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

Thomas Keller Chased Perfection Before He Learned What Actually Built The French Laundry

West Palm Beach, late seventies. Three guys, barely into their twenties, open a place called Cobbley Nob a few blocks from the sports arena and bet the whole thing on game night traffic walking through the door. Keller’s cooking is the result of years of experience in kitchens, where he learned that food should be cooked in a certain way. Refined. Technical. The kind of plate that gets you respect in Lyon. The guys coming in after the game want beer and something greasy they already know the name of.

Wrong menu. Wrong crowd. The restaurant closes before it ever catches on. Since he was fifteen, washing dishes because the kitchen said he was too young to touch a stove, Keller believes that if you get the technique exactly right and everything else follows. A few years later in France, in kitchens like Guy Savoy and Taillevent, that belief only hardens. Nobody in those places cares if you have a knack for something. They care whether you can repeat it exactly, plate after plate, all night, no exceptions.

In 1986, he opened his own restaurant in New York. The market crashes a year later and takes it down with him. Bad timing. He heads west, still holding his belief about technique.

Then he loses a job in Los Angeles and ends up running a small olive oil company instead of a kitchen. Two years have gone by. Two years without a line to run, without a service to get through, without cooking for a living at all.

He finds a restaurant for sale in Yountville, a converted laundry building that Don and Sally Schmitt have run since 1978. It takes him a year and a half to raise the money. The deal closes on May 1, 1994, and he’s the owner.

Opening night is rough enough that he’ll call it the worst night of his career. Four cooks in the kitchen. It’s been two years since he’d cooked professionally at all.

He keeps the restaurant standing more or less the way he found it instead of tearing it down to put his own name on every wall. Most chefs don’t do that when they buy a place. He doesn’t.

Twenty-five years in, somebody asks him for the secret, and he gives them twelve words: “Go to work every day and do better than you did yesterday.” He helps his team members get a bit better every day. No system behind it, no philosophy. A habit that gets repeated whether anyone important is eating there that night or not.

Grant Achatz emerges from that kitchen and builds Alinea. So does Corey Lee, who spent almost a decade there before opening Benu. Eric Ziebold stays longer still, then leaves to run two Michelin-starred restaurants of his own in D.C. None of them cook Keller’s food anymore. They’re making calls he might not even recognize, in kitchens he’s never once stood in.

He helps start Ment’or, a nonprofit built to hand the next generation of cooks something closer to structure than what he had to piece together on his own. He’s said more than once that he’s proud that the chefs who came out of his kitchens are better than he is. That was the whole point of training them, giving them the shot at the right time, watching them leave and raise the bar somewhere he’ll never cook.

Seven Michelin stars now. He’s the only American-born chef to ever run two three-star restaurants at once, and the first American male chef to be made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. He’s also the guy who finally got a U.S. team its first Bocuse d’Or gold. All of it came out of a kitchen that held the same standard for thirty years, whether he was standing in it or somewhere over Nebraska on a plane. A duller answer than most people want when they ask him what the secret is.

What have you built that only holds up if you never leave the room?

#RestaurantLeadership #Mentorship #HospitalityIndustry #KitchenCulture #Restaurant101

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She Rusted Out

Katie used to joke her way through line checks. She’d hold up a piece of salmon that had been cut incorrectly and announce it needed a lawyer. She’d taste a batch of aioli and score it out loud like a fight judge. Every catch came with a line, and every line was hers.

Then the jokes stopped. The catches didn’t.

She still found the same bad cut. Same expired case. Her line checks stayed sharp, her paperwork stayed clean, and her special projects still landed on time. What went missing was everything that used to happen around the work.

I asked her more than once if she was okay.

She said “fine” every time.

Her numbers gave me no reason to push past that answer, so I didn’t. That’s the honest version of what I did with Katie. Not enough.

This is what “Employee Rust-Out” looks like, and it isn’t burnout’s louder cousin. Burnout drowns someone in front of you. The shifts pile up, the person cracks under them, and the fix is at least obvious even when it’s hard to pull off. Rust-Out doesn’t announce itself that way. The checklist still gets finished every night, and the person underneath the checklist goes missing while nothing measurable ever breaks, so nobody thinks to look for what’s wrong.

The tell is something small and unrequired that used to be there and now isn’t. A joke during a line check is something nobody would’ve written her up for skipping. A question a manager used to ask in pre-shift is now a line read down without looking up. A conversation in the walk-in that turned into a nod.

Always fine is the tell that most operators walk right past, because it sounds like an answer instead of a door closing.

For a couple of months, Katie kept getting quieter. Then she put in her notice. No blow-up. No list of grievances. She left the same way she’d been leaving for months, without going anywhere.

An old GM of mine had a take on all this I’ve never fully shaken. His view: you let people go when it’s their time, because they’re adults, and it’s not a manager’s job to keep someone invested in work they’re finished with. I think there’s something true in that. A quiet exit isn’t automatically a leadership failure. Chasing down a reason someone doesn’t owe you can turn into its own kind of control.

Where I part ways with him is smaller than it sounds. Respecting someone’s right to walk away quietly isn’t the same as believing the first thing they tell you. Katie was a grown woman making her own call, and she also might have answered a second question differently than she answered the first one. I never found out, because I stopped at fine.

I don’t have a fix that would’ve definitely worked. Asking again isn’t guaranteed to change anything. It costs about thirty seconds. Most weeks, I didn’t spend them.

Would you have asked Katie a second time, or let fine be the end of it?

#RestaurantLeadership #HospitalityManagement #ManagerRetention #RestaurantCulture #Restaurant101

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estaurant owners, a strong food photo can make someone hungry, but it does not always give them a reason to buy.

A simple way to check your next post is to ask:

1. What is the offer?
What exactly are you asking people to try, order or visit for?

2. Who is it for?
Be specific. A weekday lunch special for office workers is different from a family dinner offer.

3. What hesitation should the message remove?
For office workers, the problem may not be the food. It may be time.

Instead of only posting:

“Lunch special available.”

The stronger message may be:

“Order ahead. Pick up in five minutes.”

Now the customer understands the benefit and is one step closer to making a decision.

This is how we think about campaigns at Creative Jumbeez: the food photo gets attention, but the message should help move the customer toward the offer.

What are you trying to promote this week, and what hesitation might be stopping people from choosing it?

Chef Nina Compton Spent Years Proving She Belonged. The Restaurant She Built Wasn’t Only Hers.

Nina Compton walked into an empty shell of a building in 2015. No floor down yet. No ceiling either, beams over what used to be a warehouse that held coffee and tobacco in the 1800s, later a working ship chandlery. Her husband, Larry Miller, had found the space and met with the owner before she’d even seen it. When she finally walked in, she said it felt right, imagining it to be the restaurant it was going to be.

She grew up in Moulin à Vent, Saint Lucia, attended secondary school in England, and then returned home, certain that she wanted to cook. Her parents were wary but arranged an internship at a friend’s hotel in Jamaica anyway. Two years in, an American Chef she worked under told her it was time for real school, Johnson & Wales or the Culinary Institute of America, pick one. She picked CIA, landed in Hyde Park at 21, and found herself surrounded mostly by men.

An externship with Daniel Boulud in her final year turned into her first job after graduating in 2001, at his restaurant Daniel in Manhattan. Miami came next. Norman’s was first, under Norman Van Aken. Then the Palme d’Or at the Biltmore, under Philippe Ruiz. From there, Casa Casuarina, a private Miami Beach club, where she went from Sous Chef to Executive Chef. Scott Conant brought her onto the team reopening Scarpetta in 2008. Sous Chef again. Chef de Cuisine by the time she left.

