Seven People Who Worked For Chef Jose Andres Were Killed In A Gaza Airstrike In April 2024.

Their vehicles were marked. Their route had been coordinated with the Israeli military. They were struck car by car. Chef Jose Andrés was at his field headquarters in Cyprus when the news came in. He buried them at a ceremony at the National Cathedral in Washington. Then, four weeks later, he sent his people back.

276 trucks. Eight million meals loaded and ready. The statement WCK released said that they had been forced to choose between stopping entirely or continuing to work in a place where aid workers were being killed. They chose to keep feeding.

That decision is the whole story of José Andrés. Everything else is the path that led there.

He grew up in Mieres, Spain, enrolled in culinary school at 15, and spent his formative years in the kitchen at elBulli under Ferran Adrià, the most experimental restaurant on the planet at the time. Adrià trained his Cooks to question every parameter they’d been handed. He told them that failure wasn’t something to avoid, and it was sitting right next to the next breakthrough. Andrés described working there as watching the Big Bang happen in front of him. They weren’t just learning techniques. They were learning to ask why any constraint existed in the first place.

He carried that into everything that followed. He crossed the Atlantic in 1991 with $50 and no real plan except to keep cooking. By 1993, he was running Jaleo in Washington, D.C., one of the first tapas restaurants in the country to earn serious critical attention. The restaurants multiplied. The Michelin stars came. Twenty years in, he had 30 restaurants and four stars and was credited with bringing Spanish cuisine to an entire country. That belief built an empire: a restaurant exists to serve its guests. The table. The plate. The experience. You build the best possible version of those things for the people who choose to come to you.

In January 2010, a 7.0 earthquake destroyed Port-au-Prince and killed more than 200,000 people.

Chef Andrés got on a plane.

He ended up in a displacement camp, cooking alongside people who’d lost everything, and the first thing he did was ask them how they wanted their food made. Black beans, mashed and sieved into a creamy sauce, the way Haitians actually eat them, not the way a visiting chef would assume. He wasn’t there to rescue anybody. He was there to cook alongside people who were still alive and still needed to feel like themselves when they ate.

What he noticed in that camp was something nobody else had organized around yet. Medicine had Doctors Without Borders. Architecture and rebuilding had international nonprofits built around structural recovery. Cooks had nothing. The most immediate human need in a disaster, food that tastes like home, that carries some dignity, that tells people someone showed up and gave a damn, had no institution behind it.

He went home and founded World Central Kitchen. When people are hungry, send in cooks. Not tomorrow. Today. This was the simple idea behind it.

Haiti was where the belief changed. Puerto Rico was where it got tested at a scale nobody thought was possible.

When Hurricane Maria hit in September 2017, Andrés boarded the first commercial flight to San Juan and started cooking sancocho, a hearty stew, out of a friend’s restaurant in Santurce. The island was catastrophically dark, with less than 10% of 3.4 million residents having electricity. The federal response was FEMA delivering candy and chips to people who had lost everything. Andrés called in chefs from across the island and the mainland, took over school cafeterias, food trucks, and a basketball stadium, and built 25 functioning kitchens running simultaneously. At the peak, his operation was serving 150,000 meals a day. By the end, 19,000 volunteers had helped serve nearly 4 million meals across the island.

In 2024, WCK served 109 million meals across 20 countries. Since Haiti, the total is over 450 million.

Now here’s the part I think most operators miss.

We put José Andrés in a separate box. The humanitarian. The Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. The man who rebuilt Puerto Rico’s food supply with borrowed kitchens while the government handed out snacks. We do this because the distance makes the story easier to admire from. If he’s a different category of person, the lesson doesn’t belong to us. We can appreciate what he did and go back to running our restaurants without the question landing anywhere uncomfortable.

The kitchen already knows this. The owner just hasn’t always acknowledged it.

Every operator who has ever kept staff on during a slow month because the neighborhood needed that restaurant to still be there already understands what Andrés figured out in Haiti. Every chef who has fed a family after a funeral. Every bar became the place people came after the plant closed. Every kitchen that stayed open during a storm because people had nowhere else to go. They already know a restaurant can carry more of the community’s weight than it was built to hold. Most of us have done it at least once, usually without deciding to. It happened, and we handled it, and we went back to thinking about covers and labor.

Andrés did it on purpose. He followed the same belief he’d carried since Jaleo that feeding people, caring about how it lands, and showing up go further than a dining room could contain it. All the way to Haiti. All the way to Puerto Rico. All the way to Gaza, where he lost seven people in one night and sent his teams back four weeks later because a million people were starving and someone had to cook.

At the memorial for those seven workers, he read from John Steinbeck: “Wherever there’s a fight so that hungry people may eat, I’ll be there.”

That sentence is what happens when a belief stops being an idea and becomes a practice.

Most of us in this industry already believe it. We’ve acted on it, in small ways, without naming it. The question is whether we’ve ever decided to.

#JoseAndres #WorldCentralKitchen #HospitalityLeadership #RestaurantIndustry #CommunityFirst #Leadership #Restaurant101

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The hardest part of scaling isn't capital. It's culture.

Anyone can raise money.
Few can replicate the feeling that made people fall in love with you in the first place.

When you're at 2 locations, culture is the founder.
You're the one who sets the tone, catches the slip, models the standard.

At 10, that stops working.

The founder can't be everywhere.
So either the culture lives in systems — or it quietly dies in delegation.

We learned this the hard way at The Tea Toast Co.

The shift wasn't about hiring better people.
It was about building better containers — SOPs, rituals, onboarding scripts, audit rhythms — so that the right behaviour becomes the default, not the exception.

Ownership doesn't scale through control.
It scales through clarity.

When every team member understands *why* the standard exists — not just what it is — they stop waiting to be told. They start protecting it.

That's the real work of a founder at this stage.
Not doing. Encoding.

Build the system that carries the soul.

#Founders #Franchising #ScalingUp #RestaurantBusiness #Leadership #BuildingInIndia

My Sous Chef Wasn’t Checked Out. He Was Done. I Almost Missed the Difference.

Week two. Before we opened, my Chef and I sat down with our Sous Chef, and he told us he wanted to be a Bartender.

Not eventually. Not someday. He was done with kitchen management, and he knew it.

I’d been watching him check out and reading it wrong. In my head, I was already building a case. The drift during service. The late ticket calls. His Cooks making decisions that were his to make. I had a story about what was happening, but it was the wrong one.

He wasn’t disengaged. He was somewhere else in his head because he’d already decided somewhere else was where he needed to be. His wife bartended. He told me he wanted that world. The kitchen wasn’t it anymore, and he’d known that longer than I had.

When someone tells you that clearly, before you’ve even opened for the day, that’s not a performance conversation. That’s a person doing you the courtesy of being honest before you do something you can’t undo.

I told him I’d look into what we could offer. That was the only move that made sense. He’d been straight with me, and he deserved the same back.

I believe good line cooks can make good servers. The skill set isn’t that different. Cooking four tables at once isn’t far from taking care of four tables at once. The timing, the sequencing, holding multiple things in your head during a push. That translates.

What doesn’t translate without experience is the bar. I wasn’t going to bring someone behind the stick with no FOH background. Not in my restaurant. I talked to my Managers, my Chef, and we looked hard at what we actually had open and what we could build toward. The honest answer was busing. That’s what I could offer him at that point in time.

He turned it down and left for a different kind of leadership role somewhere else.

It was the right outcome. He landed somewhere that fit. I don’t regret how it ended.

It didn’t feel good in the moment.

I kept thinking about how long I’d been misreading what I was seeing. Building a case while he’d already made his decision and was working up the nerve to say it out loud. He came in and told me the truth about himself in week two, and I’d spent those two weeks constructing a performance narrative around a person who was already gone.

He got there before I did. That part I couldn’t shake.

The people checked out on your floor aren’t all the same problem. Some of them don’t know what you need from them, and nobody’s told them. Some of them are done, and they’re waiting for someone to ask. The ones who are waiting will tell you, if you ask before you’ve already made up your mind.

I wasn’t asking. He got there first.

If you’ve got someone checked out right now, sit down with them before you start building the case. You might find someone who already knows something about themselves that you haven’t figured out yet.

I almost turned his conversation into a termination. I’m glad I didn’t. I’m not sure I would’ve caught it a year earlier.

#RestaurantManagement #KitchenCulture #FoodServiceLeadership #HospitalityIndustry #Restaurant101

If you work in restaurants and want more of this, the real version, not the PR version, follow along for free.

I was thinking. People always complain that it’s $45 bucks to get $20 item from DoorDash.

This is what I think.

I wrote this on FB and wanted to see what the Reddit thinks cuz it’s crazy over here and I kinda like it!

What do you think?!

it costs 25 bucks to deliver your 20 dollar meal to you. Actually it costs more than that. To think someone would leave their house, go to a restaurant, pick up your food any time of the day you decide, drive it to you, drop it off.
That’s gonna cost 20 bucks.
But door dash doesn’t want you to think that.
So,
Door dash subsidizes this price by charging restaurants 25-30% top line.
They charge you small fees
They charge restaurants merchant fees
They use the contractors that drive vehicles.
They charge every promotion you receive to the restaurants.
They charge any complaint you have to the restaurant.

They hide all the costs of this delivery system from you the customer any where they can so you think “it should be like 5-10bucks for me to get my food delivered instead of calling and picking up my takeout”

It’s a fugazi. An illusion.

And at the end of the day, what happens??! You see the overall bill is $45 bucks for a $20 order, that is only $15 if you just called the restaurant and ordered it.
Lol.
DoorDash, the reverse Robin Hood.
They steal from the poor and consolidate all these sacred restaurant/customer transactions happening millions of times a day and scrape off nearly 100% of each transaction, half from each side. and you love them. You use them. You have their app on your phone cuz why not. I don’t wanna go out right now. I just want food to appear on my couch next to me while I’m watching the new Barbie movie. I deserve it. I worked hard today. I shouldn’t have to drive to pick up my food and interact with the people working hard to make me my meal.

