The cure for chaos: put it on a schedule

I am, I confess, a glass half-empty sort of guy. I blame restaurants.

This is not to say that I am uniformly pessimistic. It is true that I tend to regard upward movement in the stock market as a temporary aberration, and that I regard as inevitable the drowning of Manhattan and the desertification of Kansas. And I have stated publicly that the only rational reaction to the modern world is to cower beneath a blanket of superstition. But I made a peach cobbler with lavender and ouzo-flavored whipped cream the other day, proving that there’s no redemption like the one you can eat.

The problem with the glass-and-liquid-level is that I’m just too literal. If you dismantle that homey saying, you get an optimist saying the glass is half full because—what? He still has something left? Oh, well, heck, it’s not empty yet? And the guy who looks at it and notices that half his whiskey is gone is called a pessimist for recognizing the direction things are trending?

When I’m sitting in a diner with a half-empty coffee cup, you can bet Shirley will not look at it, say to herself, “It’s half full, after all,” and pass me by with the pot. She’s been working there for 35 years, since she was 18 and pregnant by some creep who left her and went to college in another state. And after struggling to raise her kid alone and wondering what her life might have been, she eventually realized that there was some small satisfaction in taking care of us shmoes, making one tiny part of our day happier. She recognizes where that cup is heading: toward the universal emptiness that awaits us all. It does not get there on her watch.

This emptiness, if you were to ask a cosmologist, would be called “entropy,” and I find it to be a far greater danger than the things we usually fear. Most of the places I’ve worked defined their nightmares in terms of events: A great review published on the day that two cooks walk out. A busload of casino victims unloading at four-fifteen on a Saturday. Salmonella in the Hollandaise. These are the disasters that barstool legends are made of, but a good organization can even survive spreading a foodborne illness with enough honesty, remediation, and self-abasement.

Entropy, however, is forever.

A quote from HyperPhysics: “One of the ideas involved in the concept of entropy is that nature tends from order to disorder in isolated systems.” Got that? Anybody who has been in restaurants for a while will understand this: left to themselves, things fall apart. The restaurant owner who looks at the customer’s cup as half full is likely to find that his contentment is brief. It will be remembered as a sweet song which covered up the quiet cracking of the girders beneath his feet. And the cracks can start anywhere—the menu, the marketing, the carpet, the coffee cups. Best to assume they might be there, and start looking.

Singing the praises of a restless discontent does not mean, however, that I think you can be a jerk about it. You should scan the dining room for those metaphorical half-empty cups, but you can’t abuse the staff when you find them. I worked in a place where the owner hated a recipe, so in the middle of a shift he told one of my cooks to change it. Three times. Three different ways. Without telling the (ahem) chef, who then yelled at the cook for changing the recipe. I did figure it out, and apologized, so the second and third times I yelled at the owner instead.

The best thing to do with this gnawing, perpetual malaise is to put it on a schedule and get some work out of it. No part of the business runs too well that a gloomy lifer can’t find some problem with it, so meet with them regularly to find the flaws and reinforce your sense of the fallen state of humanity. Then get some of those cheerful half-full kids to go fix things. And pass the ouzo.

Jonathan Locke has been a restaurant chef for more than 20 years, heading restaurants in Minneapolis and San Francisco. In 1995 he joined forces with Susan Rasmussen to form FoodSense, a restaurant-consulting firm. He has written extensively for trade and consumer publications, and was KARE-11 TV’s Health Fair chef from 1995-1997. He can be contacted at jon@getfoodsense.com or at 612-724-9824