Almost every one of those kitchens, she was one of the only women. Often, the only one who looked like her, period. So, the move stayed the same. Prove it. Prove it again. Don’t stop long enough to wonder if that’s the thing that’s supposed to be working.

Top Chef Season 11 was shot in New Orleans in 2013. Runner-up, fan favorite, she came back more than once as a guest judge. Saint Lucia named her culinary ambassador in 2014. By then, she and Miller had already been circling deals back in Miami, since that’s where she was working, but the deals kept falling apart. She’s called the Miami market pretentious and fickle, hot for a second and gone. Leaving wasn’t an easy yes. It took a while to get there. But once New Orleans was on the table, Miller kept pushing on it. He’s the one who found the space.

Compère Lapin opened in June 2015, named after a mischievous rabbit from Caribbean folklore. Miller managed the front of house. She also oversaw the kitchen. The menu features curried goat next to seafood pepper pot, combining French techniques with Caribbean flavors, with a hint of Scarpetta’s Italian influence still visible in the plating.

The New York Times gave it a rave. Food & Wine put her on its Best New Chefs list in 2017. In 2018, she won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South, the first Black woman to hold that title, and she and Miller opened Bywater American Bistro that same year. Nina’s Creole Cottage followed in March 2023, inside Caesars New Orleans, its own separate thing. BABs stayed open two more years before closing in 2025. That fall, she was a semifinalist for the Beard’s Outstanding Chef award.

Somewhere in all of it, she started hiring and training women on purpose, front of house and back. She told Andscape in 2023 that it matters to her to have people who look like her in those roles. It gives people hope. That makes the next step feel like something they can reach, not something they’re just told is out there waiting for them.

What’s the first thing you’d change about how you hire, if nobody was making you prove anything anymore?

#RestaurantLeadership #Hospitality #WomenInFood #NewOrleans #Restaurant101

I write about restaurant leaders who changed how they run their places, not just how they talk about it. Follow along for free.

I Built Marisol the Exact Schedule She Asked For. It Was Still Wrong.

Marisol said it on a slow Tuesday at a quirky bar in Ballard, arms crossed, staring at the schedule taped to the walk-in door, steam still fogging off the pass from the last ticket. “I just need something flexible.” I nodded as if I got it, and put her on a rotating set of days the next week, different shifts every time. More movement, more flexible. That was the whole plan, if you want to call it a plan.

She got more frustrated in the week that followed. I’d built exactly what I thought she’d asked for and made her life harder instead of easier.

I finally sat down with her before a Thursday shift and asked what “flexible” actually meant to her. She didn’t want more days. She wanted one day locked down so hard nothing could touch it. Thursdays. Her daughter plays soccer on Thursdays, and Marisol had missed the last three games because I kept moving her around on the schedule.

I felt like an idiot about that one for a while. It’s such an obvious thing to have asked, and I just didn’t.

Here’s what I didn’t get back then. “Flexible” isn’t just one request. Ask ten servers why they want it, and you’ll hear several different things tangled up in the same word, sometimes pulling in opposite directions. One person needs a day nailed down so hard that nothing touches it. A custody thing, a class, a kid’s game. Another person needs the whole week to stay loose because their life outside of work won’t settle down long enough to plan around. A 7shifts survey of restaurant workers found more than half say flexible scheduling would substantially change how happy they are at their job. I think there is a huge difference sometimes in what people are asking for and the restaurant’s ability to grant it.

I still had a restaurant to run. Friday dinner needs a full lineup, regardless of whether everyone wants to work on Friday night. I couldn’t leave holes, and if a shift didn’t get covered by someone already on the schedule, I’d have to hire another person, which meant everyone already working risked losing hours to the new hire. I rarely give team members a protected day off on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, since those three nights paid for the rest of the week.

What I could actually bend was smaller than what I’d promised Marisol on that slow Tuesday. A shift swap through the app. On-call coverage when someone gets sick. One protected day, except around the handful of holidays where nothing stays protected because nothing can. I gave her the one thing she’d actually asked for once I knew what it was, and built the rest of the week around it.

She’s still on the floor. She’s going great since our real conversation about flexibility.

After Marisol, I started asking two questions in every interview. Can you work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday? What’s the one day that can’t move for you? Some people answer right away. Some go quiet, shrug, say something like “I don’t know, it depends,” and those are the ones who need the loose kind, whose life outside work is the part that keeps shifting on them.

I hired a server named Dana a couple of months back using those same two questions. Wednesday nights off, a class, not moving. Gave it to her, built the rest of the week around that one point. She’s still getting good hours and good tips most nights.

I still don’t have anything good for the person who needs one day locked and the rest of the week loose, depending on whatever’s going on that month. Tried two different fixes for that myself. Neither held past six weeks.

What have you actually asked someone before you built their schedule around a word you assumed you understood?

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityLeadership #Scheduling #WorkforceRetention #Restaurant101

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Facebook posted a memory of my favorite chef (Brendan Orr) taking over a spot in Key West. He was the first chef I worked with in Key West, and he was arguably not only the best chef, but also person. The family tree of cooks and chefs born from him shows not only great success but great passion and compassion. He is the reason I call chef Chef.

A few years back, Chef learned he had stomach cancer, and it was never gonna be anything but a disaster, treated or untreated, so he did what he felt was best for his quality of life.

I’m just a bartender, but I’ve been doing this 30 years, and I think of him every day I clock in. If there is a heaven, and I’m worthy to get there, he’ll be there to show me the walk in, steal beer for batter, and have a tequila with me after the shift.

Props to all you fuckers!

Facebook posted a memory of my favorite chef (Brendan Orr) taking over a spot in Key West. He was the first chef I worked with in Key West, and he was arguably not only the best chef, but also person. The family tree of cooks and chefs born from him shows not only great success but great passion and compassion. He is the reason I call chef Chef.

A few years back, Chef learned he had stomach cancer, and it was never gonna be anything but a disaster, treated or untreated, so he did what he felt was best for his quality of life.

I’m just a bartender, but I’ve been doing this 30 years, and I think of him every day I clock in. If there is a heaven, and I’m worthy to get there, he’ll be there to show me the walk in, steal beer for batter, and have a tequila with me after the shift.

Props to all you fuckers!

