A Cautionary Tale – Or Two Or Three –
For Potential Restaurateurs
I was catering a small event recently.
A young man struck up a conversation as I worked and at one point
asked me what the hardest part of running a restaurant or food
service business was. My answer was immediate and emphatic: finding
and keeping good help.
Oh, there are a million things that
will kill you in a restaurant operation. Finances and budgets aside,
something is always breaking down: AC, heat, walk-in, reach-in, ice
machine, sandwich unit …something. Building codes, fire codes,
safety codes and especially food codes and health regulations will
drive you insane. Licenses are another headache. There's one for just
about every circumstance you can think of and probably some that you
never imagined. And if you're serving liquor, that's a whole 'nother
animal. But all these things pale in comparison to the difficulty
involved in the recruiting, hiring, and maintaining of anything near
a decent staff.
“What's so hard,” you ask? “I'm
offering people a chance to work and make money. How can that
possibly be such a problem?” Oh, my dear lambs! Allow me to reveal
to you the slaughter you're about to face.
The labor pool for the restaurant
industry today is so shallow you can walk through it and barely get
the soles of your feet wet. I don't care if you are the proprietor of
a suburban fast-food eatery or the owner of the hottest downtown
restaurant, the employee mill will churn and turn like a revolving
door. A motorized door that spins like a centrifuge. Oh, sure, you'll
find a good cook or server now and then; one who loves his or her job
and enjoys working for you. An Italian friend of mine has as couple
of cooks and servers who have been with him since he opened his doors
more than a dozen years ago. I know of a waiter at another local
place who has been there for more than twenty years. But believe me,
employees like these are the statistically insignificant exception to
the revolving door rule. In fact, recent statistics show that three
in ten restaurant operators cite adequate staffing as a major issue.
Another stat says that turnover in the restaurant industry is
currently at an all-time high of seventy-five percent. According to
Restaurant Insider, forty-two percent of front-of-house employees
walk within the first three months.
Almost every candidate you're going to
encounter in your search for a reliable employee is somebody who is
not seeking a career but rather looking for a job. This means you
hire them today and they find “something better” tomorrow and you
won't see them the next day. No thanks, no notice, just no-show. It's
called “ghosting” and it's a big thing among millennials and Gen
Zers. Young people just take a job and then don't show up. Or they
quit a job and don't let their employer know. According to the
Randstad 2020 U.S. Compensation Insights survey, half of millennials
and Gen Zers have ghosted an employer for a higher paying job
opportunity elsewhere.
With increased demands for higher
minimum wages becoming more and more commonplace, people new to the
job scene expect to just walk in and be paid a whole lot of money for
very little work. When they figure out that the job isn’t going to
be a cakewalk (usually after the first ten minutes or so on the
clock), a lot of them won't hesitate a second to find something
“better.” And to leave you holding the bag.
Many of the ones that do show up and
stick around do so because they can't find “something better.”
The transient nature of restaurant work is legendary. While there are
many, many, many dedicated, hardworking folks in both the front and
back of the house, there are also a disproportionate number of, shall
we say, “hard-luck cases.” These are people who are barely
functioning in life due to alcohol, drugs, mental or emotional
impairments, criminal records, educational deficiencies, or just
plain laziness and lack of motivation. And they flock to kitchens
like flies to – sugar.
Another bunch that the business seems
to attract are the ones who have unrealistically high opinions of
themselves and their abilities. They're just working for you because
they never got the breaks that would have made them the next Bobby
Flay or Wolfgang Puck or somebody. Believe them, they're doing you a
favor by deigning to grace you with their presence. Don't try to tell
them anything; there isn't anything they don't already know. They are
legends in their own minds.
And, of course, as I alluded earlier,
nearly every waiter or waitress you're likely to employ is literally
waiting – for something else. They're “really” students,
actors, models, social media influencers – any of a million things
and they're just cooling their heels with you until their big break
comes along or until they can get “a real job.”
You start out looking for bright,
attentive, motivated people and I promise you in most cases you will
end up settling for warm bodies. And the saddest part is you're going
to get chapped lips and a permanently brown nose from all the
ass-kissing you'll have to do in order to keep them.
Sure there are exceptions. My son is
one of them – sort of. He started in fast food at age sixteen and
over the next twenty years he worked his way up to management in a
fairly high end place. The route took him through waiting tables,
tending bar, and even doing a few turns in the kitchen. He was
dedicated, hardworking, and good at what he did. And now he owns his
own place. It's a retail craft and gift shop. He's out of the food
business.