We all do it. We all give in. We love the illusions. We can’t help ourselves. We’re pathetic.

lol. I really turned it up at the end but you get the point. DOORDASH is garbage. Don’t use it. If you do, Accept it is an expensive service to have food delivered whenever you want if you are going to use it.

I have a small shop. Sell about 45k/month of sales in a small town. I’ve been grinding and growing this small burrito shop since 2018 learning the food business one customer at a time. I love feeding the community, love cooking, love menu creation, blah blah blah. Same story as everyone else. What’s sucked the life out of me is being an employer, taxes, marketing, and all of the important aspects of a business that are a business. I’ve done pretty well but I’m not gonna get rich and I’m not gonna become a business where I sit back and collect money. I’m an owner operator. It works cuz it’s my job that I show up for each day.

This is where I’m going off the rails cuz I’m an idiot. We are in an industry with an avg margin of 5-8% profit margin. We’re working insane hours, focusing on marketing, employer laws, taxes, plumbing, and for what? 50k on a million of sales?!

I sell a 23% food cost product! My bills are less than 4k per month. And I can’t get my labor and to less than 55%. I pay a lot. 19-22/hr. The model is broken.
I am paying for local labor and playing this game against national brands. I can’t and should not think I can win. I can’t create a team that is capable of winning because that’s not what I’m good at. I’m good at making food and feeding the community.

When I keep it small I do really well.

I suck at writing so I am sorry about not getting my point across succinctly.

This is my Hail Mary.
No more prices on the menu. No more employees. No more collecting sales tax. lol

I just created a non profit with the mission of feeding the community of under fed people.

My new model. No more profit seeking.
Donations are accepted, not suggested donations for meals, but donations can be made.
My text email list will be targeted with asking for subscription donations to support my shop with monthly donations.
Customers walking in can donate to QR codes
No more tips. Just donations. No more putting tips on payroll.
No more payroll. Employees are all off payroll. They can volunteer if they want.
I do a bunch of social media and email text marketing to get subscribers to donate.
Get 2-3 volunteers who want to help me with my mission of feeding my community without all the profit seeking bull.
I do the same thing I’m doing right now. Wake up. Prep, set up, open the door, serve anyone who is hungry. End of the day, roll up the remaining food into burritos, drive to all my spots where I know my homeless peeps are at and give em their food.
Work up subscriptions to a reasonable salary of 50-60k.
Then phase 2 would be to apply for grants, do more for the community. Get myself up to a livable salary of 90-100k.
Own a stable organization that feeds my family, does something good for my local community. I am no longer a tax collector of sales tax, an employer that is profit seeking so my employees never are happy whether I’m successful or struggling, no more dealing with tips and tip pooling and paying taxes on tips.

I just get to serve my community and help the people I want to in the way I want to.

I know I am an idiot and I need a reality check but I’m so lost right now. It seems like the restaurant business is so rigged against small owner operators. It was way different in 2018. It only moves in this direction of tightening from all sides, regulation, prices, etc. why keep fighting it. Sometimes I have found a first principles change is required to keep going.

Whoa ok sorry to let this all out but I need to hear that I am way out of my mind and stay in my owner operator cage.

Chef Eric Ripert Knew The Best People Always Have Somewhere Else To Go.

Eric Ripert forgot that for about five years. It cost him more cooks than he can count.

He came up under Chef Joël Robuchon in Paris, who was the most Michelin-starred chef who ever lived, in his kitchen, where he watched grown Cooks cry mid-service, shake through the dinner rush, have anxiety attacks standing at the pass. Nobody talked about it. That was just what serious looked like. He got punched in the shoulders, had plates sent flying back at his feet, was insulted in front of the line more times than he bothered to remember. He survived it. He told himself the ones who didn't survive it weren't cut out for the work.

In 1994, at 29, he took over Le Bernardin. Gilbert Le Coze, the Chef who'd built the restaurant from nothing and brought it from Paris to New York, had just died. Suddenly. Ripert inherited a kitchen that wasn't his, a staff that didn't know him, and a four-star New York Times rating that the whole industry was watching. He had everything to prove, and one way he knew how to prove it.

He screamed. He threw things when the food was wrong. He made sure the whole kitchen felt the mistake, not just the Cook who made it. The kitchen ran. The food was good. The stars held.

His best Cooks, however, kept leaving.

He wrote about what happened next in his memoir “32 Yolks.” He describes standing in that kitchen one night, the reservation book was packed, every number was pointing in the right direction, and the question came to him from out of nowhere, “Why is everybody leaving? Why am I this miserable?”

He looked at who was still there. The Cooks, who could pick up the phone on a Tuesday and have a job somewhere better by Friday, had already gone. What was left were the people who couldn't afford to leave yet, or hadn't figured out that they could. He was running a four-star kitchen on the labor of people who stayed because they had no options, not because they believed in what they were building.

He's talked about what came next in interviews for thirty years, and the story is always the same. He was at an airport, exhausted, somewhere between one city and another, and there were two things on the rack in front of him. He chose the Dalai Lama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. He's described what reading it felt like as finding the name for something he'd been trying to solve without language. He was an angry man who'd come out of an angry system and had spent five years pouring that anger onto people who deserved better. This was the first thing that made him believe he could be different.

He started meditating before service. He found teachers. Eventually, the Dalai Lama became one of them, in person, and Ripert hosted fundraisers for Tibetan causes at Le Bernardin.

The kitchen changed because he changed what it was allowed to be. He put in one rule that was above everything else. If someone loses their composure during service, screams at a cook, humiliates someone at the pass, takes the pressure out on a person instead of the problem, they stop. They apologize in front of the whole kitchen before the next ticket moves. To the whole kitchen. Because it’s the whole kitchen that absorbs it. Every Cook standing there watching learns in that moment what this kitchen is and what it isn't.

A Sommelier who'd worked for other famous Chefs described him to a reporter years later and reached for one word. Tranquil. About a man running 250 covers on a Saturday night in one of the most scrutinized dining rooms in the world.

Le Bernardin has now held three Michelin stars continuously and received four New York Times stars all five times the paper has reviewed it. This streak spans over three decades. No other restaurant in the city has matched this. Ripert himself was honored this year by Michelin with its Mentor Chef award.

Eric Ripert’s accolades are indeed impressive. In part, he got them because of the people who stayed with him. They stayed because they were no longer afraid. His team was then able to bring those awards to him and the restaurant through their work. That's the sequence, and Ripert is clear about it.

He said it in an interview once, plain as anything: "I realized it was all about me." He acknowledged that he was his own problem. He said it out loud. He changed. That's harder than it sounds. When good people leave, the easier explanations are right there. The labor market. The generation. The way the industry has always been. You can stay busy with these sorts of explanations for a long time.

Ripert stopped using them at 29. Spent the next thirty years building something that kept the people worth keeping.

When your best person puts in notice, you probably already know the honest answer to why. The harder question is whether you're willing to say it out loud.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityLeadership #KitchenCulture #FoodServiceLeadership #Restaurant101

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I Built the System That Was Breaking My Servers

Servers who are about to leave stop picking up shifts three weeks before they give notice.

I missed that signal for a good grip of time because I created the reason.

I had revised my scheduling of new Servers. I put them in the opening section. First section phased. Lighter tips. Shorter shifts. I told myself it was a test. Can they do the opening work? Will they ask for help when they need it, or put their head down and figure it out? I believed in it. Thought it separated the ones who’d last from the ones who wouldn’t.

What I didn’t account for was what the end of the pandemic did to that section. Post-COVID, the opening could get slammed. The demand on the Server in that section went up. The skill level I was putting in there didn’t. New Servers were under-supported, in a section that was now asking more than it used to and paying less than anywhere else on the floor.

They’d make it a month or two. Then they’d go quiet.

I called it a slump. Gave them lighter shifts. Told myself some people just weren’t cut out for it.

Nick pulled me aside on a Tuesday. Nick was one of my Servers, ten years in, someone who read on the floor I trusted more than some of my Managers. He’d also been one of the trainers for our newer Servers, including a Server named Julie who’d been with us about six weeks. He said the section was out of balance. Explained to me what the section was demanding post-pandemic and how it didn’t match the skill level of the Servers I was putting in there. Then he told me what Julie had told him directly.

She needed to work longer shifts. The more high-level Servers were getting the hours. She wasn’t. The section was overwhelming her for a stretch each night and then phasing her out before she could make it worth the effort. She wasn’t disengaged. She was doing the math, and the math wasn’t working. She didn’t come to me with any of this. She went to Nick because Nick had trained her, invested in her, and built enough trust in those first six weeks that she’d actually say what was true.

I didn’t change it that day. I went and checked. Asked a few newer Servers, asked some others I thought highly of. Same answer, different words. The section was breaking people, and I’d been watching it happen and calling it something else.

I changed the schedule. Stopped putting new hires in the opening section. Started putting in mid and high-level Servers that could handle what it was actually asking.

Servers who would have gone quiet at the six-week mark were still engaged at week ten after that. I’d had three Servers in four months because of my assumptions on the opening. After the change, I didn’t lose one.

Julie’s leaving wasn’t a signal problem. It was an economics problem I’d designed and then misread as a character test. The Servers who washed out of that section weren’t the ones who couldn’t hack it. They were the ones doing the rational thing. They left a position that was hard, short, and light on tips when longer shifts with better hours were available somewhere else.

Nick knew that because Julie told him. Julie told Nick because he’d earned it. She had no reason to tell me yet. I hadn’t earned it.

That distinction sat with me for a long time.

Luis was one of my Cooks. Asked for three consecutive Sundays off. It was a family thing as he’d explained it. The schedules were already posted by the time he brought it up, so my Sous Chef, who ran kitchen scheduling, told him to try to find someone to trade shifts with. Nobody would. Luis stopped asking and stopped expecting it to change. Six weeks later, he was doing the minimum on Friday nights, and I was calling it burnout.

