It is halfway through July, more than halfway through this calendar year, and I find myself developing the ability to have my attention be both present (specific) and omnipresent (general).
This is a learning curve that has been in the works since I started at my restaurant, and is one which is at turns exciting, challenging, and frustrating. Each day, we prioritize each night’s service: this particular guest need, this server question, this burnt out lightbulb. But managing the restaurant means also being aware of the direction of deeper currents, thinking about where the business will be next week, next month, a year from now. Until recently, I have struggled to do both, but my mind is now getting better at running two tracks at once, calculating how the specific affects the general and vice versa. I’m thinking not only about the Food and Wine celebration dinner in nine days, but also the way that the Jewish holidays might affect staff training in the fall. Every bit of managerial feedback I’ve gotten is the challenge to get more specific — to dig deeper into each scenario with greater efficacy and accuracy — and more big picture — to understand how it all works together, and to have a proactive role in making it all work together. To read the guest while reading the room, and then make the appropriate comparisons to previous nights like that and nights not like that.
It could be called an indexing project: I allow myself to be the encyclopedia within which the narratives and stories of the restaurant are written, and cross referenced. It’s intimate work, there is this sense that I give myself over to be both record and agent of three hundred experiences a night, five or six nights a week. But it’s also fascinating work, profoundly compelling. Just as I’m challenged to earnestly be present at every moment and generally aware at the highest level, there is a way in which I am deeply affected by every high and low moment, every twist and turn in a guest experience, and yet have to be detached, above the fray…
Imagine growing a million tiny roots into the ground and floating above it at the same time.