My grandparents owned a little place
back in the '50s. He cooked and she served. No staffing problems
there. No staffing problems at my uncle's eatery either; I had a big
family and most of them worked for Uncle P at one time or another.
And as far as my own involvement in the industry, I'm a personal chef
these days. I have a full-time staff of three – me, myself, and I
and I never have any problems with any of them.
So with four generations of idioti
in the restaurant business, let me share a few stories from my own
experience that illustrate why I tell people what I tell them about
finding and keeping good help.
I could write a book about the
fast-food employees who have screwed up my orders over the years. I'm
sure you could, too. It seems almost de rigueur anymore. I
never leave a drive-thru without checking my order. And the
attitudes of most fast-food counter people! Uffaaaaa! Have you
ever walked up to place your order and felt like you should apologize
for doing so because you're intruding on the counter person's
personal time or interrupting their social activities? I have. The
only exception seems to be Chik-fil-A. Their employees are
unfailingly efficient, polite, and attentive. I don't know what they
do differently there, but they're obviously doing something right.
Unlike the careless kitchen employee at
one of my favorite fast-food joints that I won't identify but its
name comes from the initials of the Raffel Brothers who started it. I
ordered a ham and cheese slider onto which some inattentive “cook”
slid a little something extra: the plastic wrap from the cheese. I
know. How did I know the difference, right? And yes, the manager
apologized profusely and brought me a fresh one without the extra
ingredient.
My own staffing luck was usually not so
good. I once hired a cook who had attended Le Cordon Bleu in Los
Angeles. Wow! Here I am with a little hole-in-the-wall place and I
score a classically trained chef! Woo-hoo! But two problems
immediately surfaced.
Problem number one was that the man
couldn't make all the dishes in an order come out at the same time to
save his life. He was a decent cook and he was great if he could
focus on one thing and one thing alone. But that ain't the way the
business works. My wife was on expo duty his first night and he
almost walked because she was “so hard” on him. Just because I
kept hearing her repeat the word “urgently” in regards to every
dish he was not making that was not hitting the pass......He could
muddle through a deuce okay but the “deer-in-the-headlights” look
set in when he was confronted by a four-top and anything more than
that had him so deep in the weeds he needed a machete to whack his
way out.
Second problem: he may have learned to
read a thermometer in culinary school but he had a little difficulty
with a clock. He was never on time for his shift. Even though he
lived a five or six minute drive from the restaurant, he had neither
a car nor a license. So if he couldn't bum a ride, he usually hoofed
it. And he was always late. This was especially problematic when he
was the opening breakfast cook. The servers were there, the coffee
was made, the doors were open and.......no cook. I mean, the opening
cook needs at least a half hour prep time to light the oven and the
flattop and the grill and to set up the breakfast mise and what have
you. And this clown walks in five or ten minutes after the start of
service. Che cazzo?!
So I told him one night, “I'm gonna
pick you up in the morning. You be ready.” And I was in his
driveway at the appointed time. No cook. I called his cell. His
sleepy voice answered and said, “I haven't had my shower yet. Go on
and I'll call a cab.” “Okay, bucko,” I said, “you've got
thirty minutes.” “I know. I'll be there,” he replied.
Thirty minutes passed and no cook. I
called him. “I'm the cab right now.” “Okay.” Fifteen minutes
more go by. Remember, he lives five minutes down the street. And now
he's not answering his phone. Another fifteen minutes and another
phone call. Now he says he's in the cab and on the way. “From
where?” I exploded, “CANADA?!
An hour ago you told me you'd get a cab. A half-hour ago you said you
were in the cab and now you tell me you're still in the cab when you
only live five minutes away. You know what? I suspect you're lying to
me.” He started stammering some excuse. I pressed on, “Are you
lying to me?” “Ahhhhhhh.....ummmm......I was just trying to buy
myself a little more time is all.” “GUESS WHAT, DUDE? YOU'VE
BOUGHT YOURSELF ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD,” I roared, and then
I hung up.
I saw him on the line at a Waffle House
a couple of weeks later. A little while after that he was gone from
there, too.
There's often a bit of friction between
front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house. Everybody's got a job to do
and frequently cooks have issues with how servers are doing their
jobs and vice-versa. Usually it's fairly benign, although sometimes
it can be intense to the point of being toxic. I think that point had
been reached when I had to fire a cook who threatened to kill a
waitress and a customer who had had the temerity to complain about
something. I don't mean some off-hand “I'm gonna kill her”
comment. No, this anger management dropout went into graphic detail.
