Want to Open a Restaurant?

I started this post in February of 2017 and for some reason I decided to finish it today. I guess it was just one of those things that has been silently hanging around in the back of my head and today it decided to come out.

So if you're reading this then you may have been thinking that you'd like to quit your corporate job and do something completely different. I get it. I've thought about that many, many times and I still think about it every day. Maybe you love to cook and entertain and think about how great it would be if you could just do that all the time and make a living doing it. Or maybe you've been sitting in a crowded restaurant and thought about how much money the place is going to take in when all those people pay for the food and drinks they're consuming. I've done that too. Or maybe you worked as a cook or server when you were in high school and you remember how much fun that was. Wouldn't it be great to do something that was really fun again and rake in a ton of money in the process?

These are all reasons why people decide to go into the restaurant business. After all, how hard could it be to open a place and serve food and booze and have people throw money at you all day? Sounds like a great business idea and a great way to work until you're ready to retire, doesn't it? Well, I'm going to tell you the cold, hard truth and you can decide for yourself whether it sounds right for you.

First of all, everything I'm going to tell you was learned through my experiences in restaurant ownership. I didn't learn this in restaurant school or from a book. I've owned and operated two restaurants and I'm out of that business now, but every day I still think about opening another one. Once you've done it you'll find it's very hard to get it out of your head.

The first place I owned was one that was operating when I bought it. I had been thinking about quitting my corporate job and doing a restaurant for several years when this opportunity came along. To make sure I was really ready to do it I had gotten a part time job working with a well known local chef and was already spending time in the kitchen and loving every second of it. 

I felt certain that I wanted to make this change so I bought the place at a price that was way more than it was worth. It was a neighborhood Italian restaurant that had been in business for over 50 years and was well established. For several years it had been struggling due to the owner's cocaine habit and extreme burnout. The transaction was pretty easy.  I handed over a huge amount of money and he quickly scurried away as fast as he could. This should have been a red flag, but I was crazy happy at the thought of now owning a restaurant so I didn't pay any attention to it. All of the vendors, banks, utility companies, and the landlord were eager to set up terms with someone who was actually going to pay them so it took only a day or two to get all that finalized.

The problems started to surface almost immediately. I had agreed to retain all of the employees and I quickly found out that they were stealing liquor, food, and cash as fast as they could get their hands on it. They had apparently been doing this for some time and figured it was a benefit of their employment because they didn't seem too concerned when I caught them red handed. I fired a few and a few others quit and were quickly replaced.

About 2 weeks into this adventure I had a meeting with the accountant. He had been doing the books for years and I was trying to decide whether I wanted to keep using him or find a new one. When I questioned him on the previous owner's Profit and Loss Statements and Balance Sheet for the last year he told me that he had never seen those numbers before and they didn't come from him. The P&L showed  monthly profits between $3,000 and $4,000 for the previous 12 months, but the reality was that the business was losing about $5,000 per month.  The previous owner had falsified the numbers to make the restaurant look better to potential buyers.

Then came the invoices from the previous month before I bought the place. The terms on everything were Net 30, so the previous owner spent like a drunken sailor right before the sale so the condition of the business would look better and then stuck me with all the bills for it. Perfect. The stage was now set.

Over the next three years we managed to quadruple sales and show a decent profit on paper, but the theft problems continued and costs began to go up on food and liquor.  On paper we looked great, but the bank account never seemed to get better. There was plenty of resistance as I slowly edged prices up to try and keep up with rising costs and I actually had threats of physical violence when I raised the price of a meal-sized bowl of spaghetti and meatballs to $7.00.  Think about that for a second.  A whopper at the Burger King drive through was over $5, but customers were upset at the thought of paying $7.00 for a bowl of spaghetti large enough to feed two people and having it served to them at a table with all the bread and butter they wanted, plus free refills on beverages.

The theft continued.  Bartenders would start a tab for a customer and serve them a dozen drinks.  When it was time to settle the $80 tab, the bartender would tell them the total was $20 and the customer, thinking the bartender was doing them a favor, would leave a $40 tip that went right to the bartender. Only $20 went into the register instead of $80.  They would do this when they knew I was working in the kitchen and wouldn't be around to watch them.  Putting up cameras helped quite a bit until they realized that I couldn't review 15 hours of video every day.  On top of that there were the free drinks to friends and friends of friends, employees and friends of employees.

The servers also had their bag of dirty tricks.  The best one was the ticket voiding process.  Our point of sale was very old and the ticket void password couldn't be changed.  Servers would ring up everything correctly, but if the table happened to pay in cash then they would simply void the ticket and pocket the cash.  When I saw that a server had $1200 in sales and $300 in voids I would challenge them and get some fabricated excuse that was then confirmed by another server.  I later learned that a relative of mine (by marriage) who was working in the restaurant had regularly employed this method of theft and had actually taught every new employee how to do it for themselves.  She later became an attorney where she no doubt currently uses the skills she perfected at my restaurant.  Go figure.

The real kicker was my partner.  She considered the restaurant as her personal playground and anything she wanted was free to her.  It would start with a few bottles of premium wine with friends in the afternoon, progress through dinner with those friends, and wind up with cocktails in the bar.  Her tab was routinely over $300, which would cost the business roughly about $125.  That doesn't seem like a lot until you realize that it happened 3 or 4 nights each week.  A well run restaurant has a profit margin of only about 4%, so the sales needed to finance her playground would come to upwards of $40,000 per month.  And that's not including all the free events for local non-profits and political candidates that we hosted at no charge.  It was out of hand, but she continued to spend money faster than I could make it.

So you get the picture. The place was a shit show and I couldn't get control of everything to get it stabilized.  I had a ton of restaurant experience, but non of it was in the business side of the business, so failure was inevitable and I just didn't know how to turn it around or how to get help to turn it around. The final nail in the coffin was when a friend of the landlord decided that he didn't want to be a lawyer anymore and wanted a restaurant. They decided to push me out so he could have the location and they wouldn't renew my lease. By that time I was behind on rent so we just closed down.  I spent the next few years getting divorced and paying off debts.

You would think that living a nightmare like that place would have made me want to avoid opening my own restaurant forever, but it didn't.  A small restaurant near our home became available after the previous tenant passed away.  The landlord was eager to have another restaurant in the building and worked with me to prepare it for a small Italian place which I opened on a shoestring budget in less than a month.

By applying everything I learned at the first place and not making the same stupid mistakes, we did very well.  We made money from the very first week.  We had a very small staff and they became like family.  There were a few rotten apples, but we got rid of them right away.  Customers loved the place and we were having a lot of fun, but working about 100 hours per week.  There were some slow times where cash flow was tough, but they were offset by periods of extraordinary sales.  The best part of this was that I didn't have to take on any new debt and we were able to stay current with suppliers and the landlord.

After a year we were at a place where we just couldn't increase our sales any more. We were making enough money to survive, but just barely.  The only way I could see to increase sales would be to either re-tool the restaurant to serve a higher end clientele or move the restaurant to a part of town that was nearer our customer base.  Our location was in a very old part of town and the perception of our customers was that it was in a dangerous neighborhood.  Our customer base was primarily from West Omaha and we were in extreme East Omaha so it was a long drive, especially in winter months when the snow was deep and the roads were slippery.  

After a little over a year we decided that it just wasn't worth keeping the place open because our standard of living really wasn't very good for the time and effort we were putting in each week.  We closed with only a few outstanding vendor obligations which we paid off over the next few months.

So that's my story.  Of course there's a lot more to it.  There's no way to put 5 years in a reasonably short blog post because a lot more happened.  Some of it was  great and some of it wasn't so great.  Would I do it again?  You bet I would, but I wouldn't make those same mistakes.

All that being said, you might ask "Should I open a restaurant?"  My answer would be yes, but only if you have already managed one and know the front of the house, the kitchen, and the business office like the back of your hand.  If you don't know how these areas function (in great detail) and how they relate to each other then you would be wasting your time and throwing away your money.  You might as well build a bonfire in your back yard and go shovel your money into it.  The odds of succeeding are probably less than 1 in 1,000.