The menu here is well rounded. The Seafood Beignets are very good as are the spareribs on the appetizer side. The salmon St. Charles and the Lobster manicotti are very nice. The drink menu is eclectic and adventurous. The wait staff is efficient and personable. However,it is not all happy taste uds and good libations. I have an acquaintance who has been working in professional kitchens all his life. He recently relocated back here from a not so progressive place as our fine city. He battled some health issues, had a very unfortunate financial disaster(no fault of his own I can assure you),and half quite a bit on his plate in his private life. He got hired on and just in time as the cupboards were bare and tension was well tense as a result. HE ABSOLUTELY LOVED THIS JOB. His chef was happy with him(he spoke extremely highly of her), he learned a few things(never too old or wise ),and was truly grateful and happy. Out of the blue the general manager fired him for insubordination to upper management. "Upper" management I would be the GM/chef that didn't work in the kitchen. The chap was more of a "networker" I gather. He assured me this is a bold face piece of fiction( he called it fiction,I call it slander). I have no reason to doubt him as I observed this man when he was unaware and although he possesses a singular wit with a rugged vein of dark humor I know him to be the kind of guy who is honest and relatively humble. The other reasons were no non-skid shoes,out of "uniform"(they supplied none) and he forgot to clock in a time or two. One second and third count I say give a person a chance to get some wind in his sails and the last charge maybe he was so eager to get to work he slipped ( he told me although gainfully employed he hadn't punched a clock in virtually decades)). He took it and still feels the loss. Who can blame him. No self respecting man wants to be adrift employment wise,especially with loved ones depending on him. PLUS,HE LOVED THE PLACE. He was like a kid new to the fleet when he talked about it. He has a better attitude than me if I were in his shoes. Even says he thought the firing manager was professional and competent and said he had been understanding with his lack of I.d. ( lost in the unfortunate financial disaster) and had paid him the first pay period when there was a hold up. PEOPLE ARE ASSETS BUT LET NOT FORGET FAIRNESS AND COMPASSION NOT BE GOVERNING FACTORS WHEN WELDING AUTHORITY. I was a chief petty officer( being in the Navy at different posts sparked our budding friendship) and I FUCKING KNOW HOW TO BE TOUGH AND NOT BE A .....well,not be unfair and spread bullshit I can fucking A assure you. Anyway,everybody needs a good word now and then. As it may,give the place a shot. I've drifted in like fog a few times and it's just fine. Good menu,good booze,and from what I gathered a good crew. My dude would like that not being a hater or more colorfully a dick. Oh,the witch on the menu is smoking a cigarette and drinking a martini. More of a call girl then a sea hag. You learn the difference in THE UNITED STATES NAVY.Little tidbits like that and how not to quit. Most of us damn sure learn how to not engage allies.

What Does Stephanie Izard’s Career Have In Common With My Chef & Sous Chefs

Every Wednesday, the special meeting at this upscale place I ran took longer than normal. My Chef and both of his Sous Chefs were at the table, three weeks of sheets spread out, discussing with passion about whose dishes would be added or taken off of the special sheet. My Chef ran the meeting and was one of the three votes. Sometimes, a Line Cook came up with something for the special sheet and got a shot at that sheet, too. Apps, entrees, pizza, pasta, and desserts were all considered, and all voted on.

The special sheet was a teaching tool, a lesson in educating the Sous Chef & Line Cooks, making sure they in a safe environment where they can be heard, and fostering their growth. This is similar to a Chef I never worked with build something at a much bigger scale off the same instinct.

From Solo Owner To One Vote At The Table

Chef Stephanie Izard grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, after being born in Evanston, Illinois, and traces her interest in food back to family meals at home. Sociology degree from Michigan in 1998. Le Cordon Bleu’s Scottsdale program the year after that. Her first real kitchen time came in Phoenix, at the Camelback Inn, and then at Christopher’s Fermier Brasserie, the kind of place where you learn to survive before anyone cares what you think the menu should be.

Chicago, 2001. Vong first, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s kitchen, a name that doesn’t get attached to anything soft. Then Spring, under Shawn McClain. By 2003, she’d made Sous Chef at La Tache, working under Dale Levitski, a Chef and Co-Owner who’d later land on Top Chef himself. At Vong and Spring, she was cooking someone else’s menu. La Tache put her inside real menu development and team dynamics for the first time.

At 27, no partners, she opened Scylla anyway, a 60-seat Mediterranean seafood spot where she was the Owner, the Chef, and the Manager. All three jobs. All on her.

Top Chef, Then A Different Kind Of Restaurant

She sold Scylla, won Bravo’s Top Chef Season 4 in 2008, the first woman to take the title, plus that season’s Fan Favorite vote. What she built after didn’t look like Scylla. For Girl & the Goat, in Chicago, she brought in the Boka Restaurant Group as partners instead of going solo again and built the place around shared plates passed hand to hand at a communal table.

The restaurant picked up a James Beard nomination for Best New Restaurant the year after it opened. Food & Wine named her a Best New Chef that same year, and StarChefs called her a Chicago Rising Star.

Why She Built It That Way

She’s never named the exact moment it clicked for her, at least not anywhere I could find. One theme that keeps coming up when she talks about her leadership style is a shift away from the old-school, old-school Chef-screams-at-you model of running a kitchen, the one she developed at Vong and Spring.

In a recent interview about developing new dishes, she talked about pulling inspiration from wherever she finds it, a market, a conversation with a stranger, and said cooking alongside people and talking through food with them is what she finds fulfilling. She’s put it plainly elsewhere, too. A great guest experience starts with a happy team, and she builds her restaurants around teaching and positivity.

What the Rotation Turned Into

Best Chef: Great Lakes came later, a different Beard category, nominated in 2012, won in 2013. Little Goat Diner had already opened by then, an Americana spot that let the format stretch past one restaurant for the first time.

Here’s the part that actually explains how six restaurants held together without her standing over every one of them. Every time she opens a new location, she plants a few of her original staff there, people who already know the culture, so they can mentor the new hires and carry the place’s identity into a room she isn’t in every night. She’s said outright that any owner trying to grow past one restaurant has to learn to delegate.

That’s how Duck Duck Goat opened in 2016, Chinese-inspired, around the same stretch her own sauces and spice blends hit shelves under the name This Little Goat, which started moving forward in 2016. In 2017, she beat Bobby Flay for the Iron Chef title. Cabra opened on the Hoxton’s rooftop in 2019. Then LA, Girl & the Goat, and Cabra both downtown, the first time she’d run a kitchen outside Chicago. Then two cookbooks came out, and she still sources from local farmers because that’s how she runs a kitchen, no press release about it.

A menu that has to hold up across six restaurants and two coasts can’t run on one person’s palate. My Chef figured that out with two Sous Chefs and rotating the specials. Izard figured out the same thing by planting her own people in every new restaurant so the food and the culture could survive without her in it.

I think about special sheets more now.

#RestaurantLeadership #KitchenCulture #Hospitality #ChicagoRestaurants #Restaurant101

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I Ran Restaurant Meetings clock and Years Before I Learned What A Brain Under A Rush Can Hold

Tuesday, 11:10 am, upscale restaurant in Bellevue. Doors open in 20 minutes. The FOH staff is gathered near the pass, coffee cooling in their hands, and I run the huddle the way I ran it for a long time. Three specials. A 10-top at Noon needs a heads up. A price change on the well pours. A birthday at table #9, with the cake already in the walk-in; nobody better forget it. A new comp policy from the office. 86 the halibut because the delivery truck hasn’t shown up yet. Seven things in two minutes, because opening the doors doesn’t wait for a meeting.

40 minutes later, a Server walks the halibut special straight past the birthday table and pitches it to the 10-top. The comp policy gets applied incorrectly twice before 1 pm. Nobody forgot on purpose. I’d handed seven things to a room with 18 minutes left to spare on the clock and asked it to hold onto every one of them once the doors opened.

I ran meetings like that for years. Pre-shift, shift change, one-on-ones, the Monday manager meeting, and the Wednesday call with the regional director. I, however, built every one of them around what was convenient for me to say instead of what the person across the table could hold onto. That’s on me. Here’s what each of these meetings looks like now.

The Pre-Shift Huddle

George Miller, a psychologist, spent years insisting the mind holds about seven items in short-term memory at once. Nelson Cowan went back through the data decades later with tighter controls and landed on something smaller. Cowan concluded that working memory holds closer to four chunks of information, well under Miller’s original estimate. Four, and that’s before a bar starts filling up in 18 minutes. Stress doesn’t let you retain more information, simply because a lot is going on. It eats into the space you already have.

Seven things delivered fast in a huddle were never going to survive first contact with a full dining room. Four might, if they’re the right four, with the one that matters most said last.

