saying goodbye

“Oh, don’t do the thing. Don’t do that thing we all do and don’t mean.”

The general manager of the restaurant I work at said that to me last week after I made some half-assed attempt at suggesting that we’ll all still hang out after my upcoming last day. I was disarmed by this statement to be completely honest, but I immediately recognized what he was referring to and remembered how many times I’ve made a similar statement to others.

See, I’ve had a lot of last days in my hospitality career. During my tenure with my previous company, I was frequently transferred to open up new locations and help struggling ones. It’s always tricky trying to navigate the space in your life that the relationships you’ve built with others in these environments amount to once you’re no longer shoulder to shoulder with them every day. The nature of service industry friendships tends to be that once one of you is gone, the most important factor that’s held the bond together is gone in tandem. I’ve made a lot of friends over the years I’ve spent slinging tacos and margaritas (a weirdly ubiquitous combination of items that I’m only realizing as I type this has appeared on every menu I’ve ever worked with) - some of which have lasted longer than others, but with very little exception, only as long-lasting as our tenure in the building together was. I can attribute a lot of that to my own aversion to overly investing my time and energy into people that I perceive as being more viably “friendly” than “friends”, but it would be pretty naive of me to think that I could sustain healthy, mutually beneficial friendships with even a fraction of the thousand or so people that I’ve worked with in the past thirteen years. Most of my very small circle of close friends are childhood friendships that I’ve managed to hold on to over the years, but my best friend is my ex-wife so that should probably tell you everything that you need to know about my own propensity to form close relationships with others.

The problem with restaurant relationships specifically is that most strong relationships are founded in mutual interests and most restaurant employees don’t really have any strong interest in the only thing you all have in common: your shared vocation. If a friendship is based on mutual disdain for your circumstances, it’s more of a breeding ground for toxicity and negativity than it actually is a fruitful relationship that empowers both of you to grow with one another (you know, a healthy friendship). Until pretty recently, I was pretty well under the assumption that this would be the case for most relationships that you have in restaurants due to my own experience working with a slew of different people while employed at the same company for a decade. But about six months ago, I landed a job at a renowned Austin staple that is generally considered by many to be one of the best restaurants in the city. Working for a Food & Wine award winning, nationally acclaimed restaurant put a lot of pressure on me to perform which, in hindsight, put blinders on me for the first month or two in terms of my ability to see my coworkers as anything other than just coworkers. What I quickly realized, however, was that everyone wanted to be there just as much as I did. The mutual interest that I previously asserted to be virtually non-existent in these spaces was present in nearly everyone that I encountered there. 

This opened up a lot of possibilities for me socially in a way that I hadn’t ever really considered to be possible before. People who I’d known only in the short term were becoming closer to me than people that I had maintained a friendly relationship with for years. Every time I walk into the building, I’m greeted with genuine warmth by front of house and back of house alike. We all pitch in to get things ready for service while catching up on whatever the happenings have been since we last saw each other without anyone lagging on their responsibilities for gossip’s sake. Our pre-service lineup meetings feel like open discussions in which we can all laugh and joke while still not mincing the finer points of what requires discussion to continue flawless service  execution instead of twenty minutes of managers castigating you from their position of authority. Once service starts, we’re all poised and ready to perform for the greater benefit of the people we work with and the guests who pay our bills. We all know when to tighten up and put our nose to the grindstone, but we’re never too busy to tap on the shoulder of one of our teammates to make them look the wrong way. When we go to the bar after our shift, it’s rarely to commiserate about our employment-related woes, but rather to celebrate each other’s company and have time to cut loose with some people we enjoy being around. When we enjoy our days off, our coworkers are liable to be tapped for a hangout instead of being avoided for fear of being reminded that we all share a mutual misfortune to be employed together.

It’s not as if this is the first time that I’ve publicly praised this environment, but anyone who’s spent any sort of time in the industry could pretty concretely tell you that what I’m describing lies somewhere between rare and a complete myth so it feels appropriate to sing these praises again. I love the fact that I can post in our scheduling app an open invite to the entire staff for some sort of social gathering and that I won’t be dreading an appearance from anyone be it front of house, back of house, or management. I feel like this sense of inclusion and belonging is what most everyone wants out of a service job.

