When I embarked upon my quest to become a chef there was really only one respectable option. You had to own your own restaurant.
It was seen as the true ascendancy of a chef. You had to put your name above the door. And back then, you could make a really decent living owning just one restaurant. Which sounds nice in comparison to today’s reality, which requires you be a lecherous, eatery-spawning royal, sowing countless bastard heirs throughout the land to have enough savings to send your human kids to college.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but whatever it was you were seen as a decidedly lesser stag if you spent your career in a hotel, a banquet hall or worse, in the employ of some business baron as their personal retainer. That hasn’t changed much. It’s a much more respected career path to be a private chef now, but from personal experience, it still feels like being a butler.
No matter the era though, I likely would have ended up owning my own restaurant anyway. Failure was not an option and I’m absolutely miserable when working for other people. So if you transplanted me to the 80s, I think the only major difference would have been the abundance of uncut, reactor-grade cocaine fueling my menu ideas.
(As an aside, I’m a firm believer that the reason the movies of the 80s are a total coin flip on quality and have absolutely insane premises are thanks to Hollywood board rooms being snowed on with CIA-sanctioned drugs. Picture your average venture capitalist accelerator only with mountains of cocaine to go skiing with. Just dudes, with millions of dollars to spend, pointing at each other every five minutes going “Fuck YES!”)
It actually sounds kind of nice. It was all just way easier. No credit card processing fees, everything cash, report the minimum to the IRS, labor is cheap, food is cheap, your highest level of technology is a wired telephone, you don’t need to hire a bunch of dipshits to manage your social media, your lawyer can’t charge you $200 for an email, there aren’t corporations purchasing real estate en masse and bending you over the barrel to leverage their mortgage portfolio — your landlord just used to be a guy — you barely had to carry an insurance policy and the American public was sincerely impressed if you could serve Brussels sprouts that didn’t taste like a bag o’ pressurized farts.
The good ole’ days.
Navigating modern restaurant ownership not only has a steep learning curve, but the way is littered with Punji sticks, barbed wire and landmines. Thankfully, if you’re a good cook and have a modicum of emotional intelligence, you can just be the chef for someone else’s restaurant these days. Just focus on the kitchen. It can be a very good career and it is going to add years to your life. Let the dreamer deal with everything else.
If you’re insisting on the insanity of being a restaurant owner, however, I’m prepared to walk you through the most challenging years of my career. I thought I had endured a great deal of hardship. I thought that after running the pass at a very busy three Michelin star restaurant that I could do anything. But I was totally unprepared for the crushing mental vice of dragging this reluctant, helpless infant of a business over the finish line each day. I’m still not. Every time I think I’ve climbed a few steps I get sucker-punched by some new insurance payment or repair bill. You can often find me in the fetal position on a Monday just receiving distressing bill after distressing bill.
It is … discouraging.
And I was disappointed to find that there was no mentorship or at least commiseration provided for would-be restaurant owners and dreamers. Nobody ever really extends advice and even fewer owners are willing to talk about the ugly side of their business. The ugliest thing of all being; where did you get the money? It would be like Kendall Jenner disclosing the exact procedures she had done to her face and if she vlogged about the misery of her recovery. We all know you fucking did it and congratulations on being professionally hot, I guess, but how did you get here and what did it cost you? That’s what I want to know.
The chef community is generally fraternal and collaborative, but perhaps in this regard there’s a bit of crab mentality. So I feel the need to offer my experience to those who would find it valuable (or at least entertaining).
A few disclaimers;
I do not consider myself an excellent or even good business owner. Contrary to popular belief, I am not diving into a pool of gold every day like Scrooge McDuck, padding my savings account upon the blood of thousands of his fowled kin. I’m learning as I go. But, I am a decent and stalwart learner. I am introspective and I remember everything. Keeping a detailed cache of memories both helps me protect myself from disappointment and allows me to hold comically petty grudges. So there will not be a lack of information. (I should definitely work on clearing my browser history though)
Just as with everything else in life, it is fantastically easier the more money you have. And just like everything else in life, it is really expensive to be poor. Having abundant funding means you can hire people to help you, you can relax your sense of urgency and you can take your time to explore options. It improves your decision making. I started this restaurant with not enough money or time and it ended up costing me dearly to address emergencies and unexpected costs that arose. That has deeply colored my experience with a patina of frustration, anxiety and existential stress. Maybe owning a restaurant is a breeze for some people and they laugh to the bank every day and I just suck. Very possible, seemingly likely.