If you can honestly say that you are already an expert in these three areas, then before you commit to it go find a restaurant veteran in a market where you won't be competing and have them review your business plan with you.  Develop a business model and an operating plan for your finances and have them do a sanity check on it.  Your numbers might look great, but if your sales projections are inflated just to make your business model work then you are making a grave mistake.  Be realistic and plan for the worst case, not the best.  If you can operate with limited sales and still make money then you might be on the right track.

If you can't honestly say that you have real expertise in these three areas, then find a partner who does.  Not an employee or a consultant.  Find a real partner so he/she has some skin in the game and won't walk away leaving you high and dry.  You can quickly become an expert if you partner with someone who already is.

If you can't find a good partner with restaurant experience and you are tempted to do it alone and learn as you go, then my advice would be for you to walk away and find something else to do.  You may have expertise in another type of business, but restaurants are different animals altogether and almost nothing you learned in another business is going to help you.  Just don't do it.  Step back and regroup.

There are tons of other things you should think about, but there are too many to list here.  If you are seriously thinking about doing a restaurant and have questions that I may be able to answer, then send me an email at jccamp60@gmail.com and I'll either tell you what I know or I'll try to point you to someone who knows.  Failure has been a good teacher and I'll be glad to share what it taught me so you don't have to experience it for yourself.

 

Toppy

This is a story that is better told in person in order to get the full flavor, but several of the people closest to me asked me to post in on my blog so here we go...

I hope you like it.

Throughout the course of our lives we encounter special people who help make us who we are.  These people are usually our parents, friends, favorite teachers, co-workers, and world leaders.  Everyone has a few of them even if they don't know it.  I have a number of them too, but the one I want to tell you about today is a waitress named Toppy.

First of all, I want to tell you that I did not go to culinary school.  I elected to do a chef apprenticeship instead. During a stint at a restaurant in Seattle I met Toppy.

Toppy was a server and long time employee of the restaurant.  The place was very busy and the cuisine and service were upscale but not exactly fine dining.  Toppy was older than the other servers -- maybe in her mid-forties -- and sported a beehive hair style.  Not one of the super tall ones, but tall enough that you would know it was a beehive.  The customers and management loved Toppy because somehow she was really good at serving customers, always showed up for work,  and always did everything she was asked to do.  

Everyone has a favorite thing.  Sometimes it's a spouse, a child, a car, a pair of jeans, or a pet.  A favorite thing is something that's more important to you than anything else.  The thought of losing that thing makes you wonder if life would even be worth living if it disappeared from your life.  Toppy had one too.  Her favorite thing was valium.  She loved valium, and she loved a lot of it.

At this point you might be thinking that there's no way Toppy could take valium while on her shift at a busy restaurant and still be a model employee, but you would be wrong.  In the two weeks I worked on the floor with her I never saw her sober.  In fact, in the five or six months that I worked at that restaurant I never saw Toppy sober.  Don't get me wrong.  I don't have any problems with recreational drug use as long as it's done safely and doesn't harm others.  Just don't show up to work high as a kite and then wonder why you just cut off your thumb on a meat saw.

If you looked at Toppy you would have to be stupid not to know immediately know that she was high as fuck.  Her eyes would only open about a quarter of the way.  This caused her to have to tilt her head back so she could see you standing in front of her.  Her mouth was hanging open most of the time.  It wasn't smiling.  It was just hanging there open so you could see all her dental work and even count her teeth if you wanted to.  Toppy moved very slowly.  She took tiny steps, obviously having to give each one of them some deep consideration before committing to raising or lowering a foot.  You didn't want to get behind Toppy when coming out of the kitchen toward the dining room.  If you happened to be carrying a tray of food then you could be guaranteed that it would be ice cold by the time you got it to the table unless she veered off her chosen path and miraculously got out of your way.

Toppy was also a slow talker.  When you think of the term slow talker you think of someone who speaks sentences very slowly and takes a long time to get their point across.  Toppy did this, but she was also a slow answerer.  If you asked her a question it would take her an incredibly long time to begin giving you her answer.  It was like the verbal communication between you had to travel all the way to the moon and back and then required some intense processing before a response could be sent back over the same route.  It usually took her 5-10 seconds to respond to a question and start slowly giving her answer.  This doesn't seem like a long time, but the next time you're having a conversation with someone think about it and you'll understand how long that really is.  To make this even better, she was also too stoned to speak loudly enough to hear her unless you were standing very close.

On the first night of my time in the dining room the management, in their infinite wisdom, paired me with Toppy.  I was supposed to follow her all night and learn how service worked.  When I showed up about 30 minutes before my shift I was waiting in the service area for Toppy to show up and I introduced myself to the other servers.  They were generally very friendly, but all of them rolled their eyes or slowly shook their head when I told them I was following Toppy all night.  I was beginning to develop a feeling of impending doom.  On top of that, the manager had failed to inform Toppy that I would be working with her, so when she showed up and I told her she just squinted at me for a good long time while she processed that information and then just said "Ok" without even moving her lips and walked away.

If you've ever worked in a restaurant you know that there's more involved to opening for the evening than just unlocking the doors and letting people start coming in.  By opening time the kitchen has spent all day getting things ready.  The servers have opening duties as well.  They have to make sure the service area is well-stocked, there are enough napkins folded, coffee and tea are made, lemons are cut, and condiments are full.  There's a lot more to it than that, but you get the idea -- it's a lot of work to get set up and it all has to be completed by opening time.

Knowing this, I asked Toppy what we needed to do to get set up.  She thought for a very long time and then finally just said "You know, just the usual stuff."  I decided to watch the other servers and just do whatever they were doing.  That seemed to work because a couple of the other servers commented that our section looked pretty good.  One of them loaned me their extra wine opener so I would have one in case I got lucky and someone ordered a bottle of wine.  I felt like I was part of the team.

The restaurant wasn't super busy that night so the first part of the evening went well.  I very slowly learned where everything was kept, how to ring in orders, how to get drinks from the bar, and how to collect payment from the customers.  When I say I learned these things very slowly, it wasn't because I'm a slow learner.  It was because it took Toppy and exceptionally long time to explain them to me and most of them couldn't be explained without a short intermission part way through for a cigarette or restroom break.  

After a couple of hours she let me help carry food to the tables and serve it.  This place didn't use trays so we had to carry plates without them.  Servers were permitted to carry as many plates as they could balance as long as they didn't ever drop one.  This was out of my comfort zone, so I self-limited my capacity to three  plates.  Toppy, on the other hand, would balance half a dozen plates on her arms and still swing by the bar to pick up a few drinks on her way to the table.  The food was almost certainly cold when it reached the table due to the time it took her to make the trip, but it eventually got there safely.

Think about this for a minute.  If you've ever stumbled home after a long night of drinking with friends and tried to unlock your front door, you know it can sometimes be a challenge to get the key in the hole and turn it.  Imagine being twice that impaired and having to balance 4 or 5 plates of hot food on your forearms and carry them through a busy dining room without dropping or spilling anything.  Toppy was way more than impaired but she did it over and over and over again without incident.  Amazing.

So at one point during the night one of Toppy's orders came up while she was at the point-of-sale ringing in a new order.  The expeditor was screaming for her to pick it up because there were a couple of orders coming up right behind it and her food was in the way.  She told me (very slowly) "Take the first three to table 14 and I'll follow with the other three."  I grabbed them and told the expeditor that Toppy would be coming to get the rest.  I maneuvered through the dining room and successfully delivered the plates to the table.  When I turned around Toppy was nowhere to be seen so I went back to the kitchen hoping to either meet her carrying the remaining three plates or get them myself.

When I went through the service area Toppy was not there, but I could see her back in the salad area calmly eating sliced radishes.  She saw me and slowly walked back to the service area.  I asked if she wanted me to serve the rest of the order and she thought for what seemed like ten minutes and finally said "No, I'll do it."  She grabbed the plates and headed out to the table.  I stayed in the service area to ring in some drinks and after a few minutes she came back without the plates and went over to the expeditor stand.  She headed back over to me and said that the kitchen had only cooked half the order so they would need to prepare three more plates.  When I reminded her that I had already taken three plates out she asked "What table?"  I told her that I had taken them to table 14.  She went back out to the dining room to look.  