Which makes saying goodbye this time somehow indescribably more difficult than the countless times I’ve had to say goodbye to a team I’ve worked with before. Just shy of two months into my dream gig, I was given an opportunity to take on a trainer role with the intention to move along from this beloved space into a new project with a handful of the team I had just started getting accustomed to. At the time, I saw nothing but positives from this choice. Getting in on the ground floor of an incredible restaurant with a ton of hype behind it by the team that made my current restaurant into such an incredible space to work in while taking a promotion? No brainer. But we were still in the early stages of getting the ball rolling and, in the meantime, I had a lot more time to spend with all of the people who made me feel so welcome so quickly in this place. Even the last holdouts who started more standoffish with me than others came around and became dear friends during this time. While I get to take a few of these folks with me to this new adventure, the vast majority will be holding down the fort back home.

It is with this realization that’s spent the past four months bubbling to the surface that I begin to worry about how much I’ll be able to hang on to all of this love I’ve developed for my new friends and familia. I have to question at some point in time whether or not I have it in me to give more of myself than I’ve ever really known myself to be capable of in order to sustain these friendships. I’m now much closer to 30 than 20 and I’ve firmly decided that I don’t want to be the type of person who lets my friendships be as fleeting as I’ve let them be just because of the environment in which they blossomed. I spent the first half of this post talking about why I’ve diagnosed the slow burning degradation of many of my friendships to be victims of circumstance, but at some point, I have to assume some personal responsibility. I can admit that as much as I believe what I said to be true, the truth in those statements is only exacerbated by my own unwillingness to devote myself to be a better friend to many of those that I’ve encountered over the years. I think that I tend to fear how making time for people will interfere with my routine and I selfishly prioritize this over tending to the maintenance that friendships require.

It’s impossible to deny that I need to work on balancing how much time I can give to my loved ones while still making time for my kids, my partner, my hobbies, and my fitness. Somehow, I’ve never given this as much thought as I’ve been due to give for years, but my newfound friends have forced me to challenge my conceptions about how I operate in my day-to-day life. I think that’s personal growth, right? Isn’t that what friends are supposed to help facilitate?

I’ll miss seeing my coworkers as much as I do now in a way that I’ve scarcely felt. If you’re someone who fits into this post, you know who you are and I urge you insistently to remember that I love you even though I’m not around five days a week anymore. I’m excited to live through the next phase of my life, but departing from the current is bittersweet to say the least. But as I said to my last set of coworkers (including the five that I’ll be working with at the new spot), in my experience, this is far from the last time that our paths will cross; it’s never the last time until it’s the very last time.

Bien suerte para siempre.

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dear fellow restaurant people, we’re also kind of the problem

I have a hard time imagining what life for civilians looks like. To be able to walk into a restaurant and find yourself entranced by the aroma of some delectable culinary expression passing by them on a platter as they walk in the door of the restaurant, by the sight of the bustling staff and a sea of diners and drinkers, by the cacophony of sound produced by ice rocking back and forth in a Boston shaker and gaggles of tourists and bachelorette parties yelling over each other as the in-house sound system croons away a playlist that the poor servers and bartenders have heard on repeat for potentially years. I can’t remember the last time that I sat down at a restaurant with the bliss to tune out the ceaseless, droning thoughts that are endemic to a career hospitality professional which constantly keep us watching to see what sliver of insight we can ascertain from the inner machinations of a restaurant operation; as if we ourselves aren’t paid to masquerade said machinations as a flawless, well-oiled machine at our respective places of employment.