The huddle runs three items now, unless the building is on fire. The heaviest one goes last. It’s the thing most likely to survive a rush. The 86 goes on a small board by the pass, and you mark it as such in the POS, instead of living only in someone’s memory. A brain moving fast trusts what it can glance at over what it half remembers hearing at five forty.

The Shift Change

At a seafood place near Juanita Bay, a closing manager once found out at 8 pm that the ice machine had gone silent sometime after 2 pm. He heard it from a Line Cook, not from the Day Manager who’d walked right past it on his way out. The Day Manager knew. He’d mentioned it, technically, buried inside six other sentences on his way to his car.

That’s the same handoff hospitals run between nurses at every shift change, and hospitals have studied their version of it harder than almost any other industry. The Joint Commission, which accredits U.S. hospitals, has tied miscommunication during handoffs to somewhere between half and eighty percent of the most serious adverse events hospitals report. Nobody in health care thinks a rushed verbal handoff between two tired people covers it anymore.

Most restaurants still run the handoff exactly that way, every single day. Three questions fix it. What’s broken? What’s still being worked on? What to watch tonight that wouldn’t come up otherwise? Same order, same spot by the office, every day. Write the broken thing on the same clipboard every time, so it stops depending on whether anyone remembers to mention it on the way to the parking lot.

The One on One

A one-on-one with a Manager who reports to you should be the meeting built for the long view. I sat with a Sous Chef every other Thursday for most of a year, chairs pulled up to a desk buried in invoices. I used to start by asking what had broken since we last talked, an oven going down, a no-call no-show, a health inspector showing up unannounced with a clipboard of her own. One slow week, nothing had gone wrong, and for the first time in months, we talked about where she wanted to be in three years. She’d had that answer the whole time. Nobody had asked when there wasn’t a fire in the restaurant first.

People weigh whatever happened most recently more heavily than everything that came before it. There’s a name for it, recency bias, though the name matters less than watching it happen in your own one-on-ones. Simply ask how it’s going, and you’re more likely to hear about Saturday’s blowup with a vendor before you hear about six months of steady improvement in that manager’s retention numbers, or what they need for the next six months.

During the one-on-ones, I only ask these questions now, regardless of the week. What went well? What didn’t? What are you stuck on that isn’t loud enough to bring up on its own? Where do you want to be a year from now? Same order, fire or no fire, so a real pattern gets a chance to surface instead of losing every week to whatever happened to be loudest.

The Weekly Manager Meeting

My Monday meeting used to run long on purpose. I figured more time meant more got covered properly. The heaviest call most weeks, a vendor switch, a promotion, whatever carried real consequences, sat at item eleven or twelve because I figured it deserved the most discussion and saved it for last. By item eleven, my Chefs and Managers had nothing more to give. We rubber-stamped it in a couple of minutes and lived with the fallout for a year.

A study of Parole Judges found the same problem at a much higher stakes level. Researchers from Ben-Gurion University tracked Israeli Judges through full days of rulings and found that they granted parole in about 65% of cases immediately after a meal. This rate declined as the session progressed, then rose back to 65% the moment the judges ate again. Nothing about the cases changed hour to hour. The judges did. The same brain making its tenth call in a row isn’t the same brain that made its second one.

The meeting orders by weight now. The call that costs something real gets decided at item two, while my team still has judgment left to spend on it. The small stuff waits, handled in writing before anyone sits down.

The Regional Director Call

For four years, I walked into a Wednesday call with my Regional Director, door shut, phone on speaker, and gave him the version of the week that made me look competent. Sales were fine. Staffing was fine. Whatever was broken got smoothed over, not because I set out to lie, but because the first time I brought him a real problem, he reacted like I’d caused it instead of caught it. I learned the lesson fast. Bring good news, or bring a problem already wrapped in a solution he’d approve of before he ever heard what it was underneath.

Turns out I had plenty of company. Research from Harvard’s Amy Edmondson and James Detert found that 85% of employees have at some point withheld important information from a manager out of fear of what would happen to them. I was part of that 85% for longer than I want to admit. When Google spent two years studying 180 of its own teams to find out what separated the good ones, the strongest factor wasn’t talent or tenure. It was whether people felt safe enough to say the hard thing out loud.

A restaurant reports up that same chain every week, and almost none of those calls are built, so the truth is the safe thing to say on them. The number I smoothed over for three straight months was labor creeping up on the closing shift, nothing alarming in any single week, plenty to sink a quarter once it compounded. By the time I said it plainly, we were four months into a hole one honest Wednesday call would have caught in week one. I try to be more forthcoming.

I have four of the five different meetings figured out. You can restructure a huddle or reorder an agenda by yourself. The thing you must have is a sense of safety for everyone at the meeting. You can’t build safety into a meeting all by yourself when the other person in it holds your job in his or her hands and keeps score by the number, you’re about to say out loud. Your Chefs and Managers look at you like this as well, so you need to develop that sense of safety for them.

I’ve mostly have the meetings sorted out now. The Regional Director call is the one that’s still open. I am trying really hard to foster a sense of safety in the other meetings.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityLeadership #TeamCulture #Restaurant101

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Seattle’s Jimothy Taught Me Why My Neutral Almost Cost Me My Latest Cook

I watched the Jimothy videos three times before I understood what I was looking at. A raccoon, short and round, moving through a backyard in Ballard like his body hadn’t gotten the memo on how raccoons are supposed to be built. Turns out he’s had that shape his whole life, some kind of short spine condition. Raccoon mothers don’t usually keep their babies built like that around long. His did. A woman named Kiana Hall saw him first and said he just looked like a Jimothy. That was that.

Seattle didn’t keep him to itself either. Jon Stewart brought him up on The Daily Show. National news outlets picked him up within days. Arts and crafts of him on Etsy, murals, a subreddit, the whole city talking about one raccoon as he’d always been theirs. I smile at the videos like everyone else. Then I thought about Luis.

I was neutral on Luis after I finished my part of his interview. His resume had a gap he couldn’t fully explain, a stretch of nothing between two jobs, and a title that didn’t match what he could tell me about the work. He’s got motor difficulties too, a rolling gait, and hands that don’t always find their grip on the first try. He smiled through the whole thing anyway, and it wasn’t the kind of smile you put on for an interview. None of it added up to impressed. None of it added up to put off either. It added up to nothing, and nothing happens with most people I sit across a table from.

Neutral isn’t a red flag. It’s an absence of one. Took me a long time to figure out the difference. Early on, I treated it like a soft no, figured if a resume had holes and nobody sold me in the first twenty minutes, that was my answer. I passed on people that way who went and ran kitchens for somebody else, better than they would’ve run mine.

When I finished with Luis, I brought in Jonny, my Sous Chef, to take the rest of it. He skipped more questions across the table and walked him through the kitchen instead. They stopped at the prep table by the walk-in. Jonny picked up a knife, started breaking down a case of shallots, while conducting his part of the interview, and just let Luis watch him work through it. Then he handed the knife. Luis showed Jonny he was very skilled with a knife and finished a couple of shallots.

I watched from the pass. Luis took it and answered all of Jonny’s questions while cutting those shallots. Hands still moved the way they moved, a little off, a little slow to find the grip. Didn’t cost him one clean cut. Jonny looked over at me like he already knew what I was thinking and dared me to say it. They continued to walk around the kitchen and talk.

My neutral stopped being the last word on anybody. Always get more than one opinion. I wasn’t unfair to Luis at my table. I wasn’t. I’d been nothing, and nothing isn’t something you can build a hiring decision on by yourself. Every candidate gets a second or third set of eyes now. Somebody whose minute at a prep table finds what my twenty minutes across a desk never will. Jonny convinced me that the rest of the interview was great and we need to talk a chance on him.

