Po
Boy Views
By
Phil
LaMancusa
Restauran
Tissue
Or
Chez
Wha?
Welcome, my friends, to the show that never ends; 1500
restaurants and counting in New Orleans, and not counting filling stations, bars, convenience, Mom and Pop and
grocery stores that sell food. Restaurants come and go here, sixty-two new ones
in the last twelve months; and they go out of business just as fast. And as one
goes down in flames, a new one rises from the ashes; the Phoenix Factor. A New
Orleanian would have to dine out every night to support them, lucky for us that
we have visitors; if the visitors stopped, the restaurant industry would be in
the creek, not just up it.
There’s
no end to the uninitiated that believe that they can buck the odds and open a
successful restaurant that will stand the test of time; also there seems to be
no end to the successful owners of places like the Petite Elite Sweet-treatery,
Tiny Toney’s Taco Takeouteria or Nunzio’s Newfoundland Noshemporium to try
their hand at opening locations two, three or four. Been there, done that. When
a person(s) decides to try their hand at making a living feeding people they
are in, basically, for a life without a life. Restaurant work doesn’t end at
the closing of the day; it’s a twenty-four seven occupation on the scale of walking
up to your neck into oncoming surf in Murphy’s ocean. Whatever can go wrong…
will. I happen to love the business.
Many
establishments host run-of-the mill self-aggrandizing owner/operators with
authority issues and indecorous countenances who act like sandbox intimidators
when things go awry and effectually unsettle everyone around them when things don’t
go their way. They place ‘managers’ in charge and motivate them using a self perpetuating corporate inspiration/submission
system, wondering why good people leave and rationalizing that ‘quitters’ cannot take the pressure
(that they have created), this is the best way to success: spend your time
perfecting surreptitiousness, stay alert to discrepancies in productivity and
rationalize that if one site is working up to expectations, two or more would
be better for you financially, if not spiritually. Make sure that your staff
never work unprofitable schedules, avoid offering benefits and never shy away
from terminating the weaker links. To some this is de rigueur.
Sometimes a person will ask me if I ever miss the work of
owning or Cheffing in a joint, Bistro, low brow or high end Gourmangerie, and I
tell them yes; that’s because the work is the easy part, it’s all the rest of
the stuff that goes along with being a conductor in this field of dysfunctional
cacophonic Merry Melody orchestras that tests.
Basically--at
the beginning-- passion is its own reward until the challenges start to fly at
you like an octopus pitching bedlam fastball in an asylum world series.
Numero uno, though, is that to be successful you have to
be able to pay the bills, the twenty-seven different baseballs that you have to
knock out of the park each month to stay in the game. This of course is
relative to the dollars you take in and how creative you are at spending them;
if you want a pretzel logic, Chutes and Ladders exercise, try conceiving how a
sixteen dollar pizza cut twenty ways is divided financially for any culinary
entrepreneur. Slice one goes to the
rent; slices two thru five pays the waiters, dishwashers, busboys, bartender; six
thru eleven pay for the cost of the pie (averaged out over the whole menu); so
now you have nine slices left. Telephone, electricity, gas, water, trash, insurance,
linen, alarm system, computer, booze, office supplies, paper goods, taxes and
workman’s compensation: munchers in a Pac-Man game eating into your cash
flow--- and then the ice machine breaks; the drains back up; a rain storm
floods your business closing you down for two weeks.
The work is the easy part: you get up, suit up, show up
and never give up; you become defined by your work and you try to balance
empathy and discipline with your staff, knowing that you can never pay them a
decent wage and realizing that few of them will ever reach their potential. You
try to lead by example, admitting when you’re wrong and having that ‘Come to
Jesus’ talk when you have to; you fight your demons on your own time and leave
your other life (if you’re lucky enough to have one) at the door, you have a
job to do. And you mistakenly expect everyone around you to live up to your
standards.
And then there’s the food and that’s what it’s really
about; that’s why you’re here; working ‘the product’ so that your customers are
whelmed, the critics approve of you and some crumbs hit the bottom line. And
then the dishwasher shows up drunk on Saturday night and passes out in time for
the seven-thirty rush; you find out that the cleaning crew is having surf and
turf while working; the bartender is giving free drinks to his friends and big
tippers.
The best thing about working in a restaurant is that you
can take your craft with you anywhere in the world; the worst thing about running a restaurant is knowing that
this is going to happen with your most talented staff and while the worst of
your people will fade away (hopefully before damage occurs) what you’ll be left
with will be mules that you can rely upon to do their job but not much more and
all the hopes that you have for making a mark on the world will be forgotten as
you row, row, row, that boat.
Having
been around this block more times than I can count, I’ve seen it all from the
inside; now, instead, I cook at home every night and leave you with the last
line --which is also the first line-- welcome, my friend to the show that never
ends.