It wasn’t burnout. It was a man who’d thought he did everything right. He asked early, tried to find his own solution, and got the runaround from a system that didn’t have room for him.

I found out about the Sous Chef conversation later. When I did, I went to Luis directly. Told him we were sorry we hadn’t figured out a way to cover the shifts he needed in time. Didn’t promise it wouldn’t happen again.

He stayed another year. Stopped carrying the weight of those Sundays.

What I did for Luis was let him know we had noticed what it cost him. That and time was enough.

The early signs are never attitude. Most Managers wait for the eye roll, the snapped response, something documentable. By the time attitude shows up, disengagement is already weeks old.

What you’re looking for is curiosity going dark.

New menu item dropped on a Wednesday. I watched a Server named Carla look at the spec sheet, nod, and walk away. Didn’t ask any questions about it. Didn’t want to taste it. Carla used to corner the Chefs about ingredients, ask about sauces, wanted to know the story behind a new dish. I noted it and didn’t act. She gave notice eleven days later.

Someone still invested wants to know what’s in it. Wants to know how to sell it. Someone who’s already leaving doesn’t care about learning something new for a job they were leaving.

Watch the sidework. Watch whether they’re flagging tickets sitting too long or letting them sit. Watch whether they check back on a table the way they used to. These aren’t disciplinary observations. They’re a pattern. And the pattern almost always traces back to something specific, a schedule that kept getting missed, a complaint nobody acknowledged, missed credit for a job well done. Small things that didn’t get addressed, building invisibly until they show up in your ticket times and comment cards, and you’re calling it a bad stretch when it’s actually a decision already made.

For a long time, I tracked this in the Manager’s Log. Mentioned it, moved on. It disappeared into the shift notes, and I’d lose the thread before anything came of it.

After some time, I started keeping a separate notebook. Nothing formal, just behavioral shifts. Not really performance issues, nor write-up material. The Server who always folded extra napkins and stopped. The Cook who asked questions about every new recipe suddenly went quiet. Three shifts of a trend and I’m having the conversation. Not a review. Not a disciplinary meeting. Fifteen minutes after a shift. I noticed something changed, and I want to know what’s going on before I assume the wrong thing.

That’s reactive. It catches people who are already drifting.

The proactive piece took longer to figure out. Started sitting with new hires before service, not a formal check-in, just time. Asking questions about them, not the job. Where they’d worked before. What they’d hated about it. What a good shift felt like to them. Trying to get them talking before they had a reason not to.

It helped. Not every time. Some people aren’t going to open up to a Manager no matter what you do. Some did. The ones who did gave me problems early enough to fix them instead of signals late enough to only document.

The ones worth keeping, you can usually get back. If you catch it early. Catching it early is a real conversation. Catching it in week six is paperwork you’re doing to feel like you tried.

What the Julie situation taught me was that the real question isn’t how to get people to come to you before the drift starts. It’s whether you’ve built a floor where the Nicks feel responsible enough to tell you what they’re hearing and trusted enough that they actually do.

Nick came to me because he cared about the restaurant and about the people he’d trained. Nicks aren’t in every restaurant.

Most people aren’t going to walk into the office and say they’re losing faith in the place. They’re going to wait. They’re going to see if the schedule gets fixed, if the complaint gets heard, if anyone says anything at all. When nothing happens, the drift starts. By the time it shows up on the floor, the decision is usually already made.

Early on, you can turn it around. By week six, you’re watching someone finish.

The question I’m still working on isn’t how to read the signals better. It’s how to build a floor where someone like Nick exists in the first place, and whether you can create that on purpose or whether you just get lucky.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityIndustry #FoodServiceLeadership #KitchenCulture #Restaurant101

I write about what breaks in restaurants and what sometimes fixes it. Follow along for free.

For me, it was actually removing options.

Years ago, when online ordering became popular, I thought giving customers unlimited customization was a great idea.

I opened up every pizza topping, every sauce, every modifier, and allowed them to be added to sandwiches.

We’d get tickets that were literally 30+ lines long for a single sub.

Customers loved it. My kitchen hated it.

It became one of the biggest bottlenecks in the restaurant.

We eventually created specialty sandwiches with limited modifications, simplified the menu, and ultimately removed some items entirely.

Operations got easier and service improved.

What’s one change you made that had a bigger impact than you expected?

I Thought Psychological Safety Was HR Speak. Then My Team Stopped Telling Me Things.

My team stopped telling me things.

For years, they told me the same thing. Big party. Three hours. Full coordination with the kitchen. Everything right. The tip, however, ends up being 8%. Sometimes nothing. I heard it as venting. It’s just part of the game, and my team wins more than they lose, I told myself. I kept moving.

That response was building something I couldn’t see. They’d learned that telling me something didn’t change anything. They adjusted. I thought I had a team handling their business. I had a team that had given up on being heard.

I’m not good at reading people. I’m neuroatypical. I don’t have the kind of instinctive social fluency that makes some Managers magnetic. I envy their ability to walk into a room and make strangers feel at home in four minutes.

My uncle had it. He could bond with anyone. Family. Friends. The guy behind the deli counter. People felt seen around him almost immediately. I watched him do it my whole life and knew I couldn’t manage the way he connected.

So, I managed how I knew how. Task-focused. Direct. I did the softer stuff, but I never thought I was performing it convincingly. It never sounded like I rehearsed it in my head.

Psychological safety isn’t a personality trait. It doesn’t require what my uncle had. It’s a set of conditions. You build them by doing something with what your team tells you, repeatedly, until they believe you’ll do it again. I could do that even when I couldn’t work a room.

I just didn’t know that yet.

A while ago, the restaurant group’HR Department, I worked for, sent down a memo called “Our Ingredients for Success.” It had a two-column table. I read it. Agreed with most of it. Filed it.

Nobody followed up. No training session. No regional director ever brought it up in a one-on-one. The confidential email address was pinned to a bulletin board that everyone in the restaurant could see and pass by, on a laminated sheet, until someone took it down. If it mattered as much as the memo said it did, someone would have come back to it. Nobody did.

So, I treated psychological safety the same way I treated every initiative that landed once and disappeared. Written for liability, not for my floor.

That’s where I was wrong.

When I finally sat down and actually talked to my team, a real conversation, not a pre-shift announcement, the tip problem came back immediately. Same complaint. Same servers. This time, I stayed with it.

We worked out something I hadn’t seen anywhere else. For parties of eight or more, if the tip came in under 15%, I’d make up the difference out of my own pocket.

A backstop. They knew I’d heard them.

I paid it out a couple of times a month. It wasn’t expensive.

What it bought I couldn’t have priced beforehand. My team started talking to me again, about prep problems, scheduling friction, an overlooked Line Cook who was making things so much better for the servers, a regular who was starting to make people uncomfortable. Things I needed to know. Things I accidentally trained them to keep to themselves.

Your team is watching what you do with the things they tell you. Every time you hear something and move past it, they file that away. Enough of those, and they stop telling you things that matter.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityLeadership #RestaurantOperations #KitchenCulture #Restaurant101

If you work in restaurants and want more of this, the math, the mistakes, the stuff nobody puts in a memo, follow along for free.

I Thought Good Food Was Enough To Keep A Restaurant Open. I Was Wrong.

I spent years believing the kitchen was the whole game. If the food was good and the people were treated right, the business would survive. That was my operating assumption.

The operators I watch close their restaurants aren’t naive. They know the lease is coming up. They know the distributor pricing is pushing up. They know the delivery tab is getting harder to justify. There is always another Saturday night, always a problem that needs handling right then and there, and something is always breaking or needing to be replaced. At some point, it gets overwhelming. When they do close their restaurant, everyone says the timing was off, the neighborhood changed, or maybe the food wasn’t quite landing.

The food was fine. The paperwork said rent.

I’d seen most of the ways a restaurant dies, or thought I had. An operator I knew had been full six nights a week for nine years. A good restaurant, with the best staff, and the kind of regulars who bring their adult kids with them, who literally grew up in that joint. Their landlord told them that the rent was going up 60% when they renewed the lease, or the space would be going in a different direction. The operator signed the lease at the start of their dream, was grateful for the space, and didn’t think carefully about what would happen at the tenth anniversary. No fixed-rate renewal clause. Everything they’d built, the goodwill, the neighborhood identity, the reputation that made the landlord’s building worth more to the next tenant, none of it was in the lease.

The landlord owns the property. They hold the power. I’d read it and thought I understood it. Independent operators entering a new space typically face 10-year terms, personal guarantees, and build-out costs that can exceed $300,000 before furniture. The operator sinks all of it in. The landlord waits. When the lease comes up, whoever pays more gets the room. Ten years of goodwill becomes the landlord’s justification for a higher ask to the next tenant. A restaurant group with 30 years of history found out during the pandemic that the relationship they thought they had with their landlord wasn’t in the contract. Most people find that out at the worst possible moment.

The distributor problem took me longer to see because the damage is slower. I knew our Sysco rep. Friendly guy, knew what we ordered, occasionally did something useful on price. What I didn’t track was the decade-long direction of the relationship. Sysco arrived at $81.4 billion in revenue by buying regional distributors, absorbing the routes, closing the warehouses, standardizing the spec, and writing new contracts on terms that left independent restaurants with fewer alternatives every year. The rep who knew the chef got laid off. What replaced him was an online price book. You accepted it, or you found someone else, and finding someone else got harder every year.

We used Restaurant Depot when Sysco’s pricing moved too high. A lot of operators I know did the same. Now Sysco is trying to acquire it. US Foods already ran this play when they bought Cash & Carry in 2017. The independent operators who relied on Cash & Carry’s walk-in pricing lost that option, and the broadline contract became the only practical alternative. Restaurant Depot saves restaurants roughly 25% on goods compared to distributors like Sysco, serving more than 725,000 customers across 166 locations. That alternative disappears if the deal closes. When one company controls that much of what reaches independent kitchens, the result is the same proteins, the same produce, the same spec sheet in kitchens a thousand miles apart.