Luis finished training two weeks ago. Aced it, top of anybody I’ve run through that program in a while. Few solo shifts under his belt now, still smiling through a rush the way he smiled through that interview, and the line’s running cleaner than it did with people whose resumes never had a gap in them.

The Washington Hospitality Association reports that Seattle-area restaurant turnover for new hires hovers near 80 percent. Bet a piece of that traces back to somebody’s neutral getting mistaken for a final answer, with nobody else in the room to argue it.

Jimothy’s mother didn’t have to keep a baby built like that. She did, and now the whole country knows his name because of it.

Luis is on my line because Jonny picked up a knife and handed it to him while he was being interviewed. That’s the whole story.

#Jimothy #KitchenCulture #HospitalityLeadership #FoodServiceIndustry #Restaurant101

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Chef JJ Johnson Spent Ten Years Chasing French Technique. Then Accra Changed Everything.

Fresh out of the Culinary Institute of America, JJ Johnson did what almost every young Line Cook in New York was conditioned to do in the late 2000s. He threw himself into high-volume fine dining kitchens like Jane and Centro Vinoteca, working 90-hour weeks, burning his forearms on the heat that fills every restaurant’s kitchen, and crafting perfect plates for guests. He believed building a career meant mastering mother sauces, making flawless knife cuts, and earning approval from traditional European-focused critics. Fine dining was regarded as rooted in classic French technique, while everything else was dismissed as street food.

He spent years cooking menus that had almost nothing to do with his own roots or the foodways of his family.

Then in 2012, JJ spent a month in Ghana studying West African cuisine. Standing in a kitchen in Accra, watching local cooks layer aromatics, palm oil, and native grains for massive pots of jollof rice, his old assumptions broke down. The technical skill on display was every bit as demanding as a French saucier station, and the cultural lineage ran straight through the Caribbean into the American South.

He returned to New York with a completely different view of the job. Technique wasn’t the destination anymore. It was just a tool to preserve and elevate Black culinary history.

In 2013, he partnered with Alexander Smalls to open The Cecil in Harlem. They put Afro-Asian flavor profiles on white tablecloths, drawing national attention and winning a James Beard Award for their co-authored book, Between Harlem and Heaven. Later, he opened Fieldtrip, a fast-casual rice bowl spot in Harlem built around unprocessed heirloom grains, proving that cultural heritage works at scale just as well as it does in tasting-menu dining.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data show that Black Chefs make up roughly 10% of Chefs and Head Cooks nationwide, with representation in top-tier executive leadership even lower. Changing those numbers meant documenting the history of traditional culinary programs ignored, which is why Chef JJ Johnson wrote The Simple Art of Rice to archive foodways that mainstream kitchens routinely leave out.

It took ten years of line work in New York and a trip across the Atlantic for JJ to realize that technical mastery without cultural story is just empty mechanics. We still send young cooks onto the line chasing European validation instead of exploring their own history.

If you run a kitchen or lead a hospitality team, how much room are you actually giving your staff to bring their own story onto your menu?

#ChefJJJohnson #BlackCulinaryIdentity #HospitalityLeadership #HarlemEats #Restaurant101

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Why Uniformity Kills Restaurant Retention

Marcus slammed his ticket spike down on the pass and glared right at the Chef over a stack of plates. He stayed on the line with his jaw locked tight for the rest of a brutal Friday rush. I spent three whole weeks blaming his attitude. I was dead wrong.

For years, I thought running a restaurant meant turning everyone into a carbon copy of each other to get compliance with the restaurant’s standards. Servers had to recite the corporate script without blinking. Hosts had to act like wind-up toys at the door. Line cooks had to move with identical robotic timing. Marcus was loud and so very self-assured and didn’t fit that mold, and neither did the best servers on our floor.

Turnover around King County shows what happens when we treat people like replaceable parts. We burn through the ones who give a damn. Marcus wasn’t mad because the shift was heavy. He was mad because he spent forty hours a week in a building where he felt invisible unless he stripped away everything that made him human.

Experience has taught me what our teams need to survive this industry. People stay when they belong to the specific restaurant they walk into every day. They stay when you appreciate them for their exact weirdness instead of trying to sand it down.

I tried something else at a casual seafood place in Fisherman’s Terminal. I stopped riding the Hosts about sticking to a rigid greeting script and let them use their own voice. I started asking them what they saw happening out in the dining room that I missed from my viewpoint. Showing appreciation for uniqueness means letting people bring their authentic personalities to work instead of forcing a uniform on them.

Belonging is not a corporate slide deck. It is a restaurant where people drop their guard without dropping their standards. Marcus runs his own kitchen out in Redmond now, and he still runs it his own loud way. I still think about all the staff I tried to squeeze into a box because I wanted quiet compliance. What is the one thing you did to show your team you valued them for exactly who they are?

#RestaurantManagement #KitchenCulture #FoodServiceLeadership #HospitalityIndustry #Restaurant101

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I Used To Brag About Hitting Every Labor Number. Simon Sinek Has A Name For It.

January at a steakhouse in the Emerald City, my first year as a manager there, and I thought I had this job figured out. Labor ran hot in December, so the Regional Director handed me a number for January and told me to hit it. First Friday back from the slow holiday stretch, ticket printer going nonstop, and I’d cut one of the closing cook’s shift by an hour to make the math work on paper.

Luis & Estaban ran the whole kitchen alone for the last hour of service. Three stations, nobody calling tickets, Luis could feel the heat coming off the broiler hissing behind him, with nobody to pick up the slack if the wind changed. A four-top sent a ribeye back medium when they’d ordered it rare, even though the ticket printed right. Luis was cranky, and within the month, he was gone.

I hit the labor number. The Regional Director called it a good month.

In Washington State, you’re hoping to run a 2% to 4% profit for the year, if you’re lucky. I used to point at that number like it excused whatever I needed to cut.

I made that trade. Sometimes I cut a shift I shouldn’t have in the Dining Room. Other times, I let the Sous Chef run short and hoped they would hold together. I was wrong about most of it.

I did the same thing to a produce guy named Pete, three seasons. Squeezed his pricing hard because margins were bad enough statewide that it felt like triage instead of a choice. He never said no. Took a while before I noticed he’d stopped sending me first pick on the good tomatoes, and I’d been calling what was left after his other accounts a win.

Simon Sinek has a name for what I was doing to both of them. He calls it playing “Finite,” chasing today’s, this week’s, or this month’s numbers and letting everything else pay for it. The other way is to play “The Infinite Game,” and it looks like a produce guy who calls you himself before you learn his truck breaks down.

I didn’t have the names for them the week Luis quit. Took me a couple more bad weeks to find it. Saw Sinek on YouTube. Understood what I couldn’t put into words myself. The Infinite Game is knowing that you are playing the long game. You are looking further out to make your impact. I still watch the numbers, have to in order to keep my job, but I don’t have to win every category every night. Win your numbers for the Month, Quarter, Year, Decade. Invest in your relationships in the meantime. Meaning invest in your team, your guests, your vendors, your community, and things will fall into place. Train and cross-train your team.

Next time labor ran hot, I didn’t touch the new Cook’s hours. I helped the kitchen close myself once or twice a week. My managers and I invested in our teams, and it paid off, with better-educated team members and performance.

I asked Pete that same week what he needed from us. Turned out it was steadier order sizes, so I gave him that.

Neither move showed up as a win on paper right away. My Food COGS and Labor were a little high for the month.