But the twenty-eight year old who worked at a Target or something while maintaining straight A’s in high school, didn’t work in college, graduated with a degree in marketing, and took a job straight away at a firm of some sort has never had to consider what happens behind the scenes at a Chuy’s in the same way that I couldn’t begin to grasp what a job in their field looks like. The biggest difference between myself and this strawman that I’m postulating about for the sake of this self-indulgent blog post however, is that the hospitality industry is one of the few industries that exists that serves as a great equalizer for all walks of life and, with relatively little exception, just about every single person you know. This is so to say that just about everybody has some form of experience dining at a restaurant and yet there are so many people who have either no experience viewing what we do from the operational standpoint or have experience that’s so far removed from the constantly changing beast that is the hospitality industry that their perspective is no longer applicable.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t stop for a second here before diving into the meat and potatoes of why I’m writing this to say that in the nearly thirteen years that I’ve been slinging plates and cocktails for a living in some capacity, I’ve met the most beautiful collection of people that anyone could ever be so lucky to have the fortune of knowing. I don’t have any conception of what my circle of friends and acquaintances would look like if a high school friend’s neighbor hadn’t flagged us down one day to ask if we could fill in at the kitchen she was managing for $40 out of the cash register that night when I was fifteen; frankly, I don’t particularly care to. I love what I do for a living and it’s because I love people. I love taking care of people and I love being able to be a part of something special for anyone who walks in the doors of the restaurant that I work with. Some of my fondest memories from an otherwise traumatic and better-to-forget childhood were going out to eat with my family. I don’t think that a lot of people, patron nor employee, really have any comprehension of the intrinsic value of those experiences.

For many servers, cooks, bartenders, bussers, hosts, and managers, the industry is just a paycheck and anyone who so much as mildly inconveniences them can fuck off. For many guests, these experiences (that albeit have an exceptionally large margin for quality) that countless underpaid workers put literal blood, sweat, and tears into are taken for granted because of the fact that, as a collective industry, we’ve trained people to be entitled to whatever their conceptualization of what they deserve is by groveling for them and sticking our noses in the proverbial mud every time they get the slightest bit miffed about any sort of quality, service, or atmosphere related issue that they can conceive. It’s easy to forget that we restaurant servants and our patrons work so much better together and this memory loss isn’t helped by the industry’s tendency to abuse and underpay their staff; this doesn’t exactly motivate a lot of people to show up and “do the right thing” day in and day out. To say this isn’t a multi-faceted issue is to be reductive to the point of forfeiting any illusion of interest in making the hospitality experience a more equitable one for everyone involved, but I personally have neither the desire to pontificate about every single issue that plagues we restaurant-folk nor the magnetism to hold your attention long enough to do so.

That said, I would implore that you don’t make any assumptions based on what I just said about what this whole thing is about. I know it seems like I’m setting myself up to the complain about how hard our jobs are and how much more appreciation we deserve, but to be completely honest, I think that there are already too many self-reverent, egotistical people populating spaces in hospitality so I ardently refuse to contribute to their woe-is-me bullshit. Listen, we all chose to be here one way or another, but for an industry that hosts so many workers, there are so few of us that have accepted that at some point in time, this became our de facto career. That discrepancy tends to create factions amongst us in terms of what kind of attitude we carry in our respective places of work towards the care we choose to apply to our day-to-day vocational responsibilities. Tragically, sometimes that can manifest itself into the form of people with egos that outweigh their talents which isn’t exactly conducive to creating an environment that fosters growth and inclusivity to the target demographic of people who are beginning their budding careers in the service industry (read as young people).

It’s easy to forget where we all came from. See, these days, I get to enjoy a cozy lead server position at a nationally acclaimed, high end restaurant that not only specializes in my favorite type of cuisine and spirits, but also has something that, until I started there, I was not convinced existed: true, unfettered camaraderie and passion that exists in every member of the staff. I speak of a rare space in which myself and every other member of the team is happy, respected, compensated, and aware of the fact that we are all contributing to something truly awesome in nature. To the uninitiated, the gravity of that concept may be lost in translation, but if any of my industry kinfolk can believe that there lies truth in my sentiment about this beloved restaurant without the innate skepticism that plagues the vast majority of us, I imagine that it’s because you’ve seen something like this before in whatever uncommon capacity it exists in the wild. 