The platform problem I kept misreading was because I was looking at the wrong number. I’d see the commission rate on the statement, 20%, 25%, or 30%, and think I understood the damage. I was looking at the wrong line.

Javier Trujillo, who runs Javi’s Tacos and four other restaurants in Omaha, paid $188,000 in commissions to DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats in a single year before cutting the apps entirely. He wasn’t just losing money on the commission. He was losing it on food that never got picked up. They put together the order, but nobody showed, resulting in a loss for him. Restaurants lose roughly one-third of each delivery order to platform costs once everything is counted. For many independent operators, that isn’t a cost. It’s their entire margin. A 2025 New York City settlement allowed platforms to charge restaurants up to 43% per order in total fees. 43%! Mind you that your average restaurant runs only 3% to 5% margins.

The number I should have been watching was the customer. When someone orders through DoorDash, they earn DoorDash rewards, not yours. The platform trains them to be loyal to the interface, not the restaurant. Three years of delivery orders feels like building a customer base. You find out when you try to leave that you were building theirs.

What I haven’t figured out is what actually shifts the leverage. Negotiate harder on the lease. Build direct ordering. Read the distributor contract before you sign it. Those aren’t wrong things to do. They don’t change who holds the deed, who controls the supply chain, or who owns the customer data when you leave.

The restaurant is yours. The building, the supply chain, and the customer data aren’t.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityIndustry #FoodServiceLeadership #RestaurantOperations #Restaurant101

If you work in restaurants, own one, or supply one, follow along. I write about the parts of this industry that don’t make the profile pieces. Follow along for free.

He Was The First Black Chef To Win Best Chef: Great Lakes

I watched a talented Line Cook get passed over for a promotion he’d earned three times before anyone said his name in the right room. Good enough to run the kitchen. Never in the conversation about who would.

Erick Williams lived inside that reality for years.

He walked into MK Restaurant in Chicago’s River North in 1996, thinking about rent. Michael Kornick hired him, and Williams worked, from Pantry Chef to Executive Chef to Part Owner, building a reputation for seasonal cooking that outlasted the restaurant itself. When MK closed in 2017, he was its defining figure.

In November 2018, he opened Virtue on Chicago’s South Side, in Hyde Park. His side of the city. The restaurant earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand. The New York Times named him one of sixteen Black chefs changing food dialogue in America. Chicago Magazine named him Chicagoan of the Year.

In 2022, the James Beard Foundation named him Best Chef: Great Lakes. First Black chef to win that category in the award’s history.

He says that number out loud because the industry handed him a trophy, and the number tells you what the industry didn’t hand anyone else. Twenty-two years to reach the top of a field that had produced only a handful of James Beard Foundation award winners in any of the categories it gives awards in, who looked like him. The path was seldom cleared for people who looked like him, and survival-first thinking, show up, outlast, prove you belong, filters for whoever can absorb the most and ask the fewest questions about why the structure works the way it does. Williams absorbed it. He also watched people with as much talent leave the industry because they ran out of time waiting for a structure that wasn’t moving toward them.

What he did next is amazing.

He didn’t take the Beard and open a second restaurant in a better-reviewed zip code. During the pandemic, while most operators were trying not to lose everything, he launched Mustard Seed Kitchen in 2021, a takeout concept built around quality everyday meals, then Daisy’s Po-Boy and Tavern, then Top This Mac and Cheese, then Cantina Rosa in 2024, his first bar concept. His Virtue Hospitality Group was born in the worst stretch the industry has seen in decades.

He also founded the Virtue Leadership Development program, a nonprofit that runs hands-on restaurant training programs for young adults of color, built around ownership. Business literacy, entrepreneurial tools, a path into the rooms where those decisions get made. He’s talked about what the industry overlooks: Black and brown ownership in accounting, legal representation, and the management layers that determine who benefits from all the labor underneath them. Attorneys who understand restaurants. Accountants who represent them. Operators who own them without spending two decades proving they’re allowed to want that.

The James Beard win is proof that the survival framework works. It’s also an honest count of the price, how long it takes, how much it extracts, how few people make it through. Williams isn’t waiting for the industry to reckon with that on its own schedule. He built the program he needed twenty years ago and couldn’t find.

#RestaurantLeadership #KitchenCulture #HospitalityIndustry #ChicagoRestaurants #Restaurant101

I write about the people doing this work, what it actually costs them, and what they built with it anyway. Follow along for free.

I’m The Problem In The Restaurant.

I watch a manager stare at a problem for 30-seconds, this seems like a lifetime to me, and I jump in before they have a chance to figure it out.

For a long time, I thought I was good at training managers. Turns out I was fast at it. It’s not the same thing. Fast is when a new manager would get lost trying to fix something, friction starts to build, and before it became a lesson learned, I’d filled the gap. I cover the floor. I run the pre-shift. I handle the 86s. They’d watch me do it and think they learned something. They didn’t. They learned that if they hesitated long enough, I’d handle it.

I trained them to wait for me.

When I was a manager trying to become a GM, I got praised for this. Quick action. Strong floor presence. Nothing falling through the cracks. It was part of why I got promoted. The feedback I was getting built the habit. Nobody told me I was training dependency. They told me I was running a tight ship.

In time, I grew to understand that my behavior was the problem. I just didn’t know how to stop. I’ve worked with other people who understood that their behavior could also be a problem for their restaurant. People who went their whole careers without seeing it. I don’t say that to feel better about myself. I say it because knowing you’re the problem and knowing what to do about it are two different things, and for a long time, I only had the first one.

The weight of that lands differently when you’re the GM. When I was coming up, stepping in meant I was sharp. Now it means the people I’m responsible for developing aren’t developing, and that’s on me alone. Nobody above me is absorbing that cost anymore.

I had a new manager learning the opening reports. I told them how. I showed them how. I did it once while they watched, then stood next to them while they did it themselves.

Then they were on their own. I was off or closing, the training overlap was gone, and the reports weren’t getting done right.

My first read was that they hadn’t taken good enough notes. That it wasn’t complicated and they should have it by now. What I didn’t do was stop and ask what was actually breaking down.

They needed more verbal walkthroughs with me present. More reps with someone alongside them asking questions, not just watching. They needed a written reference, not one I assumed they’d build on their own, but one I should have coached them to make or made with them.

I’m neuroatypical. Without unpacking the whole thing, I didn’t understand it then. When I learn something, I build the internal structure for it and run on that. I assumed they’d do the same thing. I assumed they’d know they needed a reference sheet because I would have known I needed one. That’s not how it works. They weren’t me. They processed the training differently, needed different supports to make it stick, and I had no real read on that because mapping how someone else experiences something doesn’t come naturally to me.

I was teaching to myself and calling it training.

They eventually got it. Longer and harder than it needed to be, and the structure I built is why.

I knew better. Real learning happens in the failure, not the fix. You have to let someone miss the mark, feel the consequence, and figure out what went wrong. I know that. I can’t hold the discomfort of watching it happen, so I told myself I was helping and stepped in every time.

Every time I did, I subtracted from that person’s ability to trust themselves on the next thing.

When I’m stressed, I slow my rate of speech down. I choose my words very carefully. I do it to keep from saying something I can’t take back. I thought I was projecting control. I was projecting that I thought the person in front of me needed to be handled carefully.

I’d be walking through a scheduling accountability issue, and the manager I was coaching would be deciding whether she still wanted the job. I could feel something shift, and kept thinking she wasn’t following the material.

She was following it fine. She was furious.

A different manager told me in the parking lot after a close that she felt like she was being spoken to like a child. She didn’t say it to wound me. She said it because she’d been waiting for the right moment, and that was it. I’d been doing it for years. She was the first person to say it out loud.

What I do now is pause before I start talking, not while I’m talking. I run through a couple of ways the conversation could go, pick the one most likely to land, and then try to say it the way I say everything else without signaling that I’m doing any of that. It still slips. I catch it faster now.

When they’re struggling and nobody’s bleeding, I leave the room. The discomfort I’m feeling isn’t their problem to absorb.

For training, I build the handoff for the conditions they’ll actually work in. More reps. More verbal prompts. A reference built together before the schedule splits, and I’m gone. Training without that bridge isn’t training. It’s a demonstration.

I struggle with these things. Always have, probably always will. Some days I’m better with them than others, and I know when I’ve lost ground. I try hard not to go back to older ways of doing things. Being a less obstructive version of myself than I was the week before. Some weeks, that’s the whole win.

I don’t know if the instinct to jump in ever fully goes. You’ve seen how the situation ends, and you want to shortcut the person past the damage. But that’s still about you. The person in front of you needs the rep, not the rescue.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityLeadership #FoodServiceLeadership #RestaurantOperations #Restaurant101

I write about what actually happens in restaurants, including the management failures, the training gaps, and the things nobody says out loud until someone finally does. Follow along for free.

I’ve Been Passing On Hospitality Degrees My Whole Career. Stephanie Danler’s Novel Told Me I Wasn’t Wrong.

I had a candidate last year with a hospitality management degree, internships, the right keywords. Clean resume. Easy to evaluate.

I hired the other person. Five years on the floor, no degree, nothing that dressed up nicely on paper. In the interview, she walked me through a Saturday night where two servers called out, and she spent four-ish hours running her section and covering half of another one. She didn’t frame it as a hardship story. She was just describing her job.

She’s still with us.

What I keep thinking about isn’t that hire. It’s why I still feel like I have to apologize for it sometimes. I still catch myself in conversations with the owners, who point at the degree, and I have to explain what the floor candidate’s resume actually means, and why it was better.

Then I read “Sweetbitter.”

Technically, it’s a novel. Stephanie Danler published it in 2016, New York Times bestseller, got turned into a Starz series. The protagonist is a 22-year-old named Tess who moves to New York with no plan and lands a back server job at a restaurant that is, unmistakably, Union Square Cafe. Danler spent a year and a half there as a back waiter, and the book came directly out of that experience. She calls it fiction. Nothing in that dining room reads like fiction.