Adding to that, I am a high-functioning, depressive people pleaser and perfectionist with little to no financial acumen, an obstinate commitment to “doing the right thing”, and an oppressive sense of self-shame. This is a very bad combination for business ownership. Trying to be a “good person”, struggling with disappointing people and not having an innate grasp of being a capitalist leads to really mediocre business models. There may be owners out there for whom ownership causes them very little stress because they simply don’t invite that stress into their life. I greatly admire those people.
So with that out of the way this may sound like more of a therapy session than any useful bit of advice. But at the very least, it’s honest. Let it begin.
Step One: The Idea
You need to have an idea to open a restaurant but I don’t know if it needs to be an incredibly novel one. In fact, my most successful peers in the restaurant industry are those replicating a very successful business model with at most, a few tweaks, great branding and a well-told story. In New York City, the dining public will never have enough of the following; Italian restaurants, neighborhood restaurants with New American cuisine (dog whistle for “whatever we feel like cooking”), cocktail bars, pizza shops, sandwich shops and apparently, bakeries. There is no ceiling on value perception or demand regarding croissants and coffee, it turns out. And the best part about all those concepts is that their ratio of costs to price tags is incredibly favorable to the business. For the love of god, just open a cocktail bar, help people get laid and give them something to show off on Instagram. Be that place everyone goes to for a first date. Revel in all the gawky courtship and sloppy face eating. You’ll need a money counter by the sixth month.
Coming from someone who does have a hitherto unseen food concept and has been celebrated for their “creativity” — my advice is just stay in a proven lane, brother. Sure, I guess I can pat myself on the back for coming up with something unique and authentic but the reality is I spend most of my time trying to educate our customer base or at the very least, contending with their confusion. You never want to have to educate your customer base. Americans are incredibly resistant to learning anything. We’re two grandmas away from an ugly, ugly history of literal human slavery and we’ve only moved the needle a few notches. In fact, we might be going fucking backwards. Think about that the next time you want to “change the game” on an obscure curry or an unprecedented rice bowl.
Things I contend with at Pecking House after existing for nearly four years; people assume Asian person plus fried chicken equals Korean fried chicken and “I can get this cheaper at Bonchon.” A lot of people see it to be unnecessarily expensive Jollibee or a worser value than Popeye’s. And then the occasional “Where’s my caviar and high-thread count linens?” thanks to someone deciding Champagne and fried chicken really go together. (Even when I did drink, Champagne can suck a sparkling, Premier Cru dick) Nobody has a consensus on the value of something that has never existed before and figuring out where the line is is a painful exercise.
I used to kind of poke fun at my white male comrades that they didn’t have a strong ethnic identity to channel into their cooking, but now I see that that’s probably for the best. Yet again, I am the jabroni. My BIPOC homies; there will be people out there who will celebrate your bravery for trying to “elevate” (the worst word ever in the context of cooking, but whatever, I give up) your childhood cooking and it’ll immediately nab you some free publicity. But don’t be surprised if it doesn’t make you rich.
You want to make money? Serve roast chicken with herbed butter and a salad of market greens. Serve ribeye and Cabernet. Serve freshly extruded pasta.
You want to be an artist? Prepare to live like one. And not the cool kind. Like the oh-they-were-so-misunderstood-what-a-shame-they’re-dead-now-and-will-never-see-their-impact kind.
Step Two: The Money
This is the big one. Nobody tells you at all how much it costs to open a restaurant. Whatever number you’re imagining, double it, potentially triple it.
And this is the ugly one because nobody, and I mean nobody wants to admit how much money they acquired, where they got it and how they spent it. To most male chefs it would be akin to baring your wiener in the walk-in, pants down chef coat on, only to have it appraised by the Victoria’s Secret runway roster.
Welp, guess who’s here to do the wiener-baring? You guessed it. I don’t give a fuck.