When she came back she very slowly said "There are only six plates on the table."  When I reminded her that there were only six people at the table she stopped for a while so she could process that bit of information and do the complex math involved in figuring out that each of the six people at the table had a plate of food.  Eventually she said "Ok.  Don't do that again" and dug around in her pocket until she found a valium.  She put it in her mouth and washed it down with a swig of non-dairy coffee creamer.  She offered me one but I decided it would be better to stay awake for the rest of the shift and politely declined.

By this time we only had about an hour of service remaining and things were starting to calm down a little bit.  That's about the time the incident happened.  It was a table of four and their dinner service had gone fine.  Super friendly people and not overly demanding.  When we picked up the plates, Toppy asked them if they were interested in dessert.  They all said they wanted this flaming fruit thing on the menu.  It was kind of like a Bananas Foster but had a bunch of other stuff in it in addition to bananas.  I can't remember the name and I have never seen it again since then.  It was prepared and served tableside on a gueridon that the server wheels up next to the table for cooking and serving the dessert.

If you're not familiar with a gueridon, technically it's a small four legged table, but in a restaurant it's a small portable cart with one or two burners built into it.  The idea is that the server or maitre' d wheels it up to the table and cooks something right there in front of the customers.  It is used mostly in fine dining ala carte restaurants, but occasionally you see them used in a not-so-fine restaurant, mostly for flaming desserts or chateau briand.

A genuine gueridon is a beautiful piece of cooking and serving equipment and is treated with reverence and respect by both the service staff and the kitchen.  It is meticulously cleaned, polished, and maintained after every shift.  As you have probably guessed, we didn't have a genuine gueridon.  We had a rickety beat-up metal cart with a single burner portable camping stove on it.  After all, why pay upwards of $2,000 for a real gueridon when you can buy a utility cart at Wal Mart, throw a tablecloth over it, and place a portable camping stove on top for less than $50?  You get the picture.

Now, this particular dessert had several ingredients and was easy to prepare.  At least it was easy to prepare if you weren't high as a fucking kite.  One of the ingredients was Bacardi 151 rum.  If you're familiar with 151, you know it's basically jet fuel in a bottle.  They use it in some exotic tropical cocktails to increase the alcohol content to the point where most places limit you to only 2 drinks.  Other than that the only place it's used in cooking is to produce a big flame when you're cooking in front of a bunch of customers.  When it's used in Bananas Foster it only takes about half an ounce to produce a flame that gets the customers all excited and impressed.  It usually helps earn the server a bigger tip, but otherwise doesn't do much except maybe set off the restaurant's smoke detector for a minute or two.

The problem that night was with the 151.  For some reason when the kitchen set up the cart for Toppy they gave her a small wine carafe full of 151 instead of about an ounce in a soup cup.  They probably saw that the order was for four servings and thought a 12 ounce carafe would be the equivalent of four 1/2 ounce portions.  Anyway, they put a full 12 ounces in a small carafe and threw it on the cart along with everything else.

She slowly wheeled the cart out to the table and got it situated.  She told me to stand behind her and to the side so I could watch but wouldn't be in her way.  With that she proceeded to make the dessert.  She got all the ingredients in and it was time for the 151.  It was at this point that I noticed that there was enough 151 in the carafe to get 10 sailors drunk.  I started to say something but she squinted at me and shook her head.  Toppy fearlessly started to pour all of the 151 into the screaming hot pan with everything else.

It wouldn't have been disastrous except for two things:  First, Toppy moved very slowly and poured the 151 from directly above the pan.  She was not able to move her hand out of the way in time to keep it out of the fireball that immediately erupted from the pan.  Second, she did not stop pouring even when the fireball engulfed most of her right arm and the now empty carafe.  In a reflex move she pulled the pan away from the burner with her other hand and flaming 151 poured out all over our makeshift gueridon, the customer's tablecloth, and her apron.  Toppy looked down and realized that she and everything around her was on fire.  It took her a minute to process the gravity of the situation and then she slowly took a couple of steps backward.

By this time the customers had jumped out of their chairs and were standing against the wall behind the table.  I had reached over to an adjacent table and grabbed a nearly full water pitcher so I could attempt to put Toppy out.  I managed to get some water on her sleeve and put that out and then smothered her burning apron until it was mostly out.  She looked down at the apron as if she was having a hard time understanding that she had very recently been on fire.  After a full 30 seconds of careful consideration she very slowly said "Wow" and then looked around the dining room to see if any of the other 200 people in there had noticed the smoke and flames.  The place was silent.

Next Toppy jumped into action.  She turned to the burning tablecloth and picked up a napkin.  I thought she would spread it out and throw it over the fire to smother it, but instead she folded it neatly and started slowly wiping the fire like you would wipe a baby's chin after feeding him a spoonful of pureed beets.  This continued for some time.  I realized that she wasn't making any headway at putting out the fire and retrieved another pitcher of water from the service area.  By this time all of the 151 had burned up and the fire was consuming the polyester tablecloth.  The smell was stifling.  There was enough water in the pitcher to put out the fire so everyone was out of danger.

The Assistant Manager had made it to the table by now and was doing his best to calm the customers to the point where they would just leave and not sue the the place into bankruptcy.  In the middle of this, Toppy joined the conversation and offered to move them to a fresh table and try the dessert again.  She told them she might even be able to get the Assistant Manager to comp the dessert so they wouldn't have to pay for it.  They just stared at her like they had been stunned with a cattle prod.  

Eventually they realized that no one had been hurt and none of their clothing or stylish accessories had been damaged and began joking about it being an evening they would remember for a long time.  They assured us they would be  back in the future but they would probably request a different table and would certainly avoid that particular dessert.  As they were leaving Toppy squinted at me while trying to remain standing and said "I think I used too much butter."

Later that night we were all in the party room while the servers did their banks and prepared for their check-outs.  They started to talk about how much they had made in tips that night.  Today servers don't share that information with everyone, but back then they did.  They went around the table and I heard numbers like "35," "42," "51," "18," and "26."  That doesn't seem like a lot of money for a busy shift of working your ass off, but back then it was pretty good money.  Today good servers make a lot more than that, but the cost of living is much higher.  They eventually got to Toppy and everyone went silent waiting for her to respond.  She was just finishing up counting her money and eventually she said "170."  I didn't believe that, but later one of the other servers told me that Toppy usually made two or three times what everyone else made.  I still don't really understand it, but I'm wondering if the valium actually helped.

That's pretty much the end of the story of Toppy.  I finished out my two weeks with her without any additional incidents and went back in the kitchen to spend a month shucking oysters and cutting up fish.  Once we were there very late for a party and Toppy asked me if I wanted a ride home.  I thought about how much valium I had seen her consume during the shift and politely declined.  

I lost track of Toppy after I moved on to the next place, but I still think of her occasionally because she's one of those really special people we encounter during our journey through life.

  

The Elusive Process Library

A couple of years ago I ran into an interesting situation at work.  It was one of those surreal things that kind of felt like it should have been in the movie "Office Space."  You run into this kind of stuff occasionally if you decide to sell your soul and work for a large organization.

I'm a Senior IT Engineer at a large healthcare organization in Nebraska.  For those of you who are surprised by this, yes there are actually large healthcare organizations in Nebraska.  Anyway, I was working on a project that required moving a medium-sized piece of equipment from one data center to another  data center across town.  By medium-sized I mean it was too big for one guy to move by himself, but not big enough to require a moving crew or any special equipment.

You would think that moving this thing would have been as simple as going into the data center, unhooking all the cables, removing it from its rack, and wheeling it out to a waiting Subaru to be transported to its new home.  Once at the destination the whole removal process would simply be done in reverse and the equipment would be in its new home whirring away and waiting to be called into action.  You would think this but you would be wrong.