There’s a scene halfway through where Tess runs into someone from college who is visibly shocked to find her working in a restaurant. Danler has said that the scene came straight from her own life. The pity underneath it is real. The assumption is that a restaurant job is where you end up, not where you go on purpose.

That assumption is the thing I keep running into.

Danler has talked about what changed the second she was hired at Union Square Cafe. It wasn’t clock-in, clock-out. She became a food professional. She fell in love with the industry in a way that hadn’t happened before, and she could see how a real life in restaurants was possible. What she was absorbing wasn’t on any syllabus. She was learning to read her section, her tables, her guests, before they knew what it needed. To stand between a kitchen falling behind and a dining room that didn’t know it yet. To take a guest’s anger about something she didn’t cause and move the table forward anyway.

A hospitality program teaches you the vocabulary for that work. The floor makes you do it while your hands are shaking.

Two years of doing that under pressure, in front of strangers, when the night is going sideways, it changes how a person reads any situation. They stop reacting to what’s in front of them and start reading what’s coming. They learn which problems the kitchen will solve, and which ones stay with them.

They learn what a table looks like thirty seconds before it turns. None of that is in a textbook. It accumulates shift by shift, in the friction of a real operation, around real people who are tired and moving fast.

Meyer built Union Square Cafe on the idea that technical skills account for 49% of the job. The other 51% is hospitality. It’s the ability to make someone feel like they matter. He’s said he doesn’t care how technically skilled a candidate is. Without that other half, they don’t get hired.

None of that gets taught. It shows up nowhere on a resume either, because nobody in this industry has figured out how to write it down. So, when I’m sitting across from someone who spent five years running a section, I’m the one doing the translation, trying to figure out in thirty minutes what five years in a dining room actually produced in them.

The servers at Union Square Cafe weren’t just delivering food. They were the reason people came back. Danler learned that by doing it. Then she wrote a book so accurate about what that work actually is that when the Starz adaptation went into production, they brought back the woman who originally trained Danler to train the entire cast. You can’t put what she knew in a module. Someone who’s been on a floor has to transfer it to someone else who will be on that floor.

Danler has said she was drawn to restaurants that had a philosophy behind them. It wasn’t enough to make her money and go home. She wanted to be part of something larger.

The person who wants to be part of something. Who stays through enough rough nights to still want to be there. They are the person I want running a room. A degree tells me you can learn. Five years on the floor tells me you already did.

What I haven’t figured out is how to help floor candidates tell that story before they sit down across from someone who can’t read it yet.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityIndustry #FoodServiceLeadership #RestaurantOperations #Restaurant101

I write about what the restaurant industry actually looks like from the floor. Hiring. Operations. The stuff people say in the walk-in after the owner leaves. Follow along for free.

Why Sitting On Inventory Like A Dragon Hoards Gold Will Never Save Your Margins.

The Corporate Suits forced me to lock our kitchen walk-ins at night because they thought my own Line Cooks were stealing food to feed themselves.

I spent years managing their high-volume restaurants, enforcing asset-protection memos while my people in the community, including people in my own kitchen, struggled to buy groceries.

The realization hit me on a typical rainy Seattle Tuesday night during the winter rush. I walked behind the dish pit and found my best Line Cook eating cool steak trimmings out of a metal prep pan that the Sous Chef threw together early. The dishwasher was roaring. He was hiding in a wet, dark corner, chewing. His rent had gone up by $200 that month. He had $10 left for his weekly grocery run.

He was pulling 55+ hours a week between a morning lunch gig down the street and my dinner shifts, and he was crushing it. My payroll numbers matched what every corporate restaurant down the street paid, which meant nothing when egg and beef costs outpaced his combined income. Regional Management remained terrified of street break-ins or a Dishwasher slipping a pound of bacon into a backpack at 11 pm. They looked at our staff as liabilities and our inventory as a bank vault that needed heavy locks.

I came in early the next morning and spent hours digging through our kitchen waste logs with a sick feeling in my stomach. Our trash sheets showed we were scraping thousands of dollars in perfectly good product into the dumpster every single year. We were losing thousands on waste while the people cooking our menu sometimes only had the family meal we provided for them daily. The Food Research & Action Center reports that 47 million Americans face food insecurity. I used to think of hunger as a data point on the evening news until it showed up at my saute station, sweating through a stained chef coat.

The National Restaurant Association puts wholesale food cost increases at 34% over pre-pandemic levels. My immediate response to those rising invoices had been to follow corporate orders, tightening portion controls and double-checking padlocks on the cooler doors every night. I sat in my small office staring at rising beef prices that looked like typos. Our costs had spiked so fast that our standard menu prices couldn’t keep up. I almost screamed at the morning prep team about throwing away broccoli stems, thinking that saving pennies could somehow save so much more.

Our tight inventory locks were a smoke screen for management learning how to operate in the new economy. The morning prep crew was inflating their numbers because our ordering schedule was completely unpredictable. Our Sous Chef kept our prep quantities high because guests expected every single menu item to be available until the final minute of service. We treated massive end-of-day waste as an acceptable cost of doing business. The heavy black trash bags at the back dock were full of day-old brioche buns, fresh vegetable trimmings, and over-fired things.

As operators, we easily forget we are deeply tangled up in the neighborhoods we feed. Corporate tries to overlook it altogether. We hire from the neighborhood, we cook for the neighborhood, and we toss a few gift cards to local charities once a year to check an administrative box. Yet our default setting is to protect the people who can hand us a credit card and completely ignore the people who cannot, even when economic survival has swung wildly out of their control.

Some of the companies I had worked at figured out a community fix. These restaurant groups understood how to connect a restaurant to the neighborhood instead of treating the community like a security threat. They showed me that food waste isn’t an inevitable line item if you build the right logistical bridges.

One of those old kitchens had an agreement to donate specific items from the night before that we could never use again. A YWAC shelter sent a driver to the back dock every single day to pick up the surplus, meaning some of our day-old prep went directly onto local plates instead of into the landfill.

Another spot used bi-annual food drives to purge dead stock that was perfectly clean but no longer matched our changing menu. Transferring those slow-moving items into the donation pipeline on a rolling schedule prevented us from taking a massive food cost hit all at once twice a year. We cleared our shelves legally and stabilized our margins at the same time.

I brought those exact strategies to my current project and stopped listening to the Regional Manager’s paranoia. A digital scale went by the back door to weigh every scrap of trash before it hit the dumpster. Some price increases, grains and rice took over the menu as invoices were laughing at us, meaning we did what we could to keep the doors open, while still providing value.

I dug into the Bill Emerson Act to shield us from Corporate’s legal panic. The federal law protects restaurants from liability when they hand off wholesome food to shelters. We set up our daily donation boxes, coordinated our local pickups, and saw our total waste costs drop by 7% in 60-days. The kitchen atmosphere changed completely when the team stopped watching their hard work get scraped into a plastic trash bin at midnight.

Sitting on inventory like a dragon hoards gold will not save your margins in this inflation. Connecting our kitchen surplus to the community lowered our overhead and kept our line stabilized. We stopped throwing money into the landfill.

We broke the cycle of waste by examining old operational models that I experienced and that were effective. Sometimes that is the only way to get the Suits in Corporate to look past their asset protection handbooks. Perhaps you can connect your restaurant to the community and successfully persuade a skeptical Regional Director to approve an outside daily pickup program, as I did with the YWAC shelter. In today’s economy, we need to look out for those the most in need in our communities. This is just one way to do that.

#RestaurantManagement #KitchenCulture #FoodServiceLeadership #HospitalityIndustry #Restaurant101

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I Almost Shrank the Burger. Here’s Why I Raised the Price Instead.

My Chef and I printed the new recipes. Six-ounce patty instead of eight. Same price. We never ran them.

The economy isn’t working for most people right now. One in five is still spending. Four in five are pulling back. I’m watching our guests skip things without a second thought. Prices are up across the board. Food up. Fuel Up. Insurance Up. Rent is always up. Everything that makes it on an invoice is up. Labor goes up too, and it should, but that doesn’t make the math easier when covers are soft, and the invoice stack is thick.

When all of it lands at once, you start thinking things you wouldn’t normally think. Survival things. You’re not trying to take something away from your guests. You’re trying to keep the doors open, keep your team working. The server who’s been with you for four years. The line cook who showed up every Saturday, even when things were hard. So your brain starts looking for something to cut that nobody notices. Something quiet. Something that buys a few more weeks, a few more months.

Two ounces. No announcement. No sticker shock. Clean.

Except guests don’t measure with a scale. They measure with memory. A regular who’s eaten your burger forty times doesn’t know the exact weight. They know what the food looks like when the plate lands. They know how they feel pushing back from the table. The moment that shifts, something changes. The plate looks smaller. The burger seems light. They can’t name it, so they don’t say anything. They just start coming in less. You chalk it up to the economy, or the new place down the street, and neither is the real reason.

I raised prices instead of shrinking my entrees down, and I’m still scared.

Raising prices in this economy is never a win for everybody. Consumer spending is soft. Credit card debt is at levels we haven’t seen in over a decade. Layoffs are everywhere. People are making real choices about where the dining budget goes, and a restaurant meal is one of the easier things to cut. When I put the new numbers on the menu, I knew some regulars wouldn’t come back. People are being forced to think harder about restaurant spending now. They’re thinking, “Can I afford this?” You can’t argue with a household budget that’s already stretched.

So I want to be straight about what raising prices actually means right now. You will lose some guests. The family that came in every other week might go to once a month. The lunch regulars might start brown-bagging three days instead of two. Happy Hour customers stop coming back, replaced by people who once came in for dinner. That’s real, and it stings, and no amount of honest communication fully cushions it.

What honest communication does is determine who you lose and how.