(This hypothetical scenario is entirely consensual and intended for humor, by the way. I don’t have a Louis CK shame kink with the added color of commercial refrigeration)
I figured it would cost $500,000 to open a fried chicken restaurant. No nice furniture, no major work, no nice kitchen equipment. You figure you need money to pay an architect, a designer, a contractor, an opening inventory and have enough runway to operate a few months in case of disaster. Sounds reasonable? Here’s what you’re not thinking of;
Lawyers cost hundreds of dollars an hour. It can cost 20-40 hours of billable work to negotiate a single lease. And that’s assuming you nail it on the first try and you can land in a place where everyone is in agreement within a month or two. A landlord may decide to pull the plug at the 11th hour for a litany of reasons, most of them irrational (much more on this later). Then you have to start this whole process over again — the search, the offer, the negotiation, the back-and-forth Zoom meetings — all the while bleeding money like someone ran you through with a Boar Spear of Rending [Causes 24-31 physical damage per second].
The insurance industry is a fucking mess. Thanks to our modern cultural identity being best described as litigious, insurance premiums are currently deadly. We traded domestic manufacturing jobs, investment in infrastructure and affordable education for a “Hail Mary, please let me get hit by a municipal bus and score a payout” strategy of social mobility. Insurance companies are sick of covering the never-ending barrage of lawsuits that restaurants propagate — sexual harassment, wage theft, personal injury, negligence, property damage, business interruption, to name a few. But they certainly don’t want to hurt their profit margins so guess who gets the short straw? The business owner. This doesn’t show up on your receipt but it should.
New York City grossly overcorrected with tenant protection laws so now it is impossible to evict anyone. I will actually empathize with the landlord for once. They could end up housing delinquent tenants for years with no rent payments. That’s how long it takes to legally evict someone. And given the crackdown on organized crime, it is generally frowned upon to send a goon to threaten someone with bodily harm these days. I am reluctant to concede a point to an entitled, land-owning class but they’re getting hosed on this one. And they’re going to give it right back, landlords now require enormous security deposits from small business owners. And given how risky the proposition of running a restaurant is, you can’t really blame them. So there goes 20% of your budget sitting in purgatory for 10 years. If you live that long.
And finally, you assume that every other professional you engage has a similar work ethic, sense of urgency and attention to detail that you’ve honed as a chef given the demanding nature of your craft, but you’d be wrong. When contractors give you an estimate, it is marginally more accurate than a gangly teenager trying to hit a speed bag with a blindfold on. Architects and designers will always push you to the most expensive option because they get a percentage of your overall costs. Everyone involved in the process of building a physical restaurant space is trying to siphon as much money from you as possible.
So I started with $500,000. And it vanished almost overnight. Where did I get it? Friends and friends of friends who were generous and taking a gamble that purchasing equity at the ground floor of a future fried chicken empire may pay off. The likelihood of our imperialism being dominant is completely in the air. I am saddled with that guilt and responsibility of making their investment worthwhile, every day.
And that’s for a fast-casual, decidedly simple restaurant serving food on paper plates. If you want nice shit, be prepared to fork it out. A beautiful bar stool may cost you something that looks more like a month of rent. Each. Beautiful marble, custom millwork, small wares, plates and Zalto wine glasses? Think private university levels of tuition numbers.
Where people come up with the millions of dollars to comfortably open a restaurant of that ambition is far beyond me. When I still thought I would open a fine-dining restaurant, I naively named $3 million dollars as the number I was looking for. That wasn’t far off. The naive part was thinking I could find it.
Maybe because I grew up middle class and never had enough money to justify a savings account means I don’t get it, but high net worth individuals are that way for a reason. They are not quick to part with money, especially for an unproven restaurant concept that will take years to get their return. If it ever comes back at all. So there’s really only a few options as I see it;
Find a generous whale. Odds are similar to winning the Powerball. For every person that successfully leveraged a great client relationship from being a private chef into a huge restaurant investment later on, I’ll show you two dozen chefs who were strung along by the master’s carrot for years.
Friends and family for whom getting a return or god willing, a profit, on their investment is a bonus. They want to see you succeed and want to see you realize your dream. These people are saints and deserve lifelong gratitude.