He was one of those “I am God's gift to the culinary industry! How
DARE you question me?” types that I mentioned earlier. I put up
with his posturing, I put up with his ego, I even put up with his
adding his “personal touches” to our established recipes. But I
wouldn't put up with his threats to customers and staff. Bye-bye.
How about this one? It's a Saturday
evening and I'm in the kitchen doing prep work. I've only got one
cook to begin with and he's working behind me prepping some chicken.
I turned to ask him something and he's gone. Not only is he gone but
ten pounds of raw chicken is sitting open and uncovered on his board.
I deal with that potential health code violation and then go off to
find him. And he's out on the patio smoking and laughing it up with
some buddies. “Hey, man”, I tell him, “it's not break time. You
need to get back in there and finish that chicken.” He's kind of
sullen about it but he does it. And ten minutes later, he's gone
again. Back on the patio with his pals. My wife goes out and tells
him he needs to get back to work. He tells her, “in a minute.” I
give him “a minute” and five or six more, then I go out and tell
him, “I'm not paying you to smoke and talk. Get back to work.”
Unreasonable, right? He must have thought so because he took off his
apron, slammed it on a table and stalked off across the parking lot.
Leaving me without a cook on a Saturday night. And five minutes after
he's gone, a rush starts. So my wife puts on an apron and hits the
flattop, I take the fry station, and a waitress works the grill. We
got through it. Oh, and did I mention that I had already taken this
guy back once because I felt sorry for him?
Then there was the master chef who cost
me two points on a health inspection because he apparently didn't
know how to cook a chicken breast. We had a grilled chicken sandwich
on our menu. Our meat vendor kept us supplied with very
generous-sized boneless chicken breasts. I mean, if these hens were
human, I'd suspect they had had work done, you know? BIG ol'
chicken breasts. And, of course, any idiot could figure out that you
had to cut these monster breasts down before you cooked them. For a
couple of obvious reasons. In the first place, you could get at least
two sandwiches out of one breast. In the second place, there was no
way in hell you could cook that enormo-breast whole on a grill or
flattop. Common sense would tell you that the outside would be toast
long before the inside cooked to a safe temperature. The problem with
common sense is that there are so many uncommonly senseless people
walking around. My cook was one of them. And, wouldn't you know, the
health inspector was there to witness his brilliant display of
chicken cookery. When the inspector stuck his thermometer into that
breast, I knew I was screwed. He “suggested” the cook start over
and then he dunned me points with the notation “suggest serving
smaller portions.” Ya THINK??!! How
about “suggest you get another cook” instead? Because I did.
I was helping out a friend who was
really struggling with his place. His biggest problem was that he was
an absentee owner who only came around on Fridays to hand out the
checks. The rest of the time, the inmates ran the asylum. The biggest
“inmate” was a cook who probably should have been an inmate for
real. He was selling drugs out in the back parking lot during his
shift and he let all his friends eat for free whenever they came in.
Guess who I fired first?
And the waitress my friend had making
the schedule and “managing” the place hadn't a clue about
restaurant management. For instance, she was buying cleaning supplies
at the Dollar General across the street. When they ran out of ground
beef, she'd just nip over to Walmart and buy twenty pounds or so. My
friend used 80/20 in his burgers. His “manager” bought 73/27
because it was cheaper. He was using 60 or 70 count potatoes for his
hand-cut fries. She found little golf ball-sized spuds at some kind
of retail discount store and bought those instead. She thought doing
all that was saving my friend money. His diminishing customer base
definitely noticed the drop in quality. And his bottom line was
headed for the toilet because his “manager” was stocking his
restaurant with inferior product at retail! Oh, and she had
worked a deal with my friend whereby she got paid extra to “manage”
on top of her waitress wages and she also negotiated a “bonus”
for running errands. And she would run to Walmart or somewhere six or
eight times a day, hitting him up for her eight-dollar fee for each
and every trip. So she was waiting tables for wages and tips and
tacking on “manager pay” on top of it and then piling on her
“errand fee” to ice the cake. In short, she was milking my buddy
like a cash cow while driving his business into the ground. I didn't
fire her; I just demoted her back to waitress and she quit.
I was traveling and stopped for lunch
at a little place in Knoxville, Tennessee one day. The owner was
behind the counter and it was little slow, so we started chatting
while I waited for my order. He took a phone call. After he hung up,
he looked at me and, shaking his head, said, “I just hired that kid
day-before-yesterday. He's worked one shift. Today he's calling me to
see if he can get tomorrow off. Where do these kids come from?” For
the answer to that question, reread the paragraph about “ghosting.”