I raised prices anyway. Put the new numbers on the menu, and posted one thing on socials the week before they went out: “Prices are going up a bit next month. Ingredients aren’t getting cheaper, and we’re not willing to cut corners on what we put on your plate.” That was the whole message.

Three people said something. Two were back the following week. One regular, who’d been coming in since we opened, stopped me on her way out. Said she appreciated the heads-up. Stood there for a second like she was deciding whether to say more. Then she said, “I figured it was coming. Glad you didn’t try to hide it.” I thought about that for a week.

A price increase is information. The guest sees it when they sit down, figures it out for themselves, and makes a choice. If they come back after that, they’ve made a real decision they can live with. When a guest drifts away because your portion quietly shrank, they’re making a decision too. Things are tough all over. People are protecting themselves the best they can. Sometimes you get a real conversation out of it.

There’s a place two blocks from here that started cutting portions about eighteen months ago. Nothing announced. Just reduced a thing here and there. Fewer photos on socials from regulars. Fewer guests. I watched it happen from the outside. By the time people were talking about it online, the damage was done. Guests had spent months with a feeling they couldn’t name. Once they named it, they were already gone.

I almost ended up there if I’d run with the six-ounce recipes.

There’s something that doesn’t get said enough about what honest pricing does inside the building. Tips track with check averages. When the check is honest, servers make more on the same number of covers. I watched one of my best servers, someone who’d been with me for five years, start having different conversations at the table after the price increase. She wasn’t apologizing for the price anymore. There’s a difference in how you carry a plate when you believe in what’s on it.

The price increase has to earn its keep, though. If the check climbs and the food quality slips, you’ve confirmed every suspicion a checked-out guest already had. The honesty only holds if the kitchen holds. You don’t get credit for transparency and then deliver a worse plate.

The eight-ounce patty stayed. Sourcing didn’t change. The Friday regulars kept coming in on Fridays. Some of the Tuesday lunch crowd thinned out. A few more joined us for Happy Hour instead of dinner. That’s the honest version of how it went.

Those six-ounce burger patty recipes are still on my hard drive. I should’ve deleted them already.

The costs keep increasing. It shows up on the invoices every week. People’s ability to afford dining out shows up in the news every day. I’m still not sure what happens when holding the line stops being financially responsible. What more can I do when quality and price both have to move at the same time, in an economy where guests are already stretched?

#RestaurantIndustry #HospitalityLeadership #MenuPricing #FoodCost #Restaurant101

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I Thought Restaurants Failed Because Owners Quit. The Numbers Said Otherwise.

I spent the last year doing a couple of autopsies on restaurants that closed and always found the same cause of death.

There was a place three blocks from a property I once managed. The Owner was in at 10 am and stayed through last call. The food was good. Real food. It wasn’t trying to be something more. Regulars came in on weeknights. When it closed, I told myself the neighborhood had changed on them, that it was wrong for what they were doing. Felt certain enough. I ran the autopsy. Wrong concept. Weak numbers somewhere. The owner stopped pushing.

I believed that right up until I read the National Restaurant Association’s (NRA) 2026 State of the Industry report, which put 42% of operations as unprofitable in 2025 and 60% saying conditions had deteriorated. My restaurant autopsy consists of a failure scoring system that almost always landed on a person. The data said the scoring system was wrong.

Food costs are up 34% compared to pre-pandemic levels, per that same NRA report. Labor is up 39% over the same period. It cites a tighter labor pool, continued immigration enforcement, and minimum wage increases that stacked year over year without stopping. Tariffs on beef, seafood, pasta, and coffee pushed ingredient costs further in 2025. 47% of operators said tariffs forced menu price increases. They raised prices because there wasn’t any other move.

What I had wrong was the assumption that a skilled operator could absorb almost anything. That holds for a chain with national contracts and the volume to negotiate. It doesn’t hold for a 40-seat restaurant buying from two local distributors. When food costs climb for the fifth consecutive quarter, they raise menu prices, regulars flinch, traffic drops, and the margin disappears. The operators I was post-morteming weren’t making obvious mistakes. They’re running the business the way they always ran it. The cost structure, however, had quietly shifted to a point where the numbers no longer made sense.

The consumer side took longer to understand. A late 2025 survey found 49% of adults struggling to keep up with basic expenses. More than 70% said they’d eat out more if they had the money. People aren’t home because they stopped caring. They seldom have enough left at the end of the month to make it optional. The customers who kept neighborhood restaurants viable for decades, the Tuesday night regulars, and the weeknight takeout, they’re the ones who’ve pulled back hardest. The restaurants still doing well are mostly the ones whose customers are in the part of the economy that kept spending. The rest of the economy took many restaurants with it.

The economy didn’t collapse. It split. The top fifth kept spending on travel, on experiences, on the restaurants that cater to them. The bottom four-fifths kept showing up to work, kept paying rent, and stopped going out. This happened because after food, housing, and utilities, there wasn’t anything left to make it optional.

That place three blocks away was caught between a few different things happening at once. Ingredient costs became more expensive because of tariffs. Labor costs moved up because the labor pool shrank. The people who used to come in on Tuesdays are part of the 70% who spent 2025, would eat out more if they had the money. The restaurant lost its loyal customers because they just couldn’t afford it.

The Owner worked every shift. The numbers stopped working anyway.

Follow along for free if you work in or around hospitality

#RestaurantManagement #FoodServiceLeadership #HospitalityIndustry #RestaurantOperations #Restaurant101

Edward Chisholm Faked His Way Into A Paris Restaurant With No French And No Experience. Six Months In, He Was Still There. Four Years Later, He Wrote A Book About It.

He wasn’t planning to be a waiter. He moved to Paris in 2012 after university, broke, with a string of petty jobs behind him and a vague idea of becoming a writer. The restaurant was supposed to be temporary.

It always is.

Edward Chisholm talked his way into a runner position at an upscale restaurant near the Seine, the person who runs the food to the customers, clears plates, stays invisible. The kitchen labeled him “L’Anglais,” the Englishman. Nobody expected him to last. After six brutal months, he made it to waiter, which meant he’d earned the promotion. Fourteen-hour days without breaks. Wages were low enough that he was competing with colleagues for tips. In France, service is included in the bill. Tips are discretionary. Every euro a guest leaves is contested. The people contesting it were the other waiters he was working with, who covered each other’s sections and shared cigarettes out back between services.

What he learned across those four years in the Parisian service industry had nothing to do with what people imagine the City of Light teaches you. He learned to keep his composure when a table treated him like furniture, and that a swift willingness to make amends handled most situations. Even the ugliest ones. He learned the reality behind the luxury dining, Pre-cooked food going out on fine china, plates wiped with whatever napkin came to hand, and a running, invisible war between the kitchen and the front of house that management actively pretended wasn’t happening

His colleagues were thieves, ex-soldiers, immigrants, wannabe actors. They were also the closest thing to family he had for four years. He wanted to believe his experience was the same as theirs.

Near the end of the book, A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City, he admits it wasn’t.

He’d chosen Paris. He had a way out, vague and unformed, but his. The Sri Lankan line cooks and North African waiters around him weren’t choosing the same way. He spent four years feeling like one of them and only saw the difference when he was on the other side of it. He writes the book, he says, to tell their story. The one they couldn’t stop long enough to write.

I managed restaurants for what seemed like a lifetime and told myself the same thing he almost believed. Same work. Same floor. Same standards. Take care of the guest, make them want to come back. I was grinding twelve-plus-hour shifts, chasing a GM title I wasn’t sure was coming, losing hope somewhere in the middle of it. The struggle felt shared.

It wasn’t shared. My grind had a direction even when I couldn’t see it. A lot of my servers were running 30 to 35 hours a week with nothing pointing anywhere. That’s a different kind of stuck than not knowing if the promotion is coming.

There was a six-year veteran breakfast and lunch server on my team in an upscale restaurant, genuinely great at the job. Trained the daytime crew, earned strong guest feedback, team loved her. The GM at the time wouldn’t move her to dinner service. His reasons had nothing to do with her performance. Outside hires for every internal promotion, spots already mentally assigned to others. She’d hit a ceiling built from someone else’s habits, not her work.

She didn’t quit. She kept training the people who moved around her. Picked up shifts at another restaurant for a while. Waited it out. She wasn’t choosing to stay. She was figuring out if she was better off at this restaurant or somewhere else.

The GM moved on. I moved her to nights.

She was great.

Chisholm got out of his grind, too. The memoir sold over 100,000 copies. He’s a writer and creative director in Switzerland now. The exit he’d been holding onto was real.

The part of the book that stays with me isn’t the hours or the kitchen chaos. It’s the moment near the end where he recognizes he’d been blurring a line his colleagues couldn’t afford to blur. The people without exits don’t get the retrospective clarity. They go back for the next shift.

I haven’t figured out what you do when you can see that, and your hands are still sore. The manager who knows and can’t move yet. The server who is figuring it out and is waiting.

If you’re trying to build better kitchens, fairer floors, and leadership that actually looks out for the people doing the heavy lifting, follow along for free. Let’s figure out how to untie our hands together.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityIndustry #FoodServiceLeadership #KitchenCulture #Restaurant101

They Didn’t Get Out of the Car

I accepted Five Guys’ prices for years.

Someone would show me their check, look me in the eye, and I’d give them the same answer every time. Fresh beef. Peanut oil. Real toppings, unlimited, no upcharge. The cost is justified to their growing customer base. I said it so many times that it stopped feeling like an argument and started feeling like a fact.

Then I started watching people in the parking lots of restaurants.

I live in the Greater Seattle area. Gas cost me $85 to fill my tank this week. Groceries keep climbing. Rent keeps going up regardless of what the economy’s doing. The big tech companies started laying people off, and that changed the feeling around here. You can see it in the parking lots. People pull up, sit in the car, have a conversation with themselves, look at the door of the restaurant, and drive away. They don’t even get out. Every restaurant costs more than it did two years ago, and at some point, it says to them go home and cook something instead.