Find a few wealthy romantics who think investing in a restaurant will mean a lifetime of sitting at the best table in the house and having a Negroni delivered to them by your most attractive employee. These folks have no idea what they’re getting into, but you may need to take advantage of their ignorance. And do make sure you keep your hostess safe.
Failing those, your remaining options are very bleak. The Small Business Administration is not approving you for a loan as a first-time operator unless you have 80% of the money anyway. Even then, I hope you have a fetish for non-lubricated interest rates and stringent monthly payments. You lose investor money, your LLC implodes and everyone walks away. You lose bank money? They’re coming for your office chairs.
And I’m guessing that while you were making $15 an hour in New York City as a line cook you didn’t tuck away $200,000 for your dream project. I hope you have a rich father who can connect you to his friends in private equity. At which point, the team managing the Sackler family’s wealth is funding your restaurant, asking that you serve “that fancy Japanese beef”, Galician turbot and make sure you keep a kilo of caviar in house at all times. Oh and your restaurant will have been built with the wreckage of thousands of lives and families. Small moral quandary.
So my half a million dollars is nearly all spent. Let’s sure hope that nothing goes wrong and this build goes exactly according to plan during a global pandemic!
What did I do when shit went awry? Who apologized? Who held themselves accountable and tried to make it right, do the right thing by you?
Panic. No one. And no one. In that order.
I got lucky with a huge (relative to chefs) payday from a fortuitously timed R&D project. I emptied my entire savings and am feeling the tax ramifications to this day. And then my mom helped me out. A single mother who works seven days a week at the age of 75 wrote me a check and tried her best to assuage my devastating sense of shame.
All in all the build came closer to a million dollars. I would be the first person to tell you I got ripped off. I’m the one who notices the shelves warping and the paint chipping every day. It’s a good barometer for my mental health.
Step Three: The Building
Let’s discuss the brilliant process of negotiating with a landlord for a lease, another thing nobody prepares you for.
I never have and likely never will own property. My family had a great run in the 80s, they owned a bunch of property and a nice suburban house. But then my father died and the whole thing went tits up. I’ve been contending with the reality of renting on a foreclosed home since I was 10 years old. And it ain’t changing anytime soon.
So that goes to say, I don’t really understand what it’s like to be a landlord. I am trying to maintain my charitable assumption here. Maybe I don’t understand the whole picture. But it usually goes away real fucking fast.
Anyone who owns land in New York City is multi-generational wealthy. Period.
We were told during the pandemic that there must be so many good deals out there. Think of all the weary landlords needing to make a deal to get some functioning tenants.
They were just fine. They charged their tenants 50% rent, looked like a bunch of heroes, wrote off everything they lost as a loss. There’s no vacancy tax, they can let a space sit empty for years. They’ll write that off too. They can sit on their hands and wait for a CVS or a Chipotle to come along, someone who won’t blink at $160 a square foot, and the whole thing barely draws a bead of sweat from their brow.
Where is your leverage as a first-time tenant when the other side is sitting on that much power? How can you have an even negotiation with someone who could theoretically SLAPP you to death and empty your war chest in three months?
Add in the color that landlords can be, let’s say eccentric, after not really working with or being accountable to other humans for oh, their entire life. And add in that they are mostly men who have pride that they feel the need to protect and you have the makings of a rather irascible negotiation partner. They will cut their nose off to spite their face rather than compromise on something they feel they don’t need to concede on.
I never was a good negotiator. Most East Asian cultures don’t equip you with the tools to contend with Western business mores. Conform, be quiet, don’t cause trouble, your feelings don’t matter. Unless you’re haggling over something nominal like a pair of knock-off Carmelo jerseys. Upbringing and cultural hang-ups aside though, when I was faced with the massive imbalance of power here, I was rendered silent regardless.
You’re going to need to get them to agree on giving you as much free rent as possible to complete your buildout. The average is three to four months. Very few restaurants can complete construction in that amount of time unless you’re putting lipstick on a pig. Getting a construction team to approve plans, sign a contract and then mobilize in three to four months is a fucking accomplishment.
