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Introduction.

“90% of new restaurants fail within their first year because someone out there said, “You know, I like to cook. And people enjoy my food.

Maybe I should start a restaurant!”

Scott Ginsberg

One of the true mysteries of life has to be asking “why”, when someone doesn’t learn or listen. There is a real arrogance to a person who still has life and won’t grow or take on new ideas. In my times in the hospitality business I have made some amazing foul ups and real failures in judgement. If someone had come to me at the beginning of my journey and given me a few pointers, I would have come back for more and more inspiration.

We bought a small family restaurant nano seconds before the global cash crunch kicked in during 2008. Despite the feeling of plummeting into a darkness with no customers and very little experience, we got through. In the three years we owned our first place we more than doubled the turnover, got written up in national news and won several awards.

Many of the lessons we learnt came from asking questions, learning, self training and watching others. This book is a toolkit of some of the real nuggets we picked up along the way. The biggest lesson was in understanding that simplicity is always the best approach. Sometimes you have to spend a lot more time making things simple, but the investment will pay off.

There are 101 different tools and lessons in this book. Some you will fall in love with and some you will hate. If you choose only to use a couple of the ideas on these pages, you have already made a return on the price on the cover.

Is this for you?

This may be one of the most important parts of this book, so please read, absorb and answer honestly. There is only one person who needs to know the truth here and that is you.

1 Does your skill in cooking come from creating great dinner parties?

2 Did you work in a bar or restaurant when you were a student?

3 Do you want a place that you can hang out in with your friends?

4 Have you watched a lot of TV shows on restaurant problems and service improvement?

5 Do you find it hard NOT to please people?

6 Do you believe a restaurant is like any other business?

If you answered yes to any of the above then there is a good chance that this is not for you. Owning and running a restaurant requires a set of technical and business skills very specific to the industry. On top of that you need to have the motivation for getting into the trade. It does help to understand the long hours and some of the jobs in the hospitality business, but you really need to know how to operate a restaurant as an owner and not from behind the beer tap.

Having somewhere your friends can come and hang out is good, but they are customers who befriend you. It is too easy to be the nicest person in town and give away free drinks and food. Remember it is still a business, your real friends will know that.

The differences between a dinner party host and a chef are too numerous to discuss here, more on that later. There are a lot of buildings, films, fashions and restaurants I could criticise from my armchair, but I only know how to fix restaurants from personal hands-on experience.

I wrote this book from sometimes getting it right the first time. The major lessons were from getting it wrong and then not repeating the same mistake. It might not work perfectly the second time, so you make sure you don’t repeat that next mistake. One real truth is that learning from other peoples mistakes is very valuable if you understand what has been taught.

This book is about many of the mistakes I learnt from and if this is for you, I want to share them with you.