The first problem with this assumption lies in the fact that we, as Senior Engineers responsible for installing, configuring, and operating these miracles of technology do not have access to the data centers where they are kept.  We have to get approval from Management and make arrangements with Operations to escort us to the device we need to work on.  If we bring someone to help us, they must do the same thing.  This is a security precaution implemented to prevent a rogue engineer from entering the data center and dismantling a production system before the Operations staff can wrestle him/her to the floor and secure the offender's wrists with cable ties behind his/her back while waiting for the authorities to arrive.  Instead, we manage these devices remotely. 

Think about that for a minute.  I can't walk into the data center with bad intent and a crowbar in hand, but I can sit undetected in the comfort of my home office at 2:00AM and slowly delete all the company data and render all the computing infrastructure useless with just a few mouse clicks.  Ok.

There are a number of other steps we must take that are security-related but I can't share them here.  Let's just say they are complex, take a lot of time, and some of them even involve biometrics.  They really want to make sure that the person they've worked with for the last 5 years is actually who they say they are. Being an astute reader, you have probably already guessed that most engineers really don't have the patience for much of this.  Management, in their ultimate wisdom, knew this and decided to boil it all down to one form for the engineer to fill out.  

This is how it works:  Once you answer about a page of questions, the online  form is routed to all the necessary approvers and eventually back to the Operations staff, who then contacts the engineer to schedule the activity.  All the engineer has to do is remotely shut down the equipment and Operations does the rest.  After the work is completed, Operations notifies the engineer that it is all done.  In the rare case that the engineer is required to be present while the work is done, he/she is notified again anyway.  This process works relatively well, although running cable for a new install or removing cable when a system is taken out of service can take some time.  That's an overview of the process for deploying something new or removing something from the data center.  Bear with me a little longer and soon we'll get to the Process Library part of the post.

With all this in mind, I decided to leverage the form and install/remove process  to get my system moved from one data center to the other one.  After all, it was basically just using the removal process and then immediately executing the installation process to achieve my objective of moving the system.  You would think the story ends there, but it's really only beginning.  This is where the Process Library part comes in.

I submitted my request on the appropriate form detailing what I wanted removed from one data center and where I wanted it to be reinstalled in the other data center.  It was immediately rejected.  Apparently it was too much information to go on one form and the person who receives the forms and then assigns the work thought it was confusing.  He said I should split it into two forms since it was actually two separate things I was asking Operations to do.  I complied and submitted two separate forms, both of which were immediately rejected.

The reason given was that two forms would generate two work tickets in their ticketing system and, although they were closely related, there was no way to tie the two work streams together to make sure they were done in the right sequence.  I asked if it would be possible to assign the two tasks to the same team and tell them something like "Do this one first and then immediately do the other one."  He told me that there was no way in their system to make sure the tasks would be assigned to the same team so there was no way to guarantee that they would be done in the correct order, which caused both forms to be rejected automatically.  After some discussion he eventually said "So what you really want is just to move the system from one data center to the other?"  I said "Yes, please.  I just need it moved.  Can we do that?"  I thought we were starting to get somewhere until he answered  "No, we don't have a process in our Process Library for that."

I asked him where the Process Library was kept and if it would be possible for me to write a process for them detailing the steps involved in the moving a system.  He informed me that I could certainly document the move process in the same format as the other processes in the Library, but it would have to be reviewed by the Process Engineering Committee and then approved by management before it could be placed in the library.

At this point I knew that documenting a new process would take less than an hour, but getting it reviewed and approved would likely take many years and I might not live long enough to finally celebrate its adoption.  As a point of reference, I’m 61 and in good health so my expiration date is well into the future.

I asked him again where I could find the Process Library so I could use a previously approved process as a template for my new one.  I really had no intention of writing a new process and then going through the long and grueling steps to get it approved, but by now I was curious about this Process Library thing and wanted to see it for myself.  By now I had decided that the best way to get my system moved would be to buy pizza and beer for the Operations staff and skip the form altogether.  I asked again where I could find the Process Library. 

Eventually I wore him down enough for him to admit that he’d never actually seen the process library himself but he had heard about it from others.  The perceptive readers are probably asking now that if he’s never actually seen the Process Library and didn’t know where it was kept, then how did he know that what I was requesting was not already in the Process Library?  I diplomatically asked that very question and he told me that he had a spreadsheet listing all of the processes in the Library.  I asked if I could see the spreadsheet and he told me that it was password protected and he was prohibited from sharing the password with me because it would be in violation of an Information Security policy. Ok. 

I decided that my best chance for locating the Process Library would be to ask one of the other IT employees who had been around longer than me.  I decided to ask Emily because she had been on the job for many years and used the word “process” in meetings more than anyone else.  If anyone knew the location of the Process Library it would be Emily.  I messaged her on Microsoft Teams and she immediately responded that she was in a meeting and she’d get back to me when her meeting was over.  I wondered who Emily was meeting with because no one really even knows what Emily does.  It must be important because she’s been doing it for a very long time, but no one really knows what function she performs. 

I decided to ask some other senior team members while I was waiting for Emily to call.  My next stop was Joe.  When I asked him about the Process Library he said that it was developed when management hired a consultant about twenty years ago and that person told management that they should have one.  Everyone was required to document what they did and how they did it and all of that information was eventually combined to build a Process Library.  That sounded plausible so I asked Joe where I could find it.  He told me that he didn’t know where it was kept and he had never actually seen it for himself, but he had once overheard some other employees secretly talking about it.  This didn’t help me but at least now I knew the history of the Process Library.

About the time I realized that I wasn’t making any headway with Joe, my phone rang. It was Emily. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and then I asked her where the Process Library is kept.  There was silence on the other end of the line for about 10 seconds as she recovered from the initial shock of hearing that question.  As she began to speak I noticed that the cordial tone of her voice was gone.  She was so uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation that I might as well have asked her what color lingerie she was wearing at the moment or if she was interested in coming over later and drinking mohitos naked with me in the hot tub.

Her voice got very soft and she spoke for quite some time, but I don’t think she actually said anything.  After a while she asked if there was anything else she could do for me.  I wasn’t interested in asking her about the hot tub thing so I thanked her and ended the call.  Back to square one.

My next stop was a Senior Analyst on our Application Development team.  I had worked with her several times and she had always been a good source of information.  I figured that most of our processes ultimately have something to do with applications at some point so someone from that team might know where to find the Process Library.  I reached her right away on Teams and asked her where I could find it.  She told me that she had asked the same question about a year earlier and was told to fill out a form requesting access to the Process Library.  She filled out the form but could never find out where to submit it.  She said everyone knew about the request form, but no one knew where to submit it.  I suggested that detailed instructions for requesting access to the Process Library are probably outlined in a process within the Library but no one could figure out how to get those instructions because no one actually has access to the Library.  It’s sort of like when you lock your only set of keys in your car.  All you really need to do to get them is to unlock the car and grab them and then you would be able to unlock your car.  She suggested that Judy, our Administrative Assistant, would certainly know how to gain access and that I should probably just ask her about it.  I thanked her and moved on.

Now you should know that Judy and I have a “history” and it involves a red Swingline stapler.  When I first started this job my wife bought me a red Swingline stapler like the one Milton had in the movie Office Space.  It was kind of an inside joke about me going to work for a very large corporate entity.  About a year into my employment, Judy came around to everyone and replaced their staplers with identical black ones.  I wanted to keep my red Swingline but Judy wasn’t going to stand for it.  Over the next couple of years she made many attempts to covertly replace my beloved red Swingline with a smaller generic black stapler so that everyone in the building would have exactly the same type of stapler. 

I wouldn’t have really cared if it wasn’t for the fact that my beautiful wife had given me the red Swingline.  In fact, I hardly ever use a stapler.  I’ve probably used less than 20 staples since I got the Swingline.  But it has sentimental value and I don’t want it to end up in a box of unused staplers stacked in some remote part of the basement storage area.  To protect it from Judy I usually locked it in a drawer or put it in my computer bag if I was going to be away from my desk for more than a few minutes.  This kept it out of Judy’s clutches and it was always available in case I happened to encounter some paper that was begging for a staple or two.