You’re going to need to chip away at what they’re asking for a security deposit, how much insurance liability they want you to carry, how their approval of your plans and work is going to go. You’re going to need to convince them to invest in the space with you, put in some of their own cash for capital improvements. That’s always a fun conversation. You’re going to need to read every sentence of a lease with your lawyer and plan for every scenario, however unlikely. Because the kind of shit that can go wrong and leave you on the hook in a commercial restaurant is an existential crisis threat level. And you’re going to have to look up your building and its history to make sure there isn’t an obscure code violation that will force you to make a six-digit renovation on your space five years down the line. It feels like trying to find your great-great-grandfather’s name on an Ellis Island ledger, deciphering some long-dead bureaucrat’s scrawled handwriting. If you feel that should be the landlord’s responsibility, you better make sure the lease says that.
Bless you if you’re one of the lucky few who had a smooth negotiation and a collaborative landlord. They’re truly something to behold. Somebody who is incentivized to be anything but compassionate and agreeable, but decides to be so regardless. Ask yourself how many people you’ve met like that in your life.
Step Four: The Process
Okay, the fun part. We’re building now, right? Right!? I get to see my dream dining room come to life? The stove I always wanted in just the perfect spot with my favorite spoons, copper Mauviels and a Rational combi oven just like I always wanted?
I mean, sure. Anything is possible given enough money. If you haven’t been bled dry by all the soft costs and deposits thus far, go for it. But might I suggest you address your infrastructure problems first?
Is your bathroom ADA accessible? Did you submit your liquor license plans? Do you have the proper means of egress for the amount of people you want to serve and employ? Is your building the proper usage code? Do you have gas? Do you need gas? Do you need to upgrade your electrical panel? Be prepared to get a painful lesson in why there should be anti-trust laws. Is your basement ceiling high enough to legally operate a prep space in? Do you need to fix your plumbing?
Every single one of those questions could cost you thousands of dollars and months of time if you didn’t have a plan for it in the very beginning. And let’s remember, your landlord gave you four free months of rent, right? How generous. It takes three weeks to get a response from the Department of Buildings. There’s one liquor license community board meeting per month. Guess you better nail it the first time. Send an email Monday morning, get a response Tuesday afternoon. You reply immediately. Get confirmation of a decision on Wednesday. It’s actionable on Thursday. Would you look at that? Thank god it’s Friday, let’s connect next week, have a great weekend.
Who is doing all the work? If you have the luxury of time, you should submit plans to multiple general contractors to get a bid. Have them compete against one another, use capitalism to your advantage, for fucking once! But that takes a month, sometimes a month and half to complete. Tick tock, tick tock…
Okay, let’s lock in. I trust this guy, he sounds smart and that he knows what he’s doing. Uh oh, turns out they made some promises they can’t keep. Your options are they stop and you start over, find somebody new or you get the money. Now.
You’re so close. Call the Department of Sanitation, prepare for a preliminary health inspection. You can start thinking about ordering food and putting bottles in the cellar! You can taste it! Oh whoops, you don’t have hand sinks arranged at the proper distances. You’re going to need to install one here. Oh, didn’t you know? You have to cover any exposed piping in food preparation areas with wooden panels. Time marches on…
Whew. Good on you, Chef. You’re so fucking close. The paint is drying, the bar is varnished. Let’s get some humans in here and start cooking and shaking!
Step Five: The Open
Well, here you are. You made it. You’re so close to opening. You got all your permits approved, you’ve got all your accounts set up with generous terms of credit, the walk-in is humming, and you’re cooking with gas. Time to get some humans in here to make and serve this food!
Many operators have gone on at length about the staffing crises the restaurant industry is facing. I’m not complaining about anything new. After all the college-educated folk decided to give the industry a run so they could chase a little romance and flirt with becoming a celebrity, we’ve got too many restaurants and not enough people who want to work in them. We are very top heavy. I’m probably part of the problem. But times are different, man. Pre-pandemic, a certain three Michelin star restaurant running on all cylinders would have seventy back of house employees. Seventy! That’s an insane payroll to carry even when everyone is on minimum wage. And each and every one of them was motivated, ambitious, and wanting to invest their time. They sought to grow with the company. They were believers. And when they weren’t anymore? There were two dozen people eager to replace them. It took years and I mean years to earn the title of sous chef.
