Restaurants Rock: Four Lessons from Restaurant Life
For most of my career life, I have hidden the fact that I worked in restaurants on and off for nearly twenty years.
There was nary a glimpse of a restaurant on my resume, you wouldn’t hear a peep from me about it in an interview. Which is a damn shame, because restaurant work is some of the most humbling, most informative, the best throw-you-in-the-deep-end sort of customer service training one could ever conceive to receive. Among the many lessons learned, four stand out:
1. Full Hands In, Full Hands Out. This saying can get extraordinarily annoying when being yelled at you by your boss fifty times a night, but golly. This great advice can extend across all sorts of situations. The general premise being: if you’re headed into the kitchen anyway, grab some dirty plates on your way in. If you’re headed back out, run some food. Even in an office setting, there is often something conceptual you can you both on the way in and out of your proverbial kitchen.
2. Peopling. Hard to say if there is anything in the whole world that teaches you more about people, and people-ing, than an exhausting night of service having hundreds of tiny, fast conversations. As as a result, generally I can make good chat with a shoebox and most people.
3. Anticipating Needs. You have a full section of people that are at any given point hungry, tired, anxious, elated, in love, bored, optimistic, grumpy, overwhelmed by being out in public, showing off, have to pee, drunk, on a first date, crying, annoyed with their in-laws or a combination of many above. Anticipating how to deal with each and every person before they have a chance to wrap their own heads around it, and meeting their needs with ease, grace and a smile is key. Multiply this by how many tables you have in your section + having to take your co-workers tables because they were feeling lazy, times how many times your section turns over.
4. A Sense of Hearth. This was my very favorite thing about restaurants and the main reason I kept going back again and again despite my legs feeling like they were going to fall off at the end of a shift, covered in a lot of sticky liquids. In the luckier establishments, the management and team come together to create something of a little family (though a family that bickers quite a lot). A sense of both something being accomplished, of making people happy, of a job well done, can be felt on the good nights. Celebrating this over staff meal and laughing about the wacky things that happened that night can create a beautiful sense of unity and belonging, but it is everyone’s responsibility to do their part to create it.
It’s hard to imagine looking at a candidate for a people-facing position and not be clobbered over the head with the value that these experiences would bring.