One afternoon Judy came by and demanded that I hand over the red Swingline.  I refused and Judy stormed off muttering something about a disciplinary action.  At this point the smart choice would have been for me to just take the stapler home and leave it there, but instead I decided to super glue it to my desk where Judy could see it anytime she was nearby.  My co-workers enjoyed this immensely because they got to watch Judy try to pry it loose several times until I finally removed it with a little acetone and took it home.

Ok, so back to the Process Library.  I went to Judy’s desk and asked for a request form for Process Library access and also how I should submit it once I filled it out.  I figured that once access was granted then someone would tell me its actual location.  Judy informed me that we were out of Process Library Access Request Forms and triumphantly handed me a Printed Form Request Form that I could use to request more of them.

I took it back to my desk and filled out both sides and had one of the other engineers initial the “Witnessed By” section.  After we both inspected it thoroughly for spelling and grammatical errors I took it back to Judy.  She looked it over and immediately rejected it and handed it back to me.  Judy then informed me that we no longer use Section R and I would have to do it over again, this time leaving Section R blank.

I made my way back to my desk and filled out the form again.  In the Quantity Requested field I specified 50 copies of the Process Library Access Request form and returned it to Judy.  She immediately rejected it, telling me that we have to order forms in increments of 100.  I went back to my desk again and filled out a third Printed Form Request Form, this time asking for a quantity of 100 copies of the elusive Process Library Access Request Form.  Miraculously it was accepted.  Judy said she would let me know when the forms arrived in 6-8 weeks.

At that point I went back to the Operations Control Center and simply asked the Operations staff if they would just move the system in question for me and afterwards I would buy them all the pizza and beer they could consume.  This approach worked and the system was moved by the end of the next day.  I fulfilled my end of the deal by taking them to a local pizza place and buying a couple of large pizzas and an insane number of PBR tall boys.

This is almost the end of the post, but I will say that the new forms eventually arrived and they had been printed on the wrong paper so they were returned.  After another 10 weeks the replacements arrived, but it was determined that the print shop had used the wrong version of the form and it contained incorrect contact information.  On the third try they were perfect so I filled one out and submitted it to Judy.  This time she accepted it and sent it on to the person who processes that particular form and then I never heard any more about it.  After almost 2 years I still have no idea where the elusive Process Library is located or what it contains. 

Later, I did run into a consultant working in our building who said he was retained as a Process Architect.  I asked him if he was working on the Process Library and he said “Not yet.  I just requested access to it.”  I think I will check with him in a few years and see how it’s going.

That’s the end of this post.  I think if there is a lesson to be learned here it would be that sometimes organizations become so focused on implementing and following processes that they become process bound and are unable to execute the basic things necessary to succeed in their primary mission.  I think there’s a sweet spot hiding somewhere in between the chaos of lean development/implementation methodologies and being process bound.  Very few organizations find this sweet spot and ours certainly isn’t one of them.

 Thanks for taking the time to read this exceptionally long post.  I promise to make the next one shorter.

Kitchen vs. Servers

 I chose Kitchen vs. Servers as the title for this post because I knew it would draw your attention.  If you’re taking the time to read this, you’re probably working in the hospitality industry.  As far back as I can remember there’s always been some kind of animosity between the kitchen staff and the front of house staff.  I’m not going to try and solve that problem for you, but I hope to show you how to think about it a little differently.

I have never been able to figure out how this rivalry started.  Maybe one side did something to the other side during the middle ages and the fight began and is still ongoing today.  Maybe it’s been passed down for generations and generations until we all just thought was part of restaurant life.  Maybe it’s like a dog and cat thing and we’re genetically wired to dislike the other side.  I don’t know, but whatever it is, we can change it and you can help figure out how.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a retired chef.  I’ve worked in many kitchens all over the place and have seen this rivalry everywhere and even participated in it a few times.  I’ve also worked as a food server and have participated in it from that side of the fence.

I’ll speak to the kitchen side of it first.  If you’re a cook or chef, the whole process of selling food is not all about you.  You play an important part, but not the only part.  You don't sell food.  You are overhead.  Those servers that you constantly harass or demean have to go to the table and convince the customer to order the food and then after it's served and eaten  they have to get money for it.  In essence that’s the function of a restaurant – to buy, prepare, serve and get paid for food.  Your primary role ends when the server takes it to the table.  From there it’s up to them to do everything else.

As a cook or chef, you have to realize that the restaurant owner doesn’t have a magic money tree growing somewhere that he harvests every other Friday to give you a paycheck.  The money for your check comes from the entire process of buying food, cooking food, serving food, and then getting the customer to fork over some money to pay for it.  That money will go toward your paycheck.  In the simplest terms possible this means that if the restaurant can’t collect money from the customer, then you don’t get a paycheck.  It’s a super simple concept when you think about it.  No sales, no paycheck.  The easier it is for the servers to sell, the more money there is.

Where this becomes important is when you think about how all this happens.  You cook the food, but the server takes it to the customer and makes sure he/she’s happy enough to pay for it.  Like it or not, you are dependent on the server for your paycheck.  With that in mind, you can see that anything you do to make their job easier is also good for you.  On the other hand, anything you do to make their life harder is not good for either of you.

Keep this in mind the next time you have the urge to throw a ripping hot dish up under the heat lamps and choose not to warn them that it’s hotter than the Earth’s molten core.  Or when you berate them for making an error on an order.  People make mistakes and making one shouldn’t result in a punishment from the Dark Ages.  Just give them what they need to make the customer happy and then move on.  You can get with them at the end of the shift and straighten out the point-of-sale or discuss what went wrong.  You can work together to figure out how to prevent it from happening again.  After all, it’s not you vs. them.  You’re on the same team.

On the other side of the coin, if you are a server then the kitchen is probably not really out to get you even if it sometimes seems that way.  They’re most likely not even thinking about you, much less plotting against you.  They’ve probably been back there sweating their balls off all day and they’re tired, stressed out, and maybe even a little hungover.  When they get behind they get frustrated just like you.  Help them out a little bit by slowing down service if you can to help them catch up.  They’re not behind because they hate you.  They’re behind because something probably went wrong back there and they’re trying to recover from it.  A good cook’s worst nightmare is to get behind on orders.  Do what you can to help, even if that’s just staying out of the kitchen for a little while to help ease the noise and confusion.

Look, I can write these little pearls of wisdom all day and there are hundreds of them, but you should get the idea by now.  The point of all this is that servers and the kitchen are working for the same thing and fighting among each other holds everyone back.  A little care and cooperation goes a long way toward a successful restaurant and makes for lifelong friendships.  I decided a long time ago that helping the servers whenever I got the chance made my life better too.  And guess what?  The servers started doing the same for me.  When we all started collaborating before, during, and after the shift everyone had fun at work again.  Sales went way up and we all started making more money.  You see, we’re on the same team.

The False Prophet

This is the story of a chef who wasn’t what he claimed to be.  As some of you know, I’ve bounced between two completely different careers all my life.  My passion is the restaurant industry, but Information Technology pays the bills.  I would work as a chef until I got tired of being dirt poor and then go back to IT for a while to make some real money.  This story is about one of those times when I was working in a restaurant.

About 3 years before this took place I had bought my first restaurant.  It was a neighborhood place that had once been the gathering place for the whole neighborhood.  The owner had gotten older and was suffering the ravages of old age, alcoholism, and a long and colorful cocaine habit.  He was burned out and ready to retire.  As you can imagine, the factors I listed contributed to the restaurant’s decline and staying open day to day had become a challenge.  I was sure I could return the place to its former glory so I decided to give it a go.  I won’t go into all the details because it’s a long and complicated story, but basically the obstacles were more than I could overcome in the 3 years I owned the place and I eventually closed it before I lost my house and everything else.  This doesn’t really have anything to do with the story but I felt it was important that you understood my state of mind when this odyssey started.