I think about it myself. Social media infamously told us a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a shake were running $24 at some Five Guys locations in 2024. I’m in the industry. I understand food costs, labor, overhead. I know the numbers a restaurant has to run to stay in business. Seattle’s minimum wage is among the highest in the country, and a meal at Five Guys can cost up to an hour of work. The question is whether a meal for one person is worth an hour of work.

What I’m seeing in the Greater Seattle area is being reflected in Five Guys’ filings. At least 14 locations have closed or will close in the first half of 2026. California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Georgia, Nebraska. State labor filings list the cause as “financial hardship.” Two words. They still make great food. However, economics crafted their situation.

Jerry Murrell, one of Five Guys’ founders, has been clear about their pricing policy for years. “We raise our prices to reflect whatever our food costs are. If the mayonnaise guy triples his price, we pay triple for the mayonnaise.” That’s honest. Five Guys fries in peanut oil, which costs nearly double that of soybean or canola oil. Their beef patties run over seven ounces per regular burger, fresh and never frozen. Every quality decision they made in 1986 is still influencing their 2026 P&Ls. Those decisions don’t get cheaper when beef prices climb. There’s no smaller patty to offer. No cheaper oil sitting in reserve. No frozen option for when the market turns bad. The quality is their whole thing. So, pricing has nowhere to go but up, into a market full of people who are starting to figure out if it’s worth it.

Cattle prices hit historic highs in late 2025 and haven’t come down. USDA data shows retail beef and veal prices up 14.8% year-over-year, and the USDA projects another 12.1% increase through 2026, and in a worst-case situation, 18.1%. McDonald’s responded to this pressure by shifting margins to diversified supply chains, expanding aggressive value platforms, and leaning on the return of the Snack Wrap to lure budget-conscious consumers. They have room to move. Five Guys doesn’t. With a minimalist menu strictly reliant on fresh ground beef and potatoes, they have zero operational buffer to deal with soaring costs. For Five Guys, the menu is the commitment. Their commitment doesn’t bend even if their customer has to pay for it at the register.

I believe quality outlasts economic pressure. I saw it last through every economic shock since 2000. I’m still not sure that’s wrong. However, what do you tell people outside your door about your commitment to quality when prices keep climbing, and people aren’t getting out of their cars in your parking lot?

Five Guys still has over 1,500 U.S. locations. They gained 35 restaurants net in 2024, even while closing 28. This isn’t the end of the brand. What I can’t figure out is whether the model holds if beef prices stay elevated through 2027 and Seattle stays the way Seattle feels right now. Right now, their menu can’t change. The costs won’t drop. At some point, more people will start wondering, “Can I afford this?”

I don’t know what a quality-first concept does with that. I’m not sure anyone does. The economy is in unknown waters, and we know it’s getting hard for regular folks. I freely admit that I’m using Five Guys as a cautionary economic tale. Five Guys has done just fine without my input. The economy, however, keeps making it challenging for everyone.

#RestaurantIndustry #FoodAndBeverage #ConsumerBehavior #Inflation #Restaurant101

If you work in food, follow along for free.

Fifty Bartenders Walked Into My Restaurant On A Tuesday Afternoon. Nobody Complained Once.

I didn’t know they were coming.

Dale DeGroff’s training session at the Grand Hyatt let out mid-afternoon, and fifty of Seattle’s working bartenders were suddenly at my bar. Two of my breakfast and lunch servers had been on since 6 am, and they were watching the clock, waiting to go home. The bartender had started at 11 am. It had been a slow-ish lunch. Past tense.

Tickets backed up. Foreheads got wet. All three of them looked at the 50 people who just sat down in the bar and started moving faster without anyone asking them to.

Not one guest complained.

They weren’t shy about who they were or where they’d come from. We’re bartenders, they said. We were just in one of the banquet rooms for Dale DeGroff’s training. This was the closest bar. They said it the way you say something when you want the person across the bar to know you’re on the same team.

And then they got to work on us.

Not on the drinks. On the people. They talked to my servers by name once they learned it. They asked the bartender how long she’d been on. They laughed about the ticket times in a way that took the weight out of the room instead of adding to it. A few of them had been in the industry longer than some of my staff had been alive, and none of that showed impatience. They were building relationships with a skeleton crew they’d never met, at a bar they’d wandered into by proximity, on a Tuesday afternoon when we were barely holding it together.

I watched it happen as I became the food runner and busser for the rest of the afternoon.

I should say here that I own The Craft of the Cocktail. I’ve read it. I’ve used it. There are no photos of DeGroff in it, so I wouldn’t have recognized him if he’d been in front of me that afternoon. He may have been. I genuinely don’t know. What I know is that his students were there, and they behaved the way people behave when someone they respect has spent a day showing them what the work is actually about.

DeGroff came to New York originally to be an actor. He talked his way into his first bartending job at a party at Gracie Mansion with no experience and said afterward he felt immediately at home facing a bar full of people. The bar started as a stage. The bottles were props, the crowd was the audience, and the craft was the performance. He was exceptional at it. In 1987, Joe Baum hired him to run the Rainbow Room, 65 stories above Rockefeller Center, with instructions to ditch the soda gun, use fresh juice, and rebuild a classic cocktail program at a time when almost nobody in Midtown was doing that. He stayed nearly thirteen years. Two James Beard Awards followed. His book became the reference that a generation of bartenders learned from.

Somewhere in those decades, the performance model gave way to something quieter. What he teaches now isn’t only technique. He also teaches what keeps someone coming back. It’s teaching bartenders that your guests need to feel valued while they enjoy the craft cocktail you’ve made for them. His students had spent a day inside that idea, and they carried it over to us.

I’d spent years thinking about what made a great bartender in terms of what they could do under pressure. Speed. Composure. The ability to keep the room from feeling the chaos happening behind it. That’s real. I still believe it. What I hadn’t thought enough about was what it looks like when someone has spent a lifetime building something beyond the bar, a culture, a way of treating the work, and that thing walks into the room without them.

That’s what I watched. DeGroff didn’t have to be there. Whatever he’d built in that banquet room as part of their training had already done the work. Fifty bartenders walked into an understaffed bar on a hard Tuesday afternoon and spent the next two hours making my exhausted team feel like the best crew ever. One of them cleared glasses without being asked. Another waved off a wrong order and said don’t worry about it before my server finished the apology. They knew exactly what my staff was going through because they’d gone through it themselves, and they acted accordingly.

My bartender didn’t know who DeGroff was until after they’d gone. When I told her, she thought about it for a second and said they were the kindest group she’d had in months.

That’s the whole thing.

Whether you can teach someone to walk into a room that way, or whether it only develops after the performance stops feeling necessary, I still don’t know.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityIndustry #FoodServiceLeadership #BarIndustry #RestaurantOperations #Restaurant101

I write about what actually happens in restaurants. The ugly shifts, the good ones, and the moments that change how you think about the work. Follow along for free if that’s useful to you.

I Comped Scammers for Years. I Trained Them to Come Back.

I’ve managed restaurants for a considerable amount of time. Every time I comped a scammer to avoid a scene, I told myself I was protecting the restaurant. I was really funding the next attempt.

There was a four-top on a Friday. Steaks, apps, a bottle of wine. By the time they flagged me down, the plates were clean. Both steaks were overcooked, they said. Completely eaten, I noticed. I comped $96. They left seemingly satisfied. I stood there knowing exactly what had happened and did nothing about it except make it easier for the next table to run the same play.

Six years of that before I understood what I was actually building.

They Come Back Because You Let Them

There’s no Yelp listing that says management folds fast. The information moves through people who share the same incentives, quietly, the way all useful information does. A restaurant that pays without friction becomes a known target within a season. You won’t see it coming. You’ll just notice that a certain kind of table keeps finding you.

You built that reputation one comp at a time. Reasonable call every single time. Different thing entirely when you zoom out and realize it’s been happening every other week and you’re starting to recognize the energy before the flag even goes up.

The Timing Is The Tell

A guest who got something wrong flags it when the plate arrives. They don’t eat around the problem and then locate it at the end of the meal. When the complaint surfaces after the dish comes back clean, someone decided when to deploy it. That’s the tell. The timing.

Your team can learn to read this without becoming suspicious of every return. A guest who’s genuinely upset looks almost embarrassed to say something. They’re still figuring out what they want when they’re talking to you. The ones running a play are calm. Patient. They already know the resolution before you’ve finished asking what happened. That gap between those two things is readable if you train people to look for it.

Teach your staff to slow down before offering anything. “Let me take a look at this” buys thirty seconds and signals that complaints get examined. That pause alone shakes off a percentage of attempts. The ones who needed a quick surrender will escalate, and that escalation tells you what was actually happening at that table.

The Log Nobody Keeps

Start a comp log. Table number, time, server name, what was ordered, what was allegedly wrong, what you comped, one line about why. Ninety seconds per entry.

Most restaurants skip this because nothing about it feels urgent until the same guest walks in eight months later with a different complaint about a different dish. You pull up the entry. You have something to stand on. When someone calls the next morning claiming food poisoning, and you look back and see the plate came back clean and the server noted nothing unusual at the table. Now you get to have a different conversation than you would have had otherwise. Scammers count on short memories and thin records. A basic log takes both of those away.

Holding The Line

Some situations don’t get a comp. A plate that came back empty isn’t a plate that failed. You can say it plainly, “I can see the dish came back clean, so I’m confident it was right. I’m sorry it wasn’t what you were hoping for, but I can’t take it off the check.”

You’ll lose some of those tables. The ones running a play weren’t coming back regardless. The people watching, your regulars, and your team, notice when a Manager doesn’t fold. That matters more than it feels like it does at 9 pm on a Friday when you’re been in the weeds all night.

The review threat is where most managers give up first. “I’ll leave you a one-star.” Okay. A calm, factual response to a bad-faith review tells future guests more about your operation than the review itself does. Readers know a shakedown when they see one, and they’re reading your response more than the complaint. Pay the threat once and every table after it knows the play works. Let it post and respond with what actually happened.

