When restaurants start to mature - and usually the five-year time is the time when the restaurant starts to settle in and have its own personality - your job is to grow it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I worked in 40 restaurants over a five-year period.
Restaurants are like having children: it's fun to make them, maybe, but then you have them for good and bad. You are going to have to raise them and if something goes wrong when they are 30 years old, they will still be your little boy.
If you go around the kitchen and ask my employees what they want to be doing in three to five years, most of them, if they're being honest, will tell you that they don't want to be working for me. They want to have their own place. And I think that's great.
I know this is rather trivial - I will not be very deep about this - but it's great when you call the hottest restaurant in town and ask for a table for five at 8:00 P.M., and they say, 'Okay,' instead of, 'You have to wait two months.'
Restaurants are like kids. You hope you understand their innate gifts, and then you let them realize their aspirations.
The toughest decision is always whether to open a restaurant. Two or three bad months, and you could be out of business.
It all comes back to the basics. Serve customers the best-tasting food at a good value in a clean, comfortable restaurant, and they'll keep coming back.
Life in the restaurant business can provide a start in the working world for young people or a stable living for many Americans and their families.
The world has changed, and it's almost been 11 years. I have 975 employees. I have six restaurants. We haven't opened any new ones in almost three years.
The restaurant business is something that you have to treat like a baby. You have to constantly be there. You can't trust it to anybody else, because no one's going to love it like you do.
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