Ok, so back to the story at hand.  After my Italian place closed I was burned out and really had no motivation to work anywhere.  A lifelong friend called me and asked me to take a position as Sous Chef at a locally owned French restaurant as a favor to him so I reluctantly agreed without really investigating the condition of that business.  On my first day I learned that the restaurant was losing about $40,000 per month and the Executive Chef was feuding with the owner.  On top of this they had a restaurant consultant there who was offering some really bad advice and bleeding them dry for about $4,000 per week.  Morale among the staff was very low and sales were terrible.  We had some nights in those first weeks where we had only 10 or 15 customers all night.  This was a larger restaurant and could seat almost 200 customers at a time.  After I started I learned that the owner had hired me after the Executive chef had offered the position to someone else and it had caused lots of hard feelings and bruised egos.

The restaurant was a high end place in Omaha’s Old Market District.  It had been a fixture of the district for about 40 years and was widely known as Omaha’s finest restaurant.  Unfortunately this was not the case anymore and it quickly became evident that the food was only marginal, the restaurant was in disrepair, and the service staff was, with a few exceptions, not qualified to serve fine food.  I didn’t know any of the politics at the time I accepted the position, but the owner’s plan was to push the Executive Chef out and move me into that position.  I started moving us slowly back to classical preparation techniques and improving the quality of the food.  The Executive Chef saw that as a direct assault on his authority so my efforts were not well received.  I decided to just put in my time and look for another position.

There is a lot more to the story, but about a month after I started working as Sous Chef the owner called the Executive Chef to the office in the middle of Saturday night service and promptly fired him.  After service he told me that I was the new Executive Chef and he gave me a small raise.  At first I wasn’t excited about this development but soon warmed up the idea and resolved to continue returning that the restaurant to the high quality dining eperience it was known for.

After a couple of months of retooling the menu, the kitchen staff, purchasing procedures, and service procedures, we started to see stronger sales and a much better product.  Things continued to improve over the next few months until we were seeing nightly customer counts of 120 to 150 and about 250 of weekends.  A great review in the local newspaper also helped immensely.  During this time I continued to look for a Sous Chef, but wasn’t having much luck finding one that was a good fit.  One morning the owner called me and told me another Omaha chef had recommended one of his cooks who was ready to move on to a new opportunity.  When our owner contacted him and told him about the open Sous Chef position, he said that he wasn’t interested in a Sous Chef title but would consider it if the title was Chef De Cuisine.  The owner interviewed Keith and was immediately captivated by his enthusiasm and drive to produce great food so he scheduled a time for me to meet him.

If you’re familiar with the structure of a restaurant kitchen you probably know that the position of Chef De Cuisine is a step below the Executive Chef and a step above a Sous Chef.  Not all kitchens have a Chef De Cuisine, but when one is present his/her primary responsibility is to work directly with the kitchen staff to prepare the best quality food possible.  In a kitchen with a Chef De Cuisine the Executive Chef is still ultimately responsible for every aspect of the kitchen’s operation and food preparation, but he/she spends more time on administrative activities than in hands-on food preparation.  Our kitchen wasn’t really big enough to need a Chef De Cuisine, but Keith wanted that title instead of Sous Chef so we just let him have it.

I met with Keith at a Bruegger’s Bagel restaurant to see if we would have the type of synergy needed to work together.  Keith told me his favorite chef was Thomas Keller and it was immediately obvious that he had no patience for anyone who did not also idolize Thomas Keller.  Keith had a huge Thomas Keller chip on his shoulder.   I knew of Thomas Keller as the owner/chef of The French Laundry and Bouchon, which are both known worldwide as among the best restaurants around.  I appreciated this, but still didn’t know too much more about Thomas Keller.  I was just happy that Keith’s idol was not Colonel Sanders.

During the interview Keith said a few things characteristic of an inexperienced chef who doesn’t know much about the financial aspects of kitchen management or the practical side of actually being able to prepare food, serve it to a customer, and accept payment for it.  Since I would be handling the operational part of our kitchen I thought this was worth noting but not serious enough to disqualify him from the position since most of those functions would be my responsibility.  I had previously worked with Keith for a time at Omaha Country club and knew that he was very, very good at food preparation and presentation.  I also knew at that point that the owner was completely sold on this young man and ultimately he would overrule my decision if I rejected him and I would end up working with him anyway.  So Keith was hired.  Sorry for the long lead-in, but you needed to know all that stuff to understand what came next.

He started on a Tuesday night and that’s when this story actually begins.  As I showed him around he just shook his head and sneered at everything he saw.  It began with the chef coats.  Keith was outraged that they didn’t have knotted French buttons rather than plastic ones.  I listened to him rant about this for about 5 minutes before cutting him off and moving on to aprons.  The aprons we used in the kitchen were also wrong.  We apparently needed bistro aprons in order to serve fine food.  Keith and I were to share an office just off the owner’s office.  Keith insisted that he needed his own space to plan and create and couldn’t be bothered by me being in the same room for the 10 minutes each day when I was placing orders.  We had a restaurant cat named Tigger who had been a resident of the downstairs area for about 12 years.  Ketih declared that Tigger had to go.  And he needed his own computer, but it had to be a specific brand and model.

After the initial shock of showing Keith around, I needed to get in the kitchen with the cooks and prepare for service.  Keith decided he would go through our spice rack and then see what was in the freezer.  I told him I’d like him to spend some time observing the line and see how we prepare food and send it out.  He told me that our food was terrible and he was going to change it all anyway and teach us all new preparation techniques so there was no reason for him to observe.  We were all mildly amused by his assessment and he took off, nose held high in the air, to go check out the freezer.

We had an unusually busy night and I was glued to the line for the duration of service.  I could see the freezer door opening and closing occasionally and I hoped that Keith was straightening it up and organizing it a little bit.  We had a very small freezer.  French Café ordered almost everything fresh and we rarely bought anything frozen, with the exception of some New Zealand lamb, Dover sole, and some hash browns for brunch.  We used the freezer when we had small amounts of something left over from fabricating steaks or perhaps fish trimmings or shrimp shells.  We would accumulate them in the freezer until there was enough to make a nice soup or maybe make something for an employee meal.  By using it for this purpose were didn’t waste anything and we were able to keep things in our inventory for longer periods of time instead of having to throw out spoiled products all the time.  At that time we probably had about $8,000 worth of food in there, none of it more than a few weeks old.

At the end of the night as things calmed down on the line I went back to the freezer to check on Keith.  He told me he had cleaned out the freezer.  I was impressed and asked to take a look.  When I looked inside it my heart stopped for a minute.  All that was left in there was a case of lamb racks and a box of hash browns.  When I regained my composure a little bit and made sure there were no knives or other sharp objects nearby I asked him where everything went. 

“I threw it out,” he said.  I asked why.  He answered by starting to spew out an endless list of reasons:   It was labeled with masking tape instead of freezer labels.”  “The date was written in pencil.”  “It wasn’t wrapped properly.”  “We’re no longer going to use that product.”  “I don’t like that product.”  “They would never use that at The French Laundry.”  “I don’t like that brand.”  And the list went on and on.

I managed to control my urge to crush his skull with my bare hands and told him that before throwing out anything else he needed to consult with me first.  He was not happy with that plan and said he didn’t want to do it because I was part of the problem.  I told him he would be required to consult with me before throwing anything out if he wanted to keep his position.  In a classical French kitchen the Executive Chef is the Supreme Ruler and disobeying a direct order is the kitchen equivalent of murdering a young child in a terrible and painful way.  You simply don’t do it or you might lose a body part, be blacklisted in the restaurant community, or maybe just disappear completely one day.  It is the worst possible kitchen offense.  The worst thing that can happen to a kitchen employee is for the Executive Chef to have it in for you.  If this happens you might as well just give up and move on because it will not just simply blow over and everything will be fine one day.  Keith grudgingly agreed to my demand.  I started to think about how I was going to tell the owner that we were going to take an $8,000 hit to our food cost.