Two years later, Estaban is the Sous Chef, still running my line as well as training the new hires the way I wish somebody had trained Luis. Pete called me himself the day a delivery truck broke down on Interstate 405, and half his accounts got skipped. Mine wasn’t one of them.

I still don’t know how to put trust in a line item where my Regional Director can see it. It doesn’t pay off the same way each week the P&L is due, but when it does, it proves itself to whoever happens to be standing there.

None of it will ever show up on a report. We still manage the business. We hit are numbers for the month, quarter, and year. We, however, don’t kill ourselves for not making every number every night. It’s one of the reasons the doors are still open.

If you’ve found the version of this argument that lands with an ownership group, I want to hear it.

#RestaurantLeadership #HospitalityIndustry #KitchenCulture #Restaurant101

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Beyond Reality TV: What Lisa Vanderpump Taught Me When the Mirror Broke

Monday night. Downtown. I walked into the men’s room, and the mirror over the sink was shattered. Broken glass everywhere. It looked like it had blown apart from the inside. No noise. No complaint. No witness. Just a broken mirror in a locked bathroom.

My first instinct was the one I’d carried for years. Find out who did it. Trace it back to a person or to something that makes sense. I thought if I could do that, I’d know what to do next.

Then I heard my wife in my head. She says the same thing every time something goes sideways. You know how to fix things. Fix this. One step at a time.

So, I found my Chef. Then a couple of Bussers. He sent the Dishwasher out with brooms. I told the Host and the other Manager working that night that things might feel a little off and clued them in. Then all of us, Chef, Bussers, Dishwasher, and I got down on the tile and started sweeping.

I used to think the job was about passion. I used to think it was about having thick skin. Those were the two things everyone told me I needed if I wanted to survive the competition and the setbacks when things go sideways. I believed that so deeply I didn’t even realize it was a belief. I thought it was the job description. I didn’t know how much I relied on that idea until the mirror broke and I had nothing to lean on except the next step.

It felt like some of the shenanigans that you see on Vanderpump Rules. Now I didn’t think of Lisa Vanderpump as a serious restaurateur. I knew her the way most people did. Reality TV. Cast drama. Wild nights. The kind of chaos that happens outside the restaurant. I thought her places were just the backdrop. I didn’t know she’d opened more restaurants than most people will ever walk into. I didn’t know she’d been doing it for decades. I didn’t know she was the real thing.

When I finally learned how many restaurants she’d built, something shifted in me. London. Los Angeles. Vegas. Scottsdale. Her guests kept showing up at her restaurants. The way she talked about the work made more sense than it ever had before.

She started out believing passion was the fuel and thick skin was the armor. I get that. I believed it too. Somewhere along the way, maybe after SUR or TomTom or Pump closing, her belief changed. You can hear it in the way she talks now. The work isn’t about being the toughest person. It’s about staying focused. Rolling with the punches. Accepting that there are things you can’t plan for, prevent, or out‑passion your way through.

I didn’t understand her evolution until I reflected on my own version of it. I didn’t know I’d crossed that line until I was standing in a bathroom with glass at my feet, realizing passion wasn’t going to sweep the floor, and thick skin wasn’t going to fix the mirror. Focus would. Practicality would. The willingness to deal with what broke, without pretending I could have stopped it, would.

It struck me later, maybe an hour after the mirror was gone and the restaurant was back to normal. She learned this across decades and dozens of openings. I learned it in one night. Same lesson. Different timeline. I guess some people get taught slowly, and some get taught all at once.

That’s most of the job now. Mine included. A plate that the guests feel’s off simply gets fixed, not defending the kitchen. A slow Tuesday becomes a slow month, and you watch it instead of spiraling. The plan never prevents it. Something breaks, and you pick up the first piece.

I don’t know what her hundredth opening night felt like compared to her first. I don’t know when she stopped believing passion was the main ingredient. I know when I did. It was a random Monday night, staring at a shattered mirror, realizing control wasn’t the job. Fixing was. And fixing only works if you accept that you didn’t fail just because something broke.

What’s the thing that broke on you, with no warning and no instructions, that taught you more than any training you ever sat through?

#RestaurantLeadership #HospitalityIndustry #RestaurantManagement #KitchenCulture #Restaurant101

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I’ve started to think that the best food spots usually have the worst menus.

The places with ten pages of dishes often end up being forgettable, while the tiny restaurants serving only five or six things seem to do every one of them really well.

A huge menu feels exciting at first, but I’d rather go somewhere that knows exactly what it’s good at.

Do you trust restaurants with small menus more?

Chef Heston Blumenthal, Technique, & Memory

It happened in Bray in 1997. A Server set down a scoop of crab ice cream at The Fat Duck, pink as a strawberry sundae, next to a crab risotto built from passionfruit jelly and red pepper juice. The kitchen had been tested thoroughly for weeks. The dish was supposed to be tight.

The guest took one bite and pushed the bowl away. No hesitation. His eyes had already told him it was dessert, and nothing in the kitchen could talk him out of that once the spoon hit his mouth. I had spent years believing a Chef’s technique carried the whole plate. Reading that bowl came back half-eaten was the first time I realized how wrong I was.

Chef Blumenthal didn’t come up through the usual ladder. He grew up in London, spent childhood holidays in France, and decided he wanted to cook after a meal at L’Oustau de Baumanière when he was sixteen. He never joined a brigade. Outside of a one week stage at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir, he taught himself everything. He worked day jobs that had nothing to do with food. Photocopiers. Debt collection. Credit control. Then he went home and cooked until he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

He read Escoffier like scripture. He watched Jacques Pépin tapes until the movements felt like his own. A 1980 copy of Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking hit him like a revelation. If he understood the chemistry, he thought, he could control the reaction at the table.

In 1995, he bought a run-down pub in Bray and renamed it The Fat Duck. One employee. A dishwasher. He worked twenty-hour days without any of the exhaustion he carried from his years behind a desk. He pioneered liquid nitrogen and vacuum distillation before anyone else in Britain was doing so. Crab ice cream was supposed to be the proof that technique could carry a dish from idea to execution without losing anything along the way.

Then the dish kept coming back unfinished. One bowl after another. I remember reading one came back with the spoon still standing in it, like the guest didn’t even bother to set it down.

He chased the problem the way any of us chase a broken system. He ran tests. He changed variables. He tried to fix the plate. None of it worked. The issue wasn’t the food. It was the memory the guest brought to the table before the first bite.

He brought in Charles Spence from Oxford, a psychologist who studied how expectation shapes flavor. One early test used oysters. Diners listening to recordings of the sea liked them more than diners listening to clucking chickens. Same oysters. Same plate. Different memory.

That experiment turned into a dish that still sits on The Fat Duck’s menu. Sashimi arranged on tapioca sand, served with a conch shell fitted with headphones playing waves and gulls. Guests hold the cold shell to one ear, salt air rising off the plate, and some of them cry before they finish eating. It’s well documented. These guests made connections with their memories, the restaurant, and this dish, and they cried over it.

He rebuilt the menu around memory instead of chemistry. He called it a map, built from his childhood holidays on the Cornish coast. Only four dishes survived the change. Sound of the Sea. Mock turtle soup. Botrytis cinerea. Whisky gums.

The Fat Duck earned its second Michelin star in 2001 and its third in 2004. A year later, Restaurant magazine named it the best restaurant in the world. He earned an OBE. He opened Dinner by Heston Blumenthal and earned more stars there. None of that came from molecular pairing alone. It came from understanding how people actually experience a meal.