You’d be lucky to find seven bodies to drag you through a dinner service these days. As so many chefs have blithely joked, if you’ve got a pulse, you’re hired.
I’m of the belief that the previous systems were unsustainable. Those were some magical times, sure. It was lightning in a bottle, a ridiculous amount of talent and friendly competition jammed into one kitchen. But there were also horrors. The way people were treated wasn’t right and how they were compensated needed to change. I don’t lament the dying of the old ways, that doesn’t upset me. I don’t like treating people as disposable.
What does upset me though is how much employees’ expectations have shifted versus what they’re willing to put in. I want to pay people well and have a relatively relaxed culture, but I also need professionalism and some degree of dedication. You’re not going to make $25 an hour right away and you’re not going to be promoted to sous chef in a couple of months. If you want more money, I’m sure you could find it, but at damn near double the amount of hours I ask you to work. I don’t ever want to be the manager who pulls the “When I was a cook…” card but I need to see some desire to be a little better at your job every day. And it would be nice to get some credit for trying to work with your personal life considering that that was never on any of my employers’ minds, but alas.
In fairness, I don’t run the sort of kitchen where cooks come in to ignite their careers. So I don’t have a set of outsized expectations that you are coming to Pecking House to build your résumé and learn advanced techniques. I try to explain to every cook before hiring that I’m not busting out the tweezers and opening up the old playbook anytime soon. This is what it is. But considering what I’m asking, you can get some really good fundamentals, a well-paid job relative to the industry and work 40-45 hours a week. That ain’t so bad in my book.
Yet to find someone who would commit to a year, as was industry standard, minimum commitment before The Panorama, and have the decency to give you a week’s notice of them quitting (let alone two) is just not happening these days. It’s usually a text the night before with the tone of “sorry, not sorry”.
The issue that creates is the constant anxiety. Even your most dependable employees don’t feel so dependable anymore. Anyone could vanish in a second. And I’d love to be the chef who says “Hey, we’ll keep an extra person around to patch holes in the schedule, encourage people to call out when they’re feeling sick, do the right thing” but that simply isn’t a luxury most restaurants have. That’s an extra $50-60,000 a year to carry an extra body. Some restaurants are lucky if that’s their entire annual net income. So you run a skeleton crew. The absolute bare fucking minimum. And when a domino falls, it falls hard and you scramble the jets to figure out a solution. The customer doesn’t care that your dinner cook decided to not come in and they shouldn’t have to. They still should get good food in under 20 minutes. Now you’ve got to ask a couple of morning guys to stay late and now you’re paying time and a half.
Put Thursday in the L column. There goes any chance of turning a profit.
Not letting all this nonsense make you cold is the real challenge. If you can keep a sliver of your humanity after being disappointed so many times, you’re a better person than me.
Step Six: The Run
They say a restaurant is set after five years. The odds of survival aren’t great in the first five years, but mortality rates go down significantly if you can get past that first gauntlet. I’m not sure exactly what metrics support that hypothesis but I suppose after half a decade you should have theoretically streamlined your operation, maximized all your margins and efficiencies, built a loyal customer base and have a good core of employees. It should be happy days after that.
And that may be the case but I’ll remind you of what we opened this essay/rant/moan with; you can’t be a one restaurant chef anymore. It just isn’t enough money. Not in New York and not at my price point at least.
So you’ve got to expand. DJ Khaled! Another one, another one, another one! You have to spread your salary across as many locations as possible or you’re going to be the monkey behind the fryer, handcuffed to the basket for the rest of your days. And I’m sorry to say it, but I can’t do that anymore. I didn’t take glucosamine in my 20s. The cartilage is already beginning to wear.
I don’t have children yet but I imagine the mental process as being similar. The selfish gene never relents. Your brain has this adorable way of making you forget all the pain, misery and stress of bringing life into the world. After a few years, you only seem to remember the good parts. So you do it again. Surely, we’ve got this figured out now! Then my squishy, primate brain just puts a sepia filter on the whole thing. And then it’s like you’ve got a poorly scheduled epidural; you’re feeling good right up until you’ve gotten back on the luge when there’s no going back.
Lots of expletives, lots of self-doubt and lots of praying for deliverance.