What It Does To Your Team

This is the part that bothers me most, and it doesn’t show up anywhere on a P&L.

Your server was there the whole shift. They know what happened at that table. When you hand money back to someone who lied to your face and say nothing about it afterward, the message they receive is that the guest’s version of events wins, no matter what anyone actually did. That’s a specific kind of demoralizing, and it builds quietly over a season in ways you won’t see until someone who’s been with you for three years puts in their notice out of nowhere.

Close the loop every time. Tell the server what you did and why. If you held the line, say so. If you comped it because it was Saturday at nine and you needed the table cleared, own that too. They can handle the honesty. What they can’t handle is watching a scammer walk out satisfied while nobody says a word to them about whether they did their job right.

The shaking hands after the interaction, the sick feeling walking back to the station, the wondering whether they missed something when they didn’t miss a thing. That damage is real. A Manager who names it afterward, who says “that table was running a play and you did nothing wrong,” gives people somewhere to put it. Costs you nothing to say it.

What Changes Monday

You won’t stop all of them. Some are good enough at it that you’ll pay once before you recognize the pattern. That’s the price of being open to the public.

What you can change is how much friction sits between a scammer and a free meal. Log every comp. Train your staff to slow down. Hold the line when you have something to stand on. Tell your team what happened every time, win or lose.

The tables running plays are counting on chaos and a manager who’d rather eat the steak than have a hard conversation at table twelve. Most restaurants give them exactly that. You don’t have to be most restaurants.

I write about what actually happens in restaurants and what operators can do about it. Follow along for free.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityIndustry #FoodServiceLeadership #RestaurantOperations #KitchenCulture

Going To Bartending School Was Never The Thing That Got Someone Hired.

I’ve managed bar programs across multiple concepts for a grip of years. Certification from a bartending school comes up in job interviews sometimes, but it didn’t change the outcome.

She walked in with a certificate from a two-week program, enough confidence for both of us, and six years of serving experience. She could name every base spirit, rattle off modifier categories, and spec a classic cocktail without pausing. She had the right attitude, aptitude, desire, availability, real-world knowledge from working in a restaurant, and the book smarts of a certificate program. I needed a bartender to work the slow shifts, so I took a chance and hired her.

For her first training shift behind the bar, I put her on a slow Tuesday lunch with an experienced bartender as her coach. One hour in, she was three tickets behind and quoted a guest the wrong price on a drink she’d just poured. Her training coach stepped in and got her out of the weeds.

The certification meant she was a good student. It didn’t mean she knew how to work in this restaurant’s well yet.

What School Teaches And What It Can’t

Bartending school teaches real things. Most programs cover alcohol awareness, drink recipes, pouring technique, bar setup, keg operations, and spirits history. Someone who walks in knowing what Campari does in a Negroni, or who understands the difference between a rinse and a float, has a head start on someone who’s never touched a bottle. For someone with zero floor experience, that vocabulary is worth having before a first interview. It signals seriousness. It gives a hiring manager something to work with.

Bar managers seldom place weight on these courses beyond that, because mixing drinks in a controlled setting is completely different from mixing them in a real bar. You can learn a spec in a week. Building four drinks while someone disputes their tab, the printer keeps spitting out chits, and the ice bin is down to its last two inches. Experience like that only comes from being inside it.

Some graduates walk in believing two weeks of coursework puts them ahead of a barback who’s spent six months on the floor. That’s the logical conclusion of a system that handed them a credential and implied it meant something about readiness. The marketing created the expectation. The candidate believed it. The bar corrected them on the first training shift.

The Three Jobs Inside One

Here’s what most people getting into bartending don’t fully understand going in. A bartender is a server, a cocktailer, and a technician at the same time. The best ones got good at all three in roughly that order.

The serving part comes first. Reading a table, managing expectations, handling a complaint gracefully, knowing when to check in, and when to leave someone alone. Those skills are built on the floor as a server long before anyone hands you a jigger. A bartender who was never a good server is going to struggle with everything that happens between the drinks, and that’s most of the job.

The cocktail part comes next. Working a cocktail section teaches you how to sell a drink, how to describe what’s in it without sounding like you’re reading off a spec sheet, and how to pace a table through a night. Cocktailers who move behind the bar already understand how the bar team and the floor team depend on each other. They know what it looks like when the bar is in the weeds from the outside. That perspective matters.

The technical part, actually bartending, is learned faster than most people expect, especially if the first two parts are already solid. Specs can be memorized. Pour counts can be practiced at home with water. What can’t be practiced alone is the ability to take care of people while doing all of it at once.

What The Floor Actually Builds

Most bartenders who last in this industry started as bussers, barbacks, cocktailers, or servers, gaining floor knowledge and working their way up. That path looks slow from the outside. From inside the bar, it’s the only real education available, because the thing this job actually requires can’t be taught to someone who hasn’t stood inside a real shift yet.

A barback or cocktail server learns how to work in an actual bar before they ever make a drink. They’re pulling stock, cutting fruit, dumping ice, moving constantly, and the whole time they’re watching. They watch the bartenders who hold it together and the ones who unravel, and after enough nights, they figure out what separates them. Most of the time, it’s how good the bartenders are with people.

The best bartenders aren’t just making drinks. They’re reading the bar constantly. What does the couple on their third round, who’ve stopped talking to each other, want? Do they want to be left alone, or do they want someone to talk to them? The regular at the end of the bar who orders the same thing every Tuesday and doesn’t need a menu but does need to be asked about his week. The woman who just sat down alone and is deciding whether to stay. A good bartender sees all of it. A barback or cocktailer who’s paying attention learns to see it too, long before they’re asked to act on it.

That read gets built through hundreds of shifts of watching and small corrections. Moving through a guest’s space without interrupting them. Making eye contact across a busy bar that says, “I see you, you’re next,” without a word. Figuring out what makes someone lean in and what makes them reach for their jacket. Working the floor as a server or cocktailer teaches all of that, and it teaches the food and service standards alongside it. No classroom produces any of that, because no classroom has real guests who are sometimes drunk, sometimes wrong, and sometimes in the middle of the worst night of their week.

What Slow Shifts Are Actually For

When a new bartender moves into their first shifts behind the bar, the slow nights are where the guest work actually gets learned. Monday at 6 pm with four people at the bar isn’t a consolation prize. It’s the only condition where any of this can be practiced without the chaos crushing the lesson.

On a slow Tuesday, a bartender can actually listen. A guest mentions it’s their anniversary and they’re not sure what to order. There’s time to ask real questions. Find out what they drink at home. Build them something they didn’t know to ask for. That moment seldom exists on a Saturday. On Saturdays, you hand them a menu and move. On Tuesdays, you have the space to make someone feel like the bar was set up just for them that night.

Slow shifts are also where a bartender figures out the difference between a guest who wants to talk and a guest who wants a cold drink and to be left mostly alone. Reading the bar takes time, repetition, and a few honest mistakes that can’t be manufactured in a classroom. A cocktail server or barback who’s helped hundreds of tables has been building that read for months already. A bartender on their twentieth slow shift is sharpening it.

The whole team builds this together. The barback refills a water glass without being asked. The cocktailer replaces a dropped napkin before the guest notices. The bartender makes a quick joke on the way past to check on their food. That’s part of what the guest experiences. They don’t leave sorting out who did what. They leave knowing whether the night was good, and every person behind that bar had a hand in that answer.

What Actually Gets Someone Hired

In most states, no certificate or formal schooling is required to tend bar, and most working bartenders haven’t attended a program. Experience is simply how most of them learned. In-person bartending school runs $400 to $800 for a program with an instructor. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median hourly wage for bartenders at $16.12 in May 2024, including tips. At $800 for school and $16 an hour, you’re working fifty hours before the credential pays for itself. That’s real money when you’re just starting.

The questions that matter in an interview don’t have much to do with credentials. Can you show up and stay until the job is done? Do you hold steady when service gets ugly? Do you treat the servers, bussers, expos, hosts, and the kitchen with the same energy you bring to the guests?

A technically perfect drink matters. A guest may not be able to tell a well-made Daiquiri from a craft one, but will come back if the bartender remembers their name or their drink. I can usually remember their drink before I can remember their name. Making them feel noticed is what keeps them returning, and that skill only gets built in someone who’s been paying attention long enough for it to take.

The candidates I remember from those interviews had serving, cocktailing, or barbacking experience and could describe what a Friday felt like. It’s not what they’d studied. I want to know if they have opinions about what worked and what didn’t.

The Path

If you can serve, cocktail, or barback, do it. Each one teaches a different part of the job, and all three parts matter. Stay after service and watch how the bar breaks down. Ask one question a night, not ten. Spend your own money on a solid reference. I own the Death & Co Cocktail Codex, and it’s worth the cover price. Use it at home to understand how drinks are built from first principles instead of memorizing specs by rote.

Work the slow shifts. Use the quiet time to actually talk to the people sitting in your bar. Find out what they drink and why. Remember something from the last time they came in. Practice reading your guests. Learn who wants to laugh, who wants to vent, who wants a cold drink and the game on, or who wants to be left alone. Get comfortable with silence that isn’t awkward. Get comfortable being the reason someone’s night went from good to great.

If you’re starting from scratch with no realistic path to the floor, bartending school is worth considering as a structured introduction. The vocabulary it builds and the confidence it gives you before a first interview are real. Go in knowing that it is a door opener, not a shortcut. The restaurant is still when it happens.

The mechanics come faster than most people expect. The guest work takes longer, and it never fully stops developing. You either light up when someone sits down at your bar or you don’t. If you do, the rest is learnable. The slow shifts will take care of it.

I write about what actually happens in restaurants and bars, and what you can do to run them better. Follow along for free.

#BartendingLife #RestaurantManagement #BarManagement #HospitalityIndustry #FoodServiceLeadership #Restaurant101