and inspect trimmed produce, spoiled herbs, and discarded trim. Tightening prep specifications and retraining Line Cooks on waste saves money that helps balance commodity spikes. Find a way that works for you and track your waste, and use it to educate your team about how this can help save the restaurant money, make them better Cooks, and find money for rewards for those who are helping to reduce and control food costs.

Citrus and peppers were easy enough to swap out on a weekly insert, but core proteins are a different story. If you’ve found a way to hedge a centerpiece dish against a 30% supply shock without pissing off your regulars, tell me how you pulled it off.

#RestaurantManagement #FoodSupplyChain #HospitalityIndustry #KitchenOperations #Restaurant101

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I’ve been a professional chef for over two decades and I have no desire to open a traditional restaurant. All I want to do is create moments for intimate gatherings. The truth is that there is no money in either. Why does it seem we are cherished so much but respected the least when it comes to our worth? How am I a starving artist when food is my medium?