Who knows, maybe I’m being melodramatic. Maybe after a few more years I’ll find this all to be really funny. I’ll read this and think what a miserable lout I was. That’d be nice. But that’s assuming I have a successful run. It used to be you opened a restaurant, you owned that restaurant, it was your baby, an extension of you. Anything less than a multi-decade run and a generational baton pass meant you kind of whiffed. Nowadays, there are more means of exit strategies and graceful closures.
You could continue to play a game of hermit crabs and move from home to home, building to building, keeping the soul of the IP alive like a transient ghost. You are continually exorcised from each building with each new landlord selling to a real estate development company.
You could franchise the thing and give it over to a boardroom to run. But that invites a whole new set of headaches.
You could sell the whole brand for millions and watch some VC schmucks bastardize your original vision, if you’re lucky. Cash the fuck out.
Or you could simply end it. I think there’s no longer any shame in just surviving the entirety of a lease. Standard commercial leases are 10 years with an option for 5 additional. If you can successfully take that player option to the end, without being under a mountain of debt, then you had a great run! It might be best to call it quits then and there. Because after the player option, you’re going to have to explore the team option with the landlord. And you don’t want that.1
Property values rise alarmingly fast in New York City. It’s hard to imagine but back when Danny Meyer opened Union Square Cafe, the Union Square area was a shit hole. The building where Gramercy Tavern resides was purchased for a few million dollars in 1994. That building has to have increased in value by orders of magnitude since then. Union Square Cafe wasn’t quite so lucky. It was a victim of the very neighborhood it gentrified. All of a sudden after a 20 year lease (they don’t make those anymore), the value became many times greater. The landlord is justified in charging seven, eight times as much as the month before. Even the almighty Danny Meyer couldn’t pressure that landlord to cut them a reasonable deal. So he cut their losses and moved the thing up several blocks.
If a massively successful restaurant group could fall victim to the property value rodeo, how do you expect your average small business owner to contend? Real estate management companies are becoming more the norm than the small landlord. It’s hard not to picture the pasty frame of Jared Kushner telling all his buddies how much money they’re going to make next quarter. I don’t think they get terribly sentimental about replacing neighborhood fixtures and touchstones if it means they can multiply their revenue.
The run can have an inglorious end. Much like in nature, rare is the opportunity to go to sleep with dignity. If you’re lucky, an apex predator will put you out of your misery with a singular strike after you’ve given a feeble attempt to mount one last escape. If you’re not so lucky, you’ll be stuck in the mud and get torn apart by a pack of wild dogs. Ass first.
My name is Eric Huang and thank you for listening to my embittered, disillusioned, go-fuck-yourself TED Talk. I suppose you caught me on a tough day. I’ve seen the industry change a lot in my life. I watched my family rack up unending successes, win after win after win. And then I watched it crumble with a few skeletons in the closet and a car accident. I started my career bright-eyed and hungry to become the next great chef, to work alongside others similarly motivated. I held arduous passion for my craft, worked hard to become the best I could be. And then I watched as the whole system of fine dining and how we value restaurants shrivel up in the span of a couple years. I have little to no understanding of behavioral economics, but it has been fascinating and heartbreaking to collect anecdotal evidence on the lot of you.
Again, it could be me. I have a penchant for doomsaying and I’ve had an Eeyore-in-the-rain depressive outlook on life since as long as I can remember. I carry on because it’s all I know how to do. And thus far I haven’t given up.
There’s so many beautiful things about this industry. There are a lot of career-defining highs and rides. But they’ve gotten lost in the noise of practical, mundane business practices for me. I suppose I’ll have to figure out how to remove myself from the things that drain me and find a way for me to involve myself more with the matters that recharge me.
But that just isn’t where we are right now. This baby needs me.
And I won’t let it down.
. -E-
Apologies for sports metaphors. In professional basketball, contracts are typically signed with either a player option or a team option at the end of X amount of years to create some flexibility. Player options mean the decision to extend is the player’s choice. Team option means the decision to extend is the team’s, thus the organization’s, choice.
The bit on staffing hit like a sucker punch. Had a no call no show just before easter with 250 on the books. With faraway eyes I just repeat my mantra "I chose this life. I get to do this. This is fine."