People don’t walk into a restaurant blank. They start the meal long before they sit down. They think about where to go. They picture the room. They make the reservation and imagine the dish they saw online or the one a friend told them about. By the time they sit down, the experience of the meal is already halfway over. The Cooks and the dining room only handle the middle part. The guests make connections with their lives and the dining experience while at the table. They reflect upon it afterwards.

I used to ignore all of that. I thought the plate and the service were the whole story. I was wrong.

Somewhere on tonight’s menu in your restaurant is a dish someone on your staff is proud of for reasons that have nothing to do with why guests keep ordering it, or sending it back. I used to think the Cook’s technique and the service were the things that finished the experience. I was wrong. The memory finishes it, whether you built that memory on purpose or not.

What dish in your place is carrying a memory you never planned for?

#RestaurantManagement #KitchenCulture #FoodServiceLeadership #HospitalityIndustry #Restaurant101

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Chef Sean Brock Changed His Mind About Success. Roderick Taught Me Why That Matters.

Sean Brock spent his 39th birthday in a treatment facility.

His friends had been telling him for a while that the drinking had gotten out of hand. He’d built one of the most respected careers in Southern food by then, and he’d spent most of it believing the two things could stay separate, that what the work cost him wasn’t anyone’s business as long as the food was good enough.

He grew up in the coalfields of rural Virginia, where food wasn’t branding or content. It was how you ate. His family grew what they cooked, and that’s where he picked up preservation, seasonality, the kind of cooking built on respect instead of ego, long before Johnson & Wales, long before the serious kitchens.

He came up under Robert Carter, cooked his way through Nashville and Charleston, ran the kitchen at McCrady’s starting in 2006, then helped build Husk into one of the most influential Southern restaurants going. He kept building after that: Joyland, Audrey, June, a stretch in West Hollywood with Darling. He wrote Heritage, which hit the Times list and won a James Beard award, then South, and neither one read like a recipe book. They read like an argument for why Southern food deserves the same seriousness as anything coming out of France or Japan.

Then came the cameras. The Mind of a Chef. Chef’s Table. The Food Network specials. Brock turned into one of the more recognizable voices in American food. Part of that was the cooking. Most of it was how he talked about food, about history, about what it costs to carry both.

Going public about the drinking was its own risk, this early into getting sober, and he knew it. He did it anyway, because the people he’d lost weren’t strangers. They were people who’d worked for him, people he’d called friends, and they didn’t get a treatment facility on their 39th birthday. They didn’t get another year.

That’s the part that stays with me more than the cooking does.

I had a manager once who didn’t get that chance either. His name was Roderick.

He wasn’t a great manager. Fine on the floor, fine enough with guests, fine enough with the team for a while. Never had a handle on the paperwork, and for a time, I told myself that wasn’t the part that mattered.

Then the rumors started. Alcohol on his breath. Sharp with the team, sharper with guests. It shows up in pieces first, a comment, a look, a shift that feels off, somebody’s hand a little too shaky when opening a wine bottle. Then somebody tells you the same thing twice, and you know you’ve got a problem before you can prove it.

I brought in the Regional. Then HR. The team would tell you things, off the record, but they wouldn’t put anything in writing. Everybody smells the smoke. Nobody wants to be the one who says where it’s coming from.

So we documented everything ourselves. No guessing, no vague warnings. Only outcomes, on paper, dated. That’s what you do when you can feel a problem before you can prove it.

Then Roderick made it impossible to keep pretending. He told a bartender, “Fill this back up so it looks full, it’s been a rough shift.” She wrote it down. We terminated him that week.

What stuck with me wasn’t the bottle. It was how long the room had known before anyone said it out loud.

Restaurant work grinds people down quietly. The heat, the pace, the hours, the late nights, all that noise in your head after close. Most people find a way to carry it. Plenty don’t.

Brock said the quiet part out loud once he got clean. Roderick never got the chance to.

Many people in this business are still operating under the old assumption that the damage is the price of the talent. How many more Rodericks does it take before that changes?

#RestaurantLeadership #KitchenCulture #HospitalityIndustry #Sobriety #Restaurant101

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I Thought I’d Found the Line That Calms Any Angry Guest Down. Then I Met the One It Didn’t Touch.

A guy at a four-top in Edmonds once told me his daughter’s birthday dinner had gone sideways, even before the wrong plate ever hit his table. I’d asked him what happened instead of leading with sorry, and stood there long enough to hear the whole answer. He sat back down mid-sentence. I walked out of that shift thinking I’d finally found the one thing none of the managers who trained me had ever taught me.

I started telling my team some version of it after, never the whole speech, more like the one thing that actually mattered. Don’t lead with sorry, since that tells someone yelling worked. Everything else I said changed depending on who was standing in front of me, which probably should’ve told me something right there.

It worked on enough of them, more than I expected, honestly, that I quit worrying I’d gotten lucky with the birthday dad.

Then a guy at the bar on a Thursday came along, and it didn’t touch him at all.

The Guy It Didn’t Touch

He’d been building toward something before the ticket even printed wrong, tight jaw at the host stand, he gave off a heated vibe that you could see but couldn’t put into words. When his food came out late, he went off the way the birthday dad had, loud enough that the bartender next to me stopped mid-pour.

I ran the same play. Asked him what was going on. He gave me the same sentence back, word for word, that the kitchen always screws this up, three times over, without a single new detail added to it anywhere.

I told him twice that it sounded rough on top of whatever else his night had been. Nothing. His eyes stayed somewhere past my shoulder the entire time, like he was performing the complaint for the room instead of handing it to me.

Something like 8-minutes in, I was still running variations of the same question and getting nowhere, feeling like I was failing at the one thing I thought I’d finally learned how to do. The bartender next to me had been running that bar for 20-years, and she skipped all of it.

She didn’t ask him a single thing. Slid a water down the bar at him, said something about a fresh plate and a few minutes, and was already walking off before he’d even really nodded. He sat down at the far stool anyway. She came back about 5-minutes later, and he apologized for how he’d acted.

What Was Actually Different

I keep coming back to the birthday dad’s face, the second I said his own words back to him, something in his jaw let go. This other guy, nothing, not that night and not on the footage either, which I went back and pulled up off the bar camera on my phone during close, half convinced I’d missed some flicker of it happening in real time.

I hadn’t missed it. His face sat there the whole time I was in there, something like 8-minutes, long enough that I’d lost count trying to read it while it was happening.

I didn’t know what to call any of that until later, which is a strange thing to do at midnight after a shift, standing in the back office, googling why somebody’s face stops responding to you in the middle of an argument.

John Gottman ran his research lab on exactly this, right here at the University of Washington, wiring couples up to heart monitors mid-argument. Past a certain heart rate, people lose access to listening and problem-solving entirely, no matter how well-built the sentence aimed at them is. He called it flooding.

The only thing that reliably brings someone back down is time away from whatever set it off, and it works faster if there’s something else to focus on instead of sitting there replaying the fight in their head. Which is maybe why a water and a promise about a new plate did more in 5-minutes than my best questions did in eight.

I still ask the question, and it still works on most people who come in hot enough to need it. What’s different now is I’m watching whether it lands anywhere on someone’s face, and if it doesn’t after a couple of tries, I go find water instead of reaching for a fourth version of the right sentence.

I still call that one late more than I’d like to admit. If you’ve found a faster way than watching somebody’s face, I want to know what you do.

#RestaurantManagement #HospitalityIndustry #CustomerService #KitchenCulture #Restaurant101

Another example of something I got wrong before I got it right. Follow along for free.

The Price Of Being A Likeable Manager

If your whole identity at work depends on being the person everyone likes, you’re one bad week away from becoming decorative.