It’s a good life, but as much as I know that I had to bust my ass to earn my spot here, I’m not unique in the fact that I deserve this. Hell, everyone does. Every single person who punches in at a bar or restaurant-be it the sixteen year old host working their first job or the thirty year seasoned industry veteran deserves to be in a healthy working environment where they can make enough money to be successful in their personal lives and be proud of what they’re doing. So why is it that so many of us who do, in fact, know that a better life in this industry is real and achievable are so unwilling to accept that others deserve the same thing we have experienced? Like any other waiter who’s pushing thirty or still playing in the end zone past it, I didn’t cut my teeth in the type of environment that I now celebrate being a part of. I bled for jobs as a food runner, expo, busser, server, cook, dishwasher, manager, host, and bartender that made me a third to half of what I currently make and provided significantly less fulfillment. But the fact of the matter is that I honestly didn’t know any better. You convince yourself when you’re putting your nose to the grindstone that you’re doing the best that you possibly could because for that not to be true puts forward a hard suggestion that you’re treading water.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones who spent more time learning than treading and was able to lean on my mentors in the business to experience growth in times that could have otherwise given way to stagnancy. The opportunities I was fortunate enough to have gave me skills and experience that now actively benefit me, but it was a hard thirteen years that cost me a lot as well: mental health, a marriage, friends, family, and then some. There was a lot of sacrifice that I was expected to make to move up and make something of myself that, frankly, I don’t feel as though I’m expected to make in my current role. So when I see some twenty year old get hired to host or clean tables at the restaurant that now provides me the comfort and stability that have shaped my new sense of normalcy, I’m overjoyed to see someone who won’t have to struggle, hurt, and experience loss to get there like I did. Just because I had to doesn’t mean they should, right?

But you hear grumblings. When I was in management at a previous job, having to figure out staffing after COVID shutdowns in 2020 forced us to really reshape our perspective on what a qualified applicant was. In a company that I was once an eighteen year old busser brushing shoulders at work with rockstar servers with ten to twenty or more years of experience, I was now a manager hiring servers with two years of questionably relevant experience. But this wasn’t necessarily an issue with my previous employers, but rather an industry-wide pivot brought on by a global pandemic that reshaped the entire world’s attitude towards work. See, the civilians that I was waxing hypothetical about earlier may not realize the true extent to which many restaurants abused their staff and when months of shutdowns and slower business came about, even restaurant folks who had found their way to a better spot started falling off the service industry chess board in favor of opportunities that could afford them a better quality of life that is basically unheard of in our line of work. The seasoned veteran servers and bartenders were mostly not applying for our craigslist ads anymore because they were either hanging on for dear life to whatever job they were secure in at the time or had gotten out of the industry entirely. So what do you do as a restaurateur? You adapt. 

In this case, we had to work a good bit harder to make people into the servers, cooks, bartenders, bussers, and dishwashers that we wanted to work with. If I may be terse and perhaps a bit uncharitable, the problem is that an industry consisting primarily of people who don’t have any personal investment into their own job who walk home with cash every day tends to be an industry with lots of short-sighted, jaded, impatient folks who either don’t care to or don’t know how to be the person that they wish they would’ve had when they were a sixteen year old host working their first restaurant job. Who are we to act like we’re somehow superior to these kids for not knowing everything like we weren’t at one point fresh, green, and relatively clueless? 

My newfound gem of positivity and nurturing in the restaurant industry does highlight the impatience with new faces that I experienced in previous jobs in stark contrast, but every now and then someone will say something to the effect of “has this person never worked in a restaurant before?” to which I’m pedantically inclined to reply “obviously anyone who has been hired here has worked in a restaurant before.”-instead I just settle for telling people to keep an open mind and be patient. Alternatively, let’s suppose this new food runner who just said the wrong name of the dish they just dropped off to your table has, in fact, never worked in a restaurant before. Does it benefit anyone to talk shit about them behind their back? It certainly isn’t helping them get better at their job and I guarantee that the catharsis one might get from releasing that sort of toxicity in the air isn’t doing anything but exacerbating negativity for the offending party as well.

Look, at the end of the day, I don’t feel like I need to sit here and preach like I haven’t at some point or another been guilty of the very words and attitudes that I’m now lambasting. That said, we don’t have a very long life expectancy in this industry. We’re built to either quit after a few years of intense burnout or cope with the taxing nature of the industry with imbibement and indulgence until we destroy our bodies to the point of inability to carry a tray. I promise that you’re only worsening your own mental health by choosing negativity and condescension day after day. Granted, that’s the easier choice to make, but choosing mindfulness, patience, and grace instead will extend our stamina both mentally and physically. And if you’re a restaurant patron who works outside of the industry and for some reason made it this far into this post, the same advice applies to you as well; this shit isn’t easy, so just be nice when you can manage it and we’ll all be better for it.

We can all do a little better, but we never will if we don’t accept that we should.

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