I was eating a late lunch in a nice
little place that had decorative Tiffany-style lamps suspended over
the booths and tables. As I said, it was late and the place was
pretty quiet. Probably no more than a half-dozen other diners in the
dining room. So the waitress was taking advantage of the lull to do
some side work. And that's fine. That's what she's supposed to do;
roll silverware and fill ketchup bottles and such. What she's most
assuredly not supposed to do
is climb up on a stool and dust the decorative Tiffany-style lamps
while the customer's food is on the table! The
manager apologized and comped my meal.
I don't do restaurant cooking anymore,
but I still do a bit of restaurant consulting. I signed on with a guy
a couple of years ago who wanted to open a place with a big city
“high-end” vibe in a small, rural Southern town. He was a
businessman with zero restaurant experience and I didn't think
much of his concept from the beginning. And the very first thing I
cautioned him about when he asked for my advice was the condition of
the local labor market. But he had lots and lots of big ideas and
piles and piles of money, so I watched as he funneled over a million
dollars into his personal fool's paradise, spending tens of
unnecessary thousands of dollars on every sparkly gadget and gee-gaw
he could get his hands on. I told him to forget all the fancy toys
like the $2,000 glass froster he bought for his bar. I advised him
against the genuine top-grain white leather banquettes he was
planning to install. I tried to tell him a lot of things, but the
single biggest thing I hammered on was the potential employee base,
or lack thereof. But I was whistling in the wind. “Oh, don't worry
so much about that,” he pooh-pooed. “I'm going to pay higher than
anybody in town. I'll have only the best people.”
Opening day approached and he hadn't
even begun taking applications. I kept nagging at him to start
developing his staff. We were less than a month out without the first
employee on the payroll. Two weeks before opening, he finally took
time from cavorting in the ludicrously expensive kitchen that had
become his personal stainless steel playground and started
interviewing for cooks and waitstaff. “Sei pazzo!,” I told
him. “These people need at least two weeks to learn the menu
and to train on procedures!” But he just looked at me like the
bothersome nuisance I had no doubt become and continued to ignore me,
believing his money would solve all his staffing problems. And the
chickens came flocking home to roost when he opened the doors to
admit the local labor pool and only a few drips trickled in.
High school kids. Tons of high school
kids. None of whom we could hire because of labor and liquor laws. A
bunch of people showed up whose only restaurant experience was eating
in one. The first question nearly everyone who came through the door
asked was “how much do you pay?” Sometimes that was the lead-in
right after they gave their name. Now, you shouldn't judge on looks
alone and it's illegal to refuse to hire on that basis, of course,
but considering we were trying to staff a “high-end”
establishment, we fielded more than a few applicants whose basic
hygiene and, let's say, “sense of style,” made them low-end
candidates for “high-end” employment. We had some applicants who
couldn't read the application. One guy listed his cooking experience
as “jail.” And then there were those who filled out applications
and accepted positions and when we called them a day or two later for
follow-up had already taken jobs elsewhere. Yep. We got “ghosted”
a lot.
My client was badly understaffed when
the place opened and the staff he had was untrained and unprepared.
And the reviews reflected it. Not that I was there to experience
those negative reviews. Having long since tired of being superfluous,
I fulfilled my obligation to get his doors open and then I waded out
of the deep end of the pool and onto dry land.
“Decent food, horrible service.”
“Nice atmosphere, horrible service.” “Horrible management,
horrible service.” The litany went on and on. But I didn't just
read the online reviews. I also checked his health department
inspections. Month after month of the same violations and
infractions, nearly all perpetrated by careless and/or untrained
staff. So much for his money buying “only the best people.”
Actually, even less-than-the-best
people can cost money. Industry figures place the average cost of
recruiting and training an hourly employee at anywhere between $2K
and $3.5K. That's an enormous investment in somebody who is going to
walk out the door seventy-five percent of the time.
So if you're still thinking of opening
a restaurant, don't! Go soak your head or take a cold shower
or run headlong and face first into a brick wall until the urge
passes. If you still persist in pursuing folly to its inevitable
conclusion, don't pretend you didn't hear the voice crying in the
wilderness; the one that said “the hardest thing about running a
restaurant is the difficulty involved in the recruiting, hiring, and
maintaining of anything near a decent staff.”
And when you came to that conclusion,
look me up. I'll be over here comfortably basking in the sunshine of
“I told you so.”