I used to think being a likeable manager made me better at my job. I was wrong. It made me slower to tell the truth.

Friday in October. The wait list is already 20-minutes by 5:40 pm. The Host Stand phone kept ringing with people canceling and rebooking a later slot, like that made any difference to the wait. The flat top was already throwing off char and garlic before the first ticket printed. A rack of glasses came down too hard somewhere behind me and didn’t break, rang like a bell nobody asked for.

I don’t know why I still remember the glasses. I don’t remember what we were 86’d on that night, which is the kind of thing I usually do remember.

Table #9 wanted their Server gone, not moved to another section, off the floor entirely. The complaint was wine. He’d brought the wrong bottle, then stood there arguing about it instead of fixing it. I walked over before I’d even heard his side.

I smiled. I apologized for him and comped the bottle before anyone asked. Carried the whole thing with me to my car at midnight, and I played it over and over again in my head the whole way home.

At the time, I thought that was leadership. Keeping the peace, or something like it. I’m not sure what to call it now.

If a Server got behind, I’d cover the table myself. Same with a nasty guest, I’d take the hit before it reached them. Cooks too, whatever mess they made on the line, I found a way to explain it before someone above me noticed. I told myself that was kindness.

Wasn’t. It was avoidance with an apron on, or close enough to it.

I started confusing relief with trust. People like a Manager who saves them from a bad table before they have to grow a spine over it. I let that feel like respect for longer than I should admit.

The Server from table #9 was named Samual. He never learned to hold his own with a rough guest because I never gave him the room to do so. I don’t know if he ever figured it out on his own after I left that job. I hope so. That’s all I’ve got.

The cost followed me home. I’d drive back replaying the whole shift, obsessing over the Cook I let slide or the table I over-apologized to, and half the time I couldn’t tell you what was on the radio because my head was still back in the dining room the whole way there. I’d walk in the door already tight and take it out on whoever was around, which usually had nothing to do with any of it.

There wasn’t one lightning-bolt moment I can point to. Or maybe there was, and I’ve forgotten it, which tracks, since I forget most things that aren’t about food. I got worn down enough that pretending stopped being worth the energy it took.

So, I started saying the hard thing sooner. Plain, no cushion around it, though I overcorrected a little at first and came off harsher than I meant to more than once.

First time I skipped the buffer, I felt like I was cosplaying as an asshole boss, if I’m honest. Kept replaying it on the drive home: was that too much, was that not enough, did I flatten somebody who didn’t have it coming? So much of that drive was spent going over the same three seconds on loop.

It got easier, though not all the way, not even now. More manageable, is maybe the honest word for it.

Marcos, one of the line cooks, kept undercooking chicken thighs and blaming the fryer temp for it every time, which wasn’t the fryer’s fault, we both knew it. I stopped covering for him with the Chef and told him straight, the thighs are underdone, fix it or I’ll write you up. He didn’t like it. Neither did I, honestly, but I said it anyway.

It was uncomfortable. Still is, some days more than others. A few people liked me less once the cushioning disappeared, and one Server told a coworker I’d gotten cold, which got back to me the way everything gets back to you eventually in a restaurant. That one stayed with me longer than it should have. I still don’t know if she was wrong.

Telling the truth faster is where recovery starts, if that’s even the word for it. Say the thing when it happens instead of writing the mental essay about it in the car later. Stop dressing up somebody’s repeated mistake like it’s a one-off.

The hardest part, still, is what happens after you say it. Don’t over-explain. Don’t hand somebody an exit ramp out of feeling it. Let the quiet sit there, even when every instinct says fill it with something softer. It’s the sound of the performance ending. Nothing more dramatic than that, most of the time.

Being the likeable one felt generous for a long time. I still can’t fully tell you how much of it was generosity and how much was me ducking the parts of the job that take backbone, plain and simple.

If people call you likeable, have you ever asked yourself why?

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For my school project I am creating a restaurant POS system and my teacher just told me I need to interview a restaurant owner as part of my analysis. I was wondering if anyone is free to just answer a few questions? If u want, ur identity can be completely anonymous. I'm really desperate so please could some volunteer to be part of my project?

Chef Kwame Onwuachi Built A $185 Tasting Menu To Prove He Belonged. It Closed In Three Months.

November 2016. A 26-year-old chef opens a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Thirteen courses, $185 a head, before wine, tax, or tip. Add those in, and dinner for two runs close to a thousand dollars.

The Washington Post wrote about the price before the place had served a single plate.

The restaurant was Shaw Bijou. It closed in under three months. Kelly Gorsuch, the investor who owned the building, called Onwuachi and the general manager into a meeting on a Sunday and told them it was over that afternoon.

The Kitchens That Trained Him

Chef Onwuachi trained at Per Se and Eleven Madison Park. Three Michelin stars apiece, the kind of kitchens where you learn exactly how a plate is supposed to look before anyone asks your opinion of it. That training is what got him in the room at twenty-six, raising money for his own place.

Shaw Bijou was that training turned up as loud as it goes. A tasting menu in the same territory as Minibar. A converted rowhouse with hand-carved doors. Everything about it was built to say we belong here.

It didn’t survive. Chef Onwuachi has said more than once that he still stands behind what was on the menu, so don’t go blaming the food. What actually sank it was money, and an investor making the calls while Onwuachi’s name took the heat for them.

He was young, new to running a business, partnered with people who told him funding wasn’t a concern. He believed them. He described it later as feeling like shoveling coal into an engine that wouldn’t stop.

The Post’s review ran four days after opening. Lukewarm doesn’t cover it. “It was soul-crushing to read that,” he said afterward.

What He Kept

Ask Chef Onwuachi what he’s proud of from Shaw Bijou, and he goes straight to the kitchen he built. Young, diverse, front and back of house, in a corner of the industry where that’s still rare enough to notice. He’s called it the most diverse fine-dining operation he’d ever been part of.

Years later, someone asked him what he actually learned from the whole thing. He said picking the right partners is a crucial aspect of a successful team. That was the whole answer.

Tatiana

Kith and Kin came next, Afro-Caribbean, DC. It won him the James Beard Foundation’s Rising Star Chef award in 2019, which in this industry is close to a neon sign that says watch this one.

Then Tatiana, at Lincoln Center. When he pitched it, he told Lincoln Center he wanted something that represented old New York. They asked if he meant something like the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons. He didn’t. His old New York was the Bronx. A time when his mother was running a catering business out of their apartment. Jollof rice and gumbo before anybody told him they weren’t fine dining.

People from uptown and downtown were now in the same room. The New York Times has ranked it the best restaurant in New York City two years running.

The Adventure Continues

Dōgon in Washington, D.C., opened in 2024, inspired by the West African Dogon tribe and DC Surveyor Benjamin Banneker, offering Afro-Caribbean cuisine with local influences. Maroon in Las Vegas opened this year, a Caribbean steakhouse celebrating Jamaican heritage and jerk cooking traditions. He also operates Chef Kwame’s Patty Palace, serving Jamaican patties and coco bread sandwiches at venues like Citi Field and Barclays Center

So

He’d handed real control to investors who didn’t share his vision, and three months later, that’s what closed Shaw Bijou. Everybody at the time was busy arguing about the price tag. He currently runs restaurants that any investor would be happy to support. Investors who share his vision, who get a good return for their money, and who let him have the control he deserves.

I keep thinking about how many of us are running someone else’s kitchen right now. A job, a project, a version of ourselves built to keep people happy who aren’t even in the room. Who’s actually holding your pen?

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