The next day I got to the restaurant about 10:00AM.  We were not open for lunch so this left 7 hours before service.  I usually spent the first couple of hours of this time to handle ordering, scheduling, costing parties, and other administrative tasks. By the time the cooks started to roll in all that stuff was out of the way and I was able to be in the kitchen working directly with them all afternoon and through service.  Normally I would be the only one in the kitchen until the cooks got there, but on that day Keith was already there when I arrived.

He had been there for about 2 hours when I arrived and had spent that time throwing away all of the prep items from the saute and pantry stations.  His rationale was that in order to serve the highest quality food we needed to prepare these ingredients on the day they will be used.  One day old will not work because the ingredients will be of lower quality.  I was stunned.  Another $800 into the dumpster.  In most kitchens he would have been out the door at that point but I knew the owner would just bring him back immediately and that would only embolden him even more.  I reminded him of our discussion from the night before when I told him he wasn’t allowed to throw anything out without consulting me first.  He just sneered and smiled.  I resisted my urge to pound a butter knife into his face and resolved to just let nature take its course when the saute and pantry cooks showed up for work.

In a professional kitchen one of the rules is that you don’t mess with another team member’s station.  If you need something from their station you must ask them for it and they have the option to tell you no with no hard feelings from either party.  That’s just the way it is.  The Executive Chef, Chef De Cuisine, and Sous Chef have more access to a cook’s ingredients on his station.  You still have to ask for something, but the cook will never tell you no.  If you take something before the cook gets to work, you must find him immediately right when he gets to work and tell them you took it.  If you are a real team player you will replace the item(s) before he gets there and notify him what you did or offer to prep that item for him before service.  This is true even if you are the Executive Chef.  Again, that’s simply the way it works and there are no exceptions to this rule.  Keith broke this rule and I knew he was going to pay dearly for it.  And he did.

When the saute cook, Carlos, got to his station he began to see what he needed to prep for the evening.  The saute station is a particularly complex station and is only for experienced cooks.  It requires a high degree of accuracy, consistency, speed, and most of all preparedness.  I had watched Keith work the saute station at Omaha Country Club and I knew he was very good at it.  Carlos was better.  Anyway, Carlos immediately noticed that many of his items were missing.  He asked me if I had used anything.

Carlos and I had a good working relationship.  If I really, really got into a bind and took something off his station then he would cut me some slack with the rules of the kitchen as long as it didn’t happen all the time.  This only happened once and I made it up to him with a brand new and very expensive chef’s knife.  Yes, it’s that important.  I told Carlos that he needed to talk to Keith.  He did and a loud argument immediately ensued.  I let it go for a while and decided to end it before Carlos gutted Keith with a boning knife.  In the end Carlos agreed to prep smaller quantities of everything and prep all the items in small quantities every day.  Keith agreed that as long as Carlos followed through on this he would keep out of Carlos’ stuff.  The pantry guy just prepped all his stuff over again and didn’t say anything.  Later I helped him take his trash out to the dumpster and assured him I would try to keep Keith off his station before he got to work.  He would need to prep enough product to get through service but no more.  He was ok with that plan and thanked me. 

We had all come to an agreement that worked for everyone, but now Keith had 2 cooks seriously pissed off at him.  I understood where Keith was coming from about fresh ingredients, but one day in the life of a minced onion doesn’t really make a difference, especially if you’re going to saute it anyway.  Having 2 very good Mexican cooks mad at you is never a good thing no matter how good you are.  They will hold a grudge forever until you apologize and promise never to cross that line again.  I explained this to Keith but he refused to do it.

Keith’s next personal mission was to reorganize our dry spice rack.  We used some dry spices, but we mostly used fresh herbs.  He declared that the spice containers wouldn’t work and he wanted deli containers for everything and he wanted them that day.  We had no use for deli containers so we didn’t have them.  When he was through telling everyone in range about this perceived deficiency I offered to let him go over to the restaurant supply place a few blocks away and pick some up himself and charge them to my account.  I got our sales rep on the phone and handed the phone over to Keith to explain what he needed.  They had all 3 sizes in stock and Keith told them to bring over a case of each size.  They told him all the trucks were done with deliveries but he could come pick them up before 5:00.  It was almost 4:30 and it was a 2 minute drive to get there.  He promptly told them to bring them to him immediately or we would never do business with them again. 

When the restaurant had not been doing well some of our vendors extended us a lot of credit -- way more than they should have and the restaurant supply place was one of those vendors.  We were still paying off a sizable balance with them.  I took the phone away from Keith, apologized, and then told him Keith would be over shortly to pick up the deli containers.  He made his way out the back door mumbling about how everyone was against him.  I think this may have been the only thing he got right during his employment there.

In about 45 minutes Keith got back with the deli containers with his wife in tow.  The spice rack was near the station I was working that night so I listened to him tell his wife about this asshole and that asshole all night as they transferred all the dry spices from their airtight factory containers to semi-airtight deli containers.  During the process Keith found some spices that were obviously very old and he rightfully disposed of those.  He and his wife finished up about the same time as we sent out the last order on the line.  His only comment was that all the food served that night belonged in the dumpster rather than the dining room and we would be making some changes the next day.  We all adjourned for the evening and went our separate ways.

By now you might be wondering why I, as the Executive Chef, didn’t just can this guy and move on.  I did consider that but decided on a different strategy.  Our owner was a prideful man and I knew if I gave Keith the boot then he would just be hired back immediately.  If this happened then he would come back knowing that he had free reign to do anything he wanted and there would be nothing I could do about it.  I would still be responsible for food cost and kitchen operations even though I would be powerless to do anything about any of it.  I decided to let him hang himself.  At the rate he was going I knew it wouldn’t take long.

The next day Keith started “improving” some menu items.  He made a basil olive oil cake that was phenomenal.  He changed our house salad from a handful of spring mix with a few candied pecans to a delicate sculpture of organic butter lettuce and a beautiful vinaigrette and a few small embellishments that I can’t remember.  All these were really good changes and we needed them to freshen our menu.  The only one I didn’t like was when he offered a dessert of 3 sugar cookies.  That was all that was on the plate.  He called it a “playful interpretation of a classic.”  The only thing that made the cookies unique was their very small size.  We didn’t get may takers at $9 per order.

Keith made a number of small changes to the menu that were welcomed because of their simplicity, ease of preparation, and quality ingredients.  For example, in our Caesar salad that we had made tableside for many years he switched out the regular anchovies for some special order (and very expensive) white anchovies.  They were somewhat less salty and didn’t have a strong fish taste like the regular ones.  Very nice.

We had several discussions about the saute oil we were using.  He wanted to switch from the high temp saute oil to grapeseed oil because it had a higher flash point and didn’t impart any unwelcome flavors to foods cooked with it.  I thought that was an excellent idea until I found that grapeseed oil was $105 per gallon and was next to impossible to find in Omaha.  Keith also wanted to upgrade the olive oil, which I thought was a great idea.  I found some organic first cold pressed olive oil and we quickly switched over to it.  We didn’t cook anything in it but it was used in Caesar salads and for some finishing and flavoring on a few dishes so the better quality oil greatly improved the taste of some of these items.

Keith’s next project was to start overhauling entrée items.  His first victim was the Duck.a l’Orange.  Our method of cooking duck was called confit (con-FEE).  This means slowly cooking a highly seasoned food in a bath of pure fat.  It sounds disgusting but it yields a fantastic result if you do it right.  Keith didn’t like this idea so he decided that the duck should be a single breast braised in red wine instead.  He opted for a medium quality cabernet sauvignon from our wine list.  Our cost of this wine was about $30 per bottle and it took 6 bottles to braise a batch of 6 duck halves, so the cost of cooking a duck was $30 even before the cost of the duck.  Of course the duck had to be from a boutique duck farm somewhere in Vermont.  Then there was the sauce.  Keith insisted that we use a highly concentrated duck stock to make the orange sauce.  He started with a case of 6 whole ducks and made a stock from them.  The cost of the ducks he used for the stock was about $75.  He started with about 5 gallons of liquid and after it had cooked for 2 days he had about 2 cups of insanely expensive and highly concentrated stock.  When we figured the total cost of serving half a duck it came to about $54 per plate.  To make this profitable we would need to sell each order for $200.  Keith didn’t see any problem with asking $200 for a 3 ounce duck nreast accompanied by 1 teaspoon of orange sauce served atop a single thin slice of poached turnip.  He said that over time our customers would learn to appreciate fine food and soon everyone would be breaking down the doors to get an order of duck.  I disagreed.  I adjusted his ingredients to make the whole thing less costly and we came up with a combination that he grudgingly accepted and would cost us only about $19 per plate.  We would sell it for $32 and take a loss on this menu item with the intention of using it to draw new customers.  This was a horrible idea but we went with it anyway.  The next time I spoke with the owner I told him that I had doubts about Keith’s ability to develop a profitable menu and he said that part of the process was mine.  I had to make it profitable.

The next item was the lamb rack.  Our racks were served as 4 small chops marinated in an herb and oil mixture and broiled to the customer’s desired degree of doneness.  Keith had other ideas.  He opted for grass fed South Dakota lamb instead of the New Zealand farm-raised product we had been using.  They do not taste the same because the grass-fed lamb is very gamey.  He cut the center part of the loin out of the rack in 2 small sections and then squared off the sides.  Next he used a product called Activa to reattach the pieces.  Activa is an enzyme product that is essentially a “meat glue.”  It binds to the protein molecules in the protein and forms an unbreakable seal.  You could use it to glue a piece of beef to a chunk of fish and it would look and act like it has come from some hybrid land/water beast.  Really a cool product, but you don’t want to do stupid things like that with it because your customers will think you’ve lost your mind.  Anyway, Keith’s method of preparation only used about 30% of the lamb rack and the rest was waste.  He used it to make a very strong lamb stock much like his duck stock only with lamb.  For the next part of this shit show he shaved the sides of the lamb until it was a perfect cube shape.  South Dakota lamb racks were about $26 each, so the cost per order of the 3 oz portion he planned to serve was already $26.  To finish off the plate he served the lamb propped up against a single cippolini onion.  Cippolini onions are similar to a pearl onion but a little larger.  The total price per plate was about $48 which meant we would need to sell 2 ½ ounces of lamb (after cooking) and a single onion all topped with a tablespoon of madeira sauce for $119.  I knew this would never fly in Omaha but I decided to just let him continue hanging himself.

One of French Café’s signature items was our Feench Onion soup.  It had been made the same way for 40 years and was very well known and loved, so he immediately decided to change it.  He switched it from using a beautiful veal stock to a vegetable stock with very little flavor and a taste similar to lukewarm dishwater.  Again, the owner told me to be patient and let Keith make his menu changes.  We started getting every other order returned with some unpleasant comments from our customers.  Keith’s response was that those customers were philistines who knew nothing about good food.

Our most successful and profitable menu item was our peppered filet.  It was an 8 ounce filet served on a beautiful demi-glace sauce finished with a little heavy cream and lots of whole butter. This item had been a staple since the first days of the restaurant and it comprised about 50% of our orders.  With this in mind, Keith set out to completely overhaul it.  His vision was to shape it in a cube much like the lamb and serve it with marble sized sphere of a vinegar sauce encased in sodium alginate.  Sodium alginate is a chemical used in molecular gastronomy where you can take a warm sauce and wrap it up into a sphere ahead of time.  The sphere is transparent so you can see the sauce inside.  Then you warm it in a water bath and spoon it out and serve it with something while it is still in a spherical shape.  It’s a magical product, but had no place on our menu.  I’ve only used it a few times and it is difficult to work with as well as very time consuming and prone to error.  Keith wanted to put a dollop of parsnip puree in the center of the plate, place the filet on top of it, and place little spheres filled with vinegar sauce on and around it.  When he told me about his plan I just told him to leave the filet alone and that my decision was non-negotiable.  He reacted by going out to his car and ranting to himself while he smoked some weed.  The cooks said they would chip in to pay for more weed if it would keep him out of the kitchen.  I told them to be patient so they backed down rather than killing and dismembering him.

The final nail in Keith’s coffin was New Years Eve.  The owner allowed him to design a limited menu with 4 or 5 items on it especially for the occasion.  We ordered in some special ingrdedients (foie gras, chanterelle mushrooms, Beluga caviar, and many others) and begin to prep for the night a few days before.  I can’t remember all the items we made, but the ingredients were all the finest available worldwide and they were expensive.  On the day of New Years Eve it became evident to me and the cooks that we would not be ready by the time service started because Keith insisted on preparing everything himself.  He told us all that the only reason he wanted us there was to help him serve it all.  That would be fine if we were only serving 30 people, but we had reservations for over 400.  The menu was designed in such a way that every plate had to be prepared ala minute.  That means that the ingredients are all prepared beforehand, but they must be meticulously assembled at the time of service.  Keith demonstrated a couple of items and it took him10 minutes to assemble each plate.  I questioned him on this and he said that the customers would just have to wait if they wanted great food.  I quickly calculated that it would take us 67 hours to plate the food for 400 people.  About 4PM I told Keith that his job for the evening would be making onion soup and that the cooks and I would handle everything else.  He flew into a rage and screamed at everyone before going right out the back door to his car for some weed. 

I was hoping he would just go home, but he returned in about half an hour and took his place on the soup station.  While he was gone I had gathered the cooks and together we had formulated a plan to get through service.  I enlisted the help of the expeditor and working as a team we were all able to get everything served in a timely fashion with almost no complaints from our customers.  For the whole duration of service Keith stood back on his station and heckled everyone else with a stream of insults about our cooking abilities, national heritage, and fashion choices.  Several times I told him he could either shut up, go home, or continue his tirade and face certain death.  At the end of the night he walked out the door without a word to anyone.

In the morning I called the owner at home and told him Keith had to go.  He had just gotten the prior month’s P&L and had come to the realization that he was going to have to write another huge check to the restaurant in order to keep the lights on and pay his employees.  Ketih had already called him and told him that he couldn’t work with me because I was holding him back and that the owner would have to fire me in order for the restaurant to be successful.  The owner told Keith that they would talk about it on Tuesday when the restaurant reopened.

On Tuesday I had my doubts that Keith would show, but he did.  He unpacked his knives and told me how upset he was at my decisions on New Years Eve.  I let him rant for a while and then told him that his services were no longer needed.  He proceeded to tell me that the owner and I had set him up for the sole purpose of stealing his ideas and that we had planned to fire him from day one.  This was not true, although I had doubts from the beginning that he would succeed in the role he chose for himself.  I had agreed to hire him anyway because of reasons I discussed earlier, but I didn’t expect him to last very long.

Keith left without further incident or discussion.  The cooks were overjoyed when they arrived and they immediately chipped in to buy me a 6 pack of Modelo.  They were so happy you would have thought that they just won the lottery.  From that minute on the morale in the kitchen was exponentially better as though the team had just collectively vanquished an enemy.  The difference was like night and day.  We reverted Keith’s unsuccessful menu changes over the next few days and things started to run smoothly again.  We kept the salad and the olive oil cake but changed everything else back.  Our regular customers were ecstatic and sales doubled to previous levels within a week as word spread that our experiment with Keith was over.

Some months later I was browsing the book selection at our local Sur La Table and came across a beautiful hardcover called “Bouchon” by Thomas Keller.  Curious, I opened the book and the first thing I saw was a full color photo of our new house salad.  I continued browsing and saw the olive oil cake as well as the cookies and some other items that he had added to our menu during his tenure with us.  The recipes were the same as Keith’s.  I bought the book and later went through it cover to cover where I found all of the items that he had told me about and intended to add to our menu.  A little later I was having a late lunch with my fiancé at a Tex-Mex place in Omaha and saw Keith behind the line shoveling piles of cheap cheese onto the various entrees and then putting them in the salamander before they were to be served.  That was the last time I ever saw him and I have never heard anything more about him from anyone in the industry from Omaha.  I imagine he found that he could no longer get a good job here and just moved on.

At this point I’d like to thank you for being patient enough to read through this long post.  I’ve been wanting to get that off my chest for some time and I appreciate you